There's a much better way of cooking mashed potato and we want to try it immediately

Mashed potatoes are undoubtedly a top five potato variant, but what if we told you there was a way to push them into the top three?

Sure, a great roast potato takes some beating, and there’s always a time when nothing will hit the spot as well as a portion of chips, but one chef has found a way to get mash onto the podium.

Next time you decide to make your own mash to go along with those butcher’s sausages, you’ll want to listen to American chef and Food Network regular Tyler Florence.

As is often the case, the solution involves more of that sweet, sweet unhealthy stuff that you always kid yourself about not including in the recipe in a vague attempt to look after your body.

Let’s be honest, though, you were always going to add butter and cream at the end of the process, and Florence is encouraging you to cut to the chase and use it at the very start.

“Potatoes have a really delicate, beautiful minerality to their flavour profile, and when you cook potatoes in water and you pour that water down the drain, you've extracted all the flavour of the potato,” the chef told PopSugar.

“So what I do with mashed potatoes — because you finish them with cream and butter anyway, right? — is I'll take that same cream and butter and add that to the potatoes and cook the potatoes in cream and butter. So cold, peeled, chopped potatoes, cream, butter, and olive oil.”

By adding your preferred herbs and spices, as well as a lot of garlic if you’re a ‘puts a load of garlic in everything’ person, you’re left with what Florence calls a ‘potato-infused garlic cream’ after draining the spuds in a colander. And if there’s a better food-based phrase than ‘potato-infused garlic cream’ then we haven’t heard it.

So, in short, boil the potatoes in cream and butter, rather than water, then fold the delicious mix back in when you get the mashing process underway. We’re assured it makes for a richer, creamier and – yeah, we’ll say it – objectively better mash than the one you made last weekend.

(Images: Rex Features)