Easy mashed potato recipe

Creamy and easy mashed potato recipe made delicious with garlic and cashew nuts in stead of using butter and eggs.

This is a vegan mashed potato recipe, meaning it contains no cholesterol. However you can make the mash as creamy as you want adding a thick cashew nut milk to the puree. Make sure you use organic cashew nuts that are not roasted nor salted.

That’s right: no butter nor oil in the mash. Most nuts contain 50 % fat, so use the fat of the nuts in stead of adding your usual oil. Experiment with different nuts for different flavors and remember that macadamia nuts contain about 75% fat. Do not buy nut milk from the supermarket, as mostly they contain sugar, and that will ruin the taste of your mash. Needless to say that with only a few ingredients, make sure you choose the right potatoes (organic potatoes have more taste) and real nuts.

Why use cashew nuts? Because they don’t need to be soaked long and if you just found this recipe to make dinner in an hour or so: start with soaking the cashew nuts now and they will be ready to blend when you have mashed your potatoes. For other nuts, read here the amount of time needed to soak them.

For those that never boiled garlic with potatoes: the taste of cooked garlic is much milder and less pronounced compared with using fresh garlic.

Boil the potatoes always starting with cold water: if you add boiling water, the outside of the potato will surely be more cooked than the inside.

The following potatoes are recommended by lovepotatoes.co.uk for making a good mash: Apache, Chopin, Desiree, Estima, Harmony, Lady Balfour, Marabel, Marfona, Melody, Mozart, Osprey, Romano, Saxon, Vales Sovereign, Vivaldi and Wilja. Ask your grocery shopkeeper for advice, here in Malaysia Russet is the easiest to find potato variety for mashing.

Always puree your potatoes first, only then adjust the consistency of the mash by adding liquid. Once to much liquid is in, you can’t remove it…

Easy mashed potatoes ingredients for 2 people

• 500 gram (1 pound) floury potatoes
• 1 to 3 cloves of garlic
• 20 gram (0.7 oz) cashew nuts
• 100 ml (3.3 fluid ounce) water
• to taste: pepper, salt and nutmeg

How to make mashed potatoes with nuts

1. Start with soaking the cashew nuts in water. They get soaked pretty fast and don’t need to be soaked overnight.
2. Peel the potatoes, make sure you cut them in more or less the same size and put in a bowl with water, so the color doesn’t change.
3. Rince, put in a pot, fill with cold water (make sure the level of the water is above the potatoes), add salt and bring to a boil on a medium fire.
4. Put a lid (almost completely) on the pot and simmer on a low fire until the potatoes are cooked (about 15 minutes or less: when you can easily pierce or puree them with a fork, they are ready)
5. Drain the potatoes, put them back on the fire without a lid, so the remaining water can evaporate (takes 1 minute or so).
6. Season with pepper, salt and nutmeg and puree with a fork or – much easier – with a potato masher.
7. Add the water and nuts in a blender and blend for at least one minute until you have a creamy, milky consistency.
8. Add the nut milk to the puree and stir with a fork through the potatoes until your mash is as soft as you prefer.
9. Taste and adjust the seasoning. I added some freshly chopped basil leaves to my mashed potatoes, because, well, they only last a few days in the fridge and needed to go somewhere 🙂 Parsley or spring onion are more commonly added, yet once the basic puree is ready, all further enhancements depend on your taste, imagination and what you have available.