My gluttonous favorite recipe, the “Pound of Bacon” mashed potatoes.
Get a bag of potatoes. A lb of bacon. Plenty of your favorite cheese. A bunch of scallions. Butter and cream.
Cook the bacon. Boil the potatoes. All of the bacon and bacon fat goes into the potatoes. Add all the butter and cream you can stomach, along with a “Will it be ok to add this much?” amount of your favorite cheese. Top with a bunch of chopped scallions. Devour while you contemplate life, death, and what it means to sin.
Oh! I also forgot the crucial step of frying a metric fuckton of garlic in the bacon fat before adding to potatoes. (officially 1 metric fuckton = 1 whole head)
So sorry to be a hater but Anne’s “trick” is shit. How much garlic flavor is actually getting into your potatoes this way? All you’re really doing is making garlic broth and throwing it out. The garlic flavor should go into the potatoes, not the water. As Chowdom mentioned, if you wanted boiled garlic flavor in your mash, do it in the milk, not the boiling water.
Your post cracked me up - yes you are describing exactly the recipe you said you couldn’t imagine in the same post. The stretchy potato purposely gums up the potato for the cheesy effect.
I do love a good olive oil in place of butter in mashed potatoes. One of the best things I learned from my vegan days. And people really like them. So exotic.
You remind me that I also make skordalia, Greek: σκορδαλιά, which involves pressed cooked potatoes, finely chopped walnuts, a fucton (@joonjoon) of pressed garlic, plenty of EVO and sea salt. Sometimes you will add a little stale bread soaked in milk, which gives the skordalia a silky texture. You can also add lemon juice or vinegar to taste. Emulsify with a hand blender adding EVO slowly.
This is traditionally served with cod fritters, or as a dip on the pikilia: ποικιλία.
To be clear smtucker, I was criticizing the method, not you in any way. I hope that a criticism of a chef’s method doesn’t hurt you personally, and I certainly don’t want it to discourage your from future contributions.
Well there are a lot of variables when making great mashed potatos, but I’m going to throw a monkey wrench into the equation. What kind of gravy do you pair with your favorite recipe? Time to stir the pot things just got interesting!
Strongly disagree: you get a different garlic flavor than if you cook the garlic in the milk (or roast it, saute it, etc.) - it’s there, but subtler. And, for the most part, when I’m adding garlic to mashed potatoes, this is the flavor I prefer (I want to taste the potato with the garlic as a supporting player, not prominent).
Thank you for the link! I used this masher at a friend’s house and loved it - kept thinking I wanted one similar and then spacing on asking where he’d bought it.
I used to make a wonky boiled beef from a recipe my Danish step monster introduced me to. Garlic cloves were boiled along with the beef in water. I felt the garlic flavor was more mellow but at the same time was just as prominent if not more so, than the garlic flavor I get when I add cloves to milk for mashed potatoes. Something along the lines of adding salt to the potato water vs salting after … it doesn’t get absorbed the same way … semi shitty analogy
Strongly disagree: you get a different garlic flavor than if you cook the garlic in the milk (or roast it, saute it, etc.) - it’s there, but subtler. And, for the most part, when I’m adding garlic to mashed potatoes, this is the flavor I prefer (I want to taste the potato with the garlic as a supporting player, not prominent).
Hey, to each his own, right? I looked up the recipe and it looks like it calls for 1 clove for a lb of potatoes, but the key is that the 1 clove is left in the mash. I will take back my previous statement since I’ve seen the recipe - I incorrectly assumed the garlic would get thrown out and based on the previous post it seemed to indicate all the flavoring happens with the extraction during boiling.
I was told as a young lad at 3 years old you couldn’t shovel mashed potatoes into my face fast enough without me crying and throwing a fit. To this day I still love them. Lately I’ve just been boiling Russian fingerlings and eating them plain. Looking at this posting makes me want to have mashed potatoes.
I do that as well and it works fine.The garlic cooks in the water, penetrates the potato and then the soft garlic is scooped up and mashed with the potatoes…only the water is discarded.
I also use oven roasted garlic masked through at the end if I want a different garlic flavour profile.
