The Best Way to Mash Potatoes
I have been cooking potatoes for years, I have mashed them with a wire masher but the time they were fluffy they were they were also starting to get gummy. You know what I mean, when they have that pasty gloppy texture. I have tried different mashers and even a food processor. That was the fastest way to turn a perfectly good potato into a very excellent wall paper paste.
It was suggested to me that I try a potato ricer. I had seen them in the stores but I could never figure out why someone would want to make potatoes in the shape of rice obviously I had never seen one used. I went onto YouTube to see how they worked, and they looked promising. So I went out and bought one. I am not the type of person who buys the best of everything; I usually buy the cheapest I can find of anything. However a plastic potato ricer is not the way to go. I filled it with cooked potato and tried to squeeze the two handles together and it broke right away. When you finally get a good stainless steel one that is well built and you try to pull the two sides together you realize why the plastic broke.
The directions just say to put the cooked potato in and squeeze. It doesn’t say tell you that you had better have been working out with weights to be strong enough to do the job. There were several people present and we passed the ricer from man to man and we all had trouble. Yes there were women present but we weren’t going to let them try. We were all afraid they would succeed.
We finally got the potato to cooperate, by cutting it up into small pieces. The problem as I see it was that the two handles start out too far apart and the pressure needed to squeeze the potatoes only flexed the metal.
So now I have owned seven different potato ricers. You see I fell in love with the finished product. The potatoes come out fluffy, creamy and perfect every time. The trick is not to buy the cheapest but the best built. I have seen some on some gourmet sites that charge over $100, that’s too much. I did find that out of all the brands I tried the OXO is the sturdiest with the best design; it costs about $30.00, and can be found at any number of sites on the internet or at your local kitchen center.
