Proportions, methods vary for garlic mashed potatoes

Sally Pappas wrote this week asking about garlic mashed potatoes. “I have looked through a lot of my cookbooks but haven’t found one we like yet,” she said. As it happens, this is something I make all the time at home, as a way to vary mashed potatoes. We grow a lot of garlic, up to 150 heads, so I have as much as I need. I also make horseradish mashed potatoes with some of our own grated horseradish.

Sally has some experimentation ahead of her, since garlic mashed potatoes is really a matter of cooking to taste. It is just enough of a contemporary wrinkle that a lot of cookbooks don’t include directions for it, and when I surfed the Web for some ideas I found no agreement about the proportion of garlic to potatoes.

So the question really is what to do with the garlic. Here are some of the ways I have tried, each of which produces a slightly different effect. We like garlic a lot, so at our house, one clove of garlic to each potato is the rule. Sometimes I even use a little more.

Sometimes I cook the peeled whole cloves of garlic along with the potatoes, mashing the garlic with the spuds as I add milk, butter and salt and pepper. I often save potato-cooking water for soup so I can get a garlic-flavored broth. This method creates a milder flavored garlic mashed potatoes.

Sometimes I add pureed fresh garlic to the potatoes as I mash them. This makes for a slightly more pungent flavor.

Sometimes I mince the garlic finely and heat it with the milk and butter before adding them to the potatoes. This makes for a more garlicky-flavored mashed potato but the cooking takes the edge off the garlic.

Sometimes I add roasted garlic to the mashed potatoes. You can do this by peeling a bunch of garlic, drizzling it with olive oil, and putting it into a small baking dish with a lid on it, and baking it at a low temperature, 300 degrees F, until it is soft enough to stir with a spoon. Actually, as soon as we harvest our garlic I peel close to a third of the heads and roast them. I put the resulting puree into pint-sized canning jars to freeze, so that in the spring when the stored whole garlic begins to get a bit tough and tries to sprout, I still can use spoons full of the roasted stuff in all sorts of dishes. This is our favorite way to produce garlic mashed potatoes; the roasting process really mellows garlic.

I have not tried it myself, but I know you can buy garlic paste in tubes and minced garlic in jars. You could try using those, remembering that you need so much garlic in mashed potatoes, that it might be a costly way to go. I haven’t tried using dried garlic powder either but if you were flat out of fresh cloves, and you were hankering for garlic mashed potatoes, that method might work as well.

One more thing. I will sometimes substitute potato-cooking water for part of the milk in mashed potatoes. It is a bit less rich and tastes good. As always, how much liquid you need depends on how mealy the potatoes are. If you use a dry potato, like a russet, you will want more milk. Personally I don’t like to use waxy potatoes for mashing so most red potatoes are out of the question.

Basically, mash potatoes your usual way, add garlic and taste as you go. If you like the result, take notes to help you remember what you did so you can repeat it.

Garlic Mashed Potatoes

1 medium potato per person

1 clove peeled garlic per person

Warm milk

Butter to taste

Salt and pepper

Peel, cut up and boil the potatoes and cook until they are tender. Prepare the garlic in one of the ways suggested above. Warm the milk and butter in a saucepan. Mash the potatoes with the garlic, milk and butter. Sample and adjust the garlic, then salt and pepper to taste.