What’s your favorite style of mashed potato? When I make mashed potatoes at home, I’m a fan of skin-on (aka, “dirty” mashed potatoes) — partly because I like the texture, partly because I don’t like peeling. But as for my favorite style of mashed potato, there’s no question: fancy-restaurant mashed potatoes. You know what I mean — the kind that come beside a filet of poached salmon or white asparagus that cost more than your cell phone bill. The super-creamy kind that make you pause mid-bite and say, “How do they even do this?”
“Butter,” explains chef Matthew Ryle in his new cookbook,French Classics. “A lots of it.” Plus, a few more tricks — like baking the potatoes, instead of boiling them — to achieve “truly luxurious, restaurant-quality mash.” Here, Matthew his recipe for pommes purée.
Pommes Purée
From French Classics: Easy and Elevated Dishes to Cook at Home, by Matthew Ryle
Tools:
“You’ll want to buy a potato ricer. The classic potato masher that everyone has in their kitchen is completely useless: continually pounding potatoes will cause your mash to turn gloopy.”
For the dry potato mash
6 large potatoes, ideally Maris Piper or Yukon Gold
salt, ideally rock salt
To finish
1kg (4 cups firmly packed) dry potato mash (see above)
about 500g (4 sticks) butter
about 200ml (scant 1 cup) whole milk
fine sea salt
white pepper, freshly ground
Preheat the oven to 180°C fan (350-400°F).
Prick your potatoes with a small knife; this will stop them from exploding in the oven. Place them on a baking tray on a bed of rock salt (any salt will work, but cheap rock salt works best and you can re-use it next time you’re making mash). Bake for 60 minutes, or until the potatoes are soft.
Cut the potatoes in half once they are out of the oven, so steam can escape. Scoop the cooked potato flesh out of the skins and pass it through a potato ricer. Weigh the dry mash so you can get the correct amount of butter:potato (1:2). [For this specific recipe, you can also use four cups of dry potato mash and four sticks, or two cups, of butter.]
Put the weighed dry potato mash in a medium saucepan over a medium-low heat. Cut half its weight of butter into small cubes and slowly add to the potato, stirring, using splashes of the milk to stop the butter from splitting. You may not need all the milk; you are just using it to bring the mash to your desired consistency and help get that butter inside. Add fine salt and ground white pepper to taste.
Optional: Pass the finished mash through a fine-meshed sieve. This final stage is not 100 percent necessary, but does guarantee beautifully lump-free mash.
Thank you so much, Matthew!
P.S. More potatoes, just because we love them:
* how to make English jacket potatoes
* a potato salad trick
* what’s the best part snack of all time? this
* the perfect crunchy roast potatoes
* 8 mashed potato mix-ins
* three strategic starters for a dinner party
* social anxiety and the power of potato chips
(Photos by Patricia Niven. Excerpted from French Classics: Easy and Elevated Dishes to Cook at Home by Matthew Ryle, on sale now from Bloomsbury Publishing. Copyright © 2025 by Matthew Ryle. All rights reserved.)
