Perfect Mashed Potatoes

There is something amazing and comforting about the perfect mashed potatoes. The Instant Pot and a potato ricer make for very easy production of mashed potatoes.

Very simple ingredients, but following the right steps makes them perfect.

Wash whole potatoes, and add to a rack or mesh basket. This is the one I use, it was very inexpensive and only needed the handles tilted up with some pliers, which was very easy to do. I find the rack that comes with the instant pot is a little low for this application. Add about a cup of water, and pressure cook on high for about 25 minutes. This size of potato took that long, but if they’re bigger or smaller you might have to adjust the time. I just cook until a fork poked in slides into the middle. I am currently using the Instant Pot Max and I LOVE IT.

I was reading a food blog about making mashed potatoes, and the author stated she did not like to use a potato ricer because you have to peel the potatoes. I assure you, you do not. Even with a crappy old plastic potato ricer. The advantage to doing it this way (pressure cook with the skins on and use the potato ricer whole) is that the potatoes do not become waterlogged, because they stay inside the skins. This is similar to the ancient potato ricer I have.

You can see here that the butter is already mostly melted into the bowl. This is critical. Just butter.

After the first potato.

See? No peeling.

Skins after the last potato. Still stuck to the ricer, or, exactly where you want them to be.

You will notice at this point that I have not added any liquids, other than the melted butter. This is also critical. In order to prevent the mashed potatoes from getting gooey starchy gluey, you want to surround the potato molecules in fat. Fat is your friend here, and water is the enemy (this is why the pressure/ricer method is also helpful. Waterlogging is bad).

Mix the butter and the riced potatoes with a spoon, you can be pretty thorough here because of the lack of water. They’re very easy to mix at this point.

Add your heavy cream (you can use heavy cream, milk or half and half here. Guess which one tastes the best…)

And mix all together, and there you have it. Mashed potatoes.

Delicious with Chicken Fried Chicken and Cream Chicken Gravy