Mashed potatoes

If you are unfamiliar with Sally Schneider’s mashed potato recipe, let me tell you a little bit about it. True to many of Sally’s recipes, this one calls for very few enrichments, relying on big flavor ingredients and techniques instead. In this recipe she uses buttermilk because it has a natural creaminess yet is far lower in fat than milk or cream. She also uses some of the reserved potato-cooking liquid to thin the mash as needed. And finally, only after the potatoes have absorbed the liquid, Sally adds a single tablespoon of butter. By adding the butter at the end, she says, “the butter stays on the surface of the potatoes, its flavor readily discernible, imparting a truly rich finish.” Every time I make these potatoes I am astonished there is no cream and very little butter — they taste far richer than they actually are. In this buttermilk mashed potato recipe, you’ll find a few variations, including roasted garlic, which I love, and also spicy-scallion, which is my favorite: not only are these potatoes visually very appealing, they’re also just so darn tasty, creamy and tangy thanks to the buttermilk, and bright and spicy thanks to the herb-and-chili infused olive oil