Chef reveals secret to perfect mashed potatoes

When you cook potatoes in water then pour that water down the drain, you're losing much of the vegetable's flavour. Photo / Getty

We have all been cooking our mashed potato wrongly, according to a top chef, who says there's a really easy way to make them infinitely better.

Tyler Florence, a host on the US cable channel, The Food Network, says the traditional method of cooking potatoes in water then adding milk or cream and butter when you mash them isn't the best way to bring out their flavour.

Mr Florence told Pop Sugar: "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.

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Instead, Mr Florence has alternative method. He explains: "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."

He also adds garlic and herbs and after the concoction has cooked and cooled he runs it through a colander till the cream collects in the bottom.

"Then I'll put the potatoes back into the pot and take the potato-infused garlic cream and fold that back into the potatoes, and it's the most incredible flavour profile. It's the best mashed potato you'll ever taste in your entire life," he said.

So there you go.