(upbeat electronic music)
- Hi, I'm Spuds MacKenzie. (laughing)
Hello, and welcome, my friends, to A Little Help.
Everyone needs a little help now and then.
Today, we're gonna talk potatoes.
They're cheap, they're filling, they're delicious,
and they're also easy to mess up.
Are your mashed potatoes too gluey?
Are your baked potatoes lacking that
certain fluffiness you want?
What about your french fries, are they mushy and soft?
I'm gonna walk you through your three favorite ways
to make foolproof potatoes, let's (beep) go.
I'm gonna start with mashed potatoes or,
as I called them when I was a child, smashies.
I forgot I wrote this. (laughing)
You do?
Comment below what you guys call spuds.
I'm gonna start with mashed potatoes, okay?
For the best mashed potatoes,
I like to use Yukon Gold potatoes.
They make a really nice, creamy, velvety mashed potato.
(crunching potato)
I told you, I love Yukon Gold potatoes.
So what we have here is a pot of water.
We start with cold water, then we add
our Yukon Gold potatoes, we add our salt,
and then we're gonna bring the pot of water up to a boil.
It's probably gonna take you, like,
30 minutes until your potatoes are ready to go.
That's it.
Okay, so our potatoes are boiled,
they're ready to be mashed.
Now, when you go to make mashed potatoes
and you get gluey, sticky, runny mashed potatoes,
it's probably because you're reaching for a potato masher.
I say get rid of that guy and reach for a ricer.
If you use a ricer when you're making mashed potatoes,
you're gonna get fluffy, delicious
mashed potatoes every time.
Our boiled potatoes have all gone through the ricer,
so now they're ready to mix with our butter.
I have about two cups of equal parts cream and whole milk,
and of course salt and pepper.
So, remember, we wanna be super delicate here.
We don't wanna over-mix but we wanna make sure
that everything is well-incorporated, so let's go.
Temperature is really important here.
You want your butter to be at room temperature,
you want your potatoes to still be hot,
you also want your cream and milk to be simmered
so that's also warm, that way everything gets
incorporated into the potatoes evenly.
As you can see, our milk and cream is incorporated,
so is our butter and we have fluffy,
non-gluey mashed potatoes.
So I'm gonna plate these up and then we're ready to go.
Okay, potato number two, the baked potato.
These are supposed to be easy, right?
You just throw 'em in the oven and wait,
like, an hour and they're done, right?
Kind of.
If you want a true baked potato that's flaky on the outside
and soft and fluffy on the inside,
there's just a little, tiny bit more work that goes into it.
My first tip, skip the aluminum foil
because trapping all that heat in there
is gonna steam your spud and leave you
with a soggy, wet skin. Ew.
Instead, let them breathe.
Poke some holes in them with a fork
and rub them down with oil, salt, and pepper.
Place them in the oven and bake them
until you feel that they're soft on the inside
by giving them a little squeeze.
Remove them from the oven, let them cool slightly
until they're cool enough to handle,
and gently squeeze them, breaking down the inside
without breaking the skin.
The idea is you're breaking down all of the inside
to make it fluffy on the inside, like a mashed potato,
but then keeping the outside intact.
This makes for the fluffiest baked potato you've ever had.
Next, just load them with whatever
your little heart desires and serve them.
Do you keep trying to make french fries at home,
but they come out mushy and gross?
Well, by just adding one more little step to your process,
you can get amazing, crispy, restaurant-quality fries
every single time.
The secret is blanching, which basically means
we're gonna cook them two times.
So here I have my potatoes, which I've cut into fries,
and they've been soaking in water for about half an hour,
but you could even soak them overnight if you want.
First step is I'm going to dry them thoroughly.
Once they've dried, I'm gonna submerge them into the oil,
which is currently at 250 degrees.
After just a few minutes, I'm gonna pull them
and let them cool.
Once they're cool, we're gonna turn the heat up
on our oil to 350 degrees and we'll put our french fries
back in for one last swim in the oil.
Once they're golden brown, we'll take them out,
hit them with a little bit of salt,
and they're ready to serve.
And we are done, three different kinds of perfect potatoes.
See, all you needed was a little help.
Oh, that's a good french fry.
(upbeat electronic music)
Thanks so much for watching.
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