How to Make Instant Potatoes Taste as Good as Homemade (2024)

FAQs

What can I add to instant potatoes to make them taste better? ›

You can slightly improve the taste by adding seasoning like a pinch of salt or nutmeg, chopped herbs like chives, a knob of butter, a spoonful or two of crème fraîche or sour cream, use half milk instead of all-water, or maybe some grated cheese depending on the dish, but the texture still won't compare to homemade ...

Instead of regular milk, pro chefs generally use a generous helping of buttermilk and plenty of half-and-half or (even better) heavy cream in their potatoes. If you think the bartenders up front are pouring heavy, they've got nothing on the cooks in the back who are in charge of the mashed potatoes.

Nutritionally speaking, instant mashed potatoes offer roughly the same vitamins and minerals as the real mashed potatoes with the exception of Vitamin C. To please palates, they tend to be higher in sodium, significantly higher than the amount of salt home cooks would add when making them at home from scratch.

Make the Box Better

Those same add-ins—chopped fresh herbs like chives or parsley, chopped cooked bacon, crumbled blue cheese, roasted garlic cloves and so on—will enhance the instant variety as well. Butter (not margarine) is a must, as is sour cream.

Not Seasoning the Water

If you leave out the salt at this point, you will get tasteless potatoes, and butter and sour cream simply can't cover the taste of a flat potato. After you mash the potatoes and add your dairy stir-ins, you can season to taste with additional salt, pepper, garlic, herbs, etc.

And you always need more salt than you think potatoes love salt. Cream cheese, buttermilk, caramelize onions, roasted garlic, or scallions are all amazing additions! My go to is cream cheese, heavy cream, butter, and roasted garlic. You should add heavy cream and butter, and some oregano too.

In mashed potatoes, cooking in milk, and preserving that starchy liquid, gives your potatoes a natural creaminess and allows you to skip the weighty heavy cream.

Tips for the Best Mashed Potatoes

Start cooking the potatoes in cold water: This ensures that the potatoes cook evenly. Otherwise, if you start with hot or boiling water, the outsides of the potatoes cook and soften while the middles are still hard and crunchy.

Use whole milk for the creamiest results. Sour cream – Technically, this ingredient is optional. If you skip it, the recipe will still come out great. But for the best mashed potatoes, I highly recommend folding it in!

What are the cons of instant mashed potatoes? ›

Instant mashed potatoes have substantially more sodium than fresh potatoes, and much less dietary fiber.

Instant mashed potatoes are convenient for busy food establishments like KFC — the only thing employees need to do is add water and mix. The peeling, cooking, and mashing, has already been done. The downside to instant mashed potatoes is that they aren't as fluffy and tend to be bland.

That's the basic mashed potato recipe. From here, you can add whatever seasonings make your skirt fly up: onion powder, salt, fresh ground pepper, garlic salt… even mashed roasted garlic cloves (my personal favorite).

Heat milk, add a good blob of butter then the dehydrated potato. Beat well. Add more warm milk to get desired consistency. Finely sliced spring onions help to take the taste up a notch, depending on what you are serving it with.

I boil or steam my potatoes after peeling and cutting into halfs or quarters. I then usually drain them and put some oil in a pan and add some mixed herbs and then add back in the potatoes.