MASHED POTATOES
Mashed potatoes are a particularly divisive topic in my
family.See, I like mine rich and perfectly smooth, with plenty of
butter and heavy cream, lots of black pepper, and maybe
some chives if I’m dressing to impress (I usually am).
Somewhere between a dish on its own and a sauce, the
mash should have the consistency of a pudding, slowly
working its way across a tilted plate. I like to pick up a piece
of turkey and swirl it in my gravy-covered potatoes so that
they coat it, their buttery richness working into the cracks in
the meat. Sounds good, right? Who could possibly want it
any other way? My sister. That’s who.
For Pico (yes, that’s her real name), mashed potatoes
should be fluffy and thick enough to stand up under their
own weight, Close Encounters of the Third Kind–style. The
kind of mashed potatoes that can hold their own on the
plate. The kind that you want to turn into a TV commercial
with a pat of butter slowly melting on top. I’m talking
smooth but light and fluffy. So how do you arrive at such
two different results with the same starting ingredients?
It’s all got to do with starch.
The Starch
For our purposes, potatoes can be thought of as basically
three different things. First, there are the cells, the little
microscopic bubbles that all living things are made from.