From my childhood days I’ve always loved mashed potatoes. I mean the smooth puree of potatoes, perhaps with cream and butter – not the lumpy kind with little lumps of potato not mashed; and worse still, not even properly cooked. But I must confess that I’m a bit lazy and I’ve always preferred it when someone else does the work of mashing the potatoes and extra washing up afterwards. In recent years I’d estimate that I’ve only made mashed potatoes once or twice a year. It hasn’t been something that crosses my mind to do. It’s much easier just to served up the cooked potatoes, which I like anyway. And it’s easier to cook rice or pasta than making mashed potatoes. And it’s even easier to serve up oven fry potato chips or wedges.

The main way I’ve made mashed potatoes is to tip the cooked potatoes into an old bowl given to me in the mid-1960′s and mash the potatoes by hand with an old fork (with long splines) given to me at the same time by my Mother when setting me up a bit for the first time I moved into a flat (in Adelaide).  That has been my old faithful way of mashing potatoes.

However, over the years, I have tried out other ways of mashing the cooked potatoes.   One method was to use a Sunbeam Mixmaster, but that seemed like huge overkill to use such large and relatively  heavy equipment when cooking for one.  I also tried using a food mill (some call it a mouli) to try to puree the potatoes, but I never took to this method with the food mill I had. Or to be more accurate, my potatoes never took to it. They refused to go where they had to, that is, under the mashing blade. To be honest, I can’t blame them. If I were cooked potato I wouldn’t choose to be crushed into a mash.

I’ve also tried a potato ricer. Without doubt, the results from my ricer are THE best I’ve ever had. I treat the results with the same respect as one has for whipped egg whites. Extras are folded in gently, to preserve the lightness of the mash.  The downside to my ricer, and the reason I don’t use it often (in fact, not for years), is that it’s a bit small for potatoes, and too much of the potato pieces don’t get processed – but stay in the ricer in out of the way places.  I have since read that this is because the cheaper construction of my ricer allows potato to squeeze back past the plunger.

But this week, I saw an advert on TV for the Kenwood triblade, and it awakened my interest in mashed potatoes.  So I did some YouTube research on making mashed potatoes.

I found this video very interesting, especially the hint to overcook the potatoes for a few minutes if you intend to mash them.  That made good sense.  But my jaw dropped when the demonstrator added milk to the mash.  I couldn’t credit how much milk she added.  Well, she did say it looked like soup.  I wouldn’t go into that in a fit.

This is the demo of the Kuhn Rikon potato ricer.  From what I can see, it’s much bigger than my ricer, and would fit all the potato I would cook for myself, in the ricer at once.   In the video, it works wonderfully.  I’ve read several user reviews and one explicitly mentions that it does suffer from the problem that my ricer does.   In the past I couldn’t find a seller in Australia, but in a check tonight I’ve found several interstate online stores that sell it.  I’ll definitely try to get one, hopefully before Christmas, and will report on it in due course.

And now we come to the Kenwood triblade blender with accessories, which includes a masher.