French Restaurant Mashed Potatoes | Cup of Jo

What’s your favourite fashion of mashed potato? After I make mashed potatoes at dwelling, I’m a fan of skin-on (aka, “soiled” mashed potatoes) — partly as a result of I like the feel, partly as a result of I don’t like peeling. However as for my favourite fashion of mashed potato, there’s no query: fancy-restaurant mashed potatoes. You recognize what I imply — the type that come beside a filet of poached salmon or white asparagus that value greater than your cellular phone invoice. The super-creamy sort that make you pause mid-bite and say, “How do they even do that?”

“Butter,” explains chef Matthew Ryle in his new cookbook, French Classics. “And many it.” Plus, a number of extra methods — like baking the potatoes, as a substitute of boiling them — to attain “actually luxurious, restaurant-quality mash.” Right here, Matthew shares his recipe for pommes purée.

Pommes Purée
From French Classics: Straightforward and Elevated Dishes to Cook dinner at Residence, by Matthew Ryle

For the dry potato mash
6 massive potatoes, ideally Maris Piper or Yukon Gold
salt, ideally rock salt

To complete
1kg (4 cups firmly packed) dry potato mash (see above)
about 500g (4 sticks) butter
about 200ml (scant 1 cup) complete milk
nice sea salt
white pepper, freshly floor

Preheat the oven to 180°C fan (350°F for the standard oven, or 400°F for convection).

Prick your potatoes with a small knife; this can cease them from exploding within the oven. Place them on a baking tray on a mattress of rock salt (any salt will work, however low-cost rock salt works finest and you may re-use it subsequent time you’re making mash). Bake for 60 minutes, or till the potatoes are tender.

Minimize the potatoes in half as soon as they’re out of the oven, so steam can escape. Scoop the cooked potato flesh out of the skins and go it by a potato ricer.

Put the weighed dry potato mash in a medium saucepan over a medium-low warmth. Minimize half its weight of butter into small cubes and slowly add to the potato, stirring, utilizing splashes of the milk to cease the butter from splitting. It’s possible you’ll not want all of the milk; you’re simply utilizing it to carry the mash to your required consistency and assist get that butter inside. Add nice salt and floor white pepper to style.

Non-compulsory: Cross the completed mash by a fine-meshed sieve. This remaining stage shouldn’t be 100% needed, however does assure fantastically lump-free mash.

Thanks a lot, Matthew!

P.S. Extra potatoes, simply because we love them:
* tips on how to make English jacket potatoes
* a potato salad trick
* what’s the very best half snack of all time? this
* the right crunchy roast potatoes
* 8 mashed potato mix-ins
* three strategic starters for a cocktail party
* social nervousness and the ability of potato chips

(Photographs by Patricia Niven. Excerpted from French Classics: Straightforward and Elevated Dishes to Cook dinner at Residence by Matthew Ryle, on sale now from Bloomsbury Publishing. Copyright © 2025 by Matthew Ryle. All rights reserved.)

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