Easiest Slow Cooker Mashed Potatoes

foodcheats | 2018 | Side Dish, Slow Cooker | No Comments

Using just potatoes and water, these are the easiest slow cooker mashed potatoes because there’s nothing special or extra – this slow cooker recipe shows you how to make simple mashed potato. You don’t even have to peel them! In an ideal world I would peel the potatoes, but today’s potatoes were quite small and so I left the skins on.

Beyond this basic mashed potatoes recipe, if you wish, you can build it up into the “best mashed potato in the world” if you’ve particular likes and fancies, but, I actually happen to like the taste of potatoes and have rarely pimped them up beyond a quick knob of butter.

My slow cooker is a 3.5 litre / 3.5 quart slow cooker, so “not very big” – this limits the quantity that will fit and cook.

Using this mashed potatoes recipe you will end up with a big bowl of mashed potatoes – which is what most people want most of the time 🙂 It’s then up to you if you add butter, or margarine, milk or cream, a little garlic, or just black pepper. Many slow cooker mashed potato recipes make a meal of the “recipe” as they feel that the audience wants to make special/celebration/fancy potatoes – but if all you want to do is make mashed potatoes in the slow cooker then this is the easiest and simplest recipe in the world.

I’d bought a 4Kg bag of Aldi Wonky Potatoes – on their best before date – so I had very little wriggle room when it came to getting through them, so the best way to get them out of the way was to cook up a whole pile of them into mashed potatoes using the slow cooker…. scrub, into the slow cooker … walk away. Job done. Well, job done in 2-3 batches… but hands free cooking 🙂

I don’t use a hob and I have no saucepans – boiling/mashing potatoes creates a lot of steam – and using my microwave mashed potatoes recipe simply was going to be “too much effort” as I’d have to cook them in such small batches.

Ingredients:

1.25-1.5Kg potatoes
240-250ml water (about a coffee mug full, it’s not critical)
A large pinch of salt (optional of course!)

Method:

Scrub the potatoes clean – you can peel them if you wish, but it’s not necessary. Peeled or not, it’s “how YOU fancy it” on the day. Sometimes life’s too short to peel potatoes, especially if they’re small!
Cut out any grotty bits, eyes, bruises or green parts.
Slice, quarter, cut the potatoes up however you fancy it – I tend to slice them rather than quartering as it’s quicker for me and then they’re all roughly the same thickness. Give them a quick rinse to get rid of some of the starch.
Place the potatoes into the slow cooker with a pinch of salt (if you use salt) and about a coffee mug full (240ml) of water (hot or cold, it doesn’t actually matter). This isn’t much water, so you won’t see it once your potatoes are in the pot.
Put the lid on the slow cooker and turn it onto High. Cook on high for four hours, giving them a turn/stir every hour or so to prevent them sticking to the sides and to make sure they’re evenly cooked. Stick a knife in a couple of the potatoes to check they’re soft enough to mash. Alternatively, these will take 7 hours to cook on low … I don’t use low, I want the potatoes in, cooked, out, portioned up and all washing up completed soonest. NOTE: As this was the “easiest slow cooker mashed potatoes” recipe, it didn’t put any butter into the pot, but left that to the end part, when you can choose what you mash potato with. If you do intend on adding butter/margarine at the end, then adding a little to the water at the start will minimise the opportunity of potatoes sticking to the sides.
At the end of the cooking time, there might be a little water left. You might choose to mash any remaining water in, or to remove the potatoes and mash in a separate bowl. This is really your choice. Today I had no water remaining in my slow cooker, just nicely cooked potatoes.
Mash the potatoes with a potato masher – or if you’ve not got round to buying a potato masher yet, then it can be done with a regular eating fork!
You can add milk, cream, a big knob of butter, black pepper – or any other of your preferred extras at this point.

Serve immediately, or put it back in the slow cooker on the “keep warm” setting if you’re not eating just yet, or cool the potato and put it in a lidded dish in the fridge. Once cool, you can freeze it either whole, or in portions.

Weights

For the sake of completeness, I’ll often weigh my food, just so I can be specific here! This will also help me to compare costs versus buying mashed potato (something I’ve never done, but many people do!).

Today I started off putting 1355 grams of potatoes into the slow cooker – and ended up with 1300 grams of cooked mash. Of that I bagged up five 250 gram portions. A couple of spoons of cooked potato “disappeared” under the heading of “cook’s treats” 🙂

Can You Freeze Mashed Potatoes?

You can freeze mashed potatoes. If you’re planning ahead, then I’d suggest you freeze them before you’ve added any butter/milk/cream – add those when you defrost/reheat the potato as it helps the potato to not become watery if you just freeze the potato itself.

Today I bagged up my potatoes into five portions, each of 250 grams. I put them into freezer bags, then squashed the potato flat (it’s easier to store in the freezer and quicker to defrost). These then went into the fridge to cool completely before going into the freezer.

Which Potatoes to Use for Mash?

Different varieties of potatoes cook up slightly differently. In short there are two types, waxy potatoes and floury potatoes. Waxy potatoes keep their shape better while cooking; floury potatoes go mushy quicker. Ideally, if I were choosing “the right potatoes to make mash” I’d be looking for something like the UK Maris Piper, which were developed close to where I grew up and are a popular UK potato for baking, roasting and mashing. Secondly I’d look for anything a seller describes as a “baking potato” – however, in the main, I just use “whatever potatoes I’ve got”, so these Wonky Potatoes (the bag said they were from Lincolnshire) were “good enough” today. You can mash any potato – but if you’ve just got “potatoes” in a bag and want to use them, then go for it! Today’s potatoes were simply “a cheap bag of potatoes I bought”.

Maris piper, baking potatoes, King Edward potatoes … will all cost you more/Kg than simply “a bag of potatoes”.

Why Use a Slow Cooker to Make Mashed Potatoes?

Some people might ask this question, there are a variety of answers. If you don’t have hob space, or can’t carry large saucepans of boiling water about, or you’re trying to reduce steam in the kitchen, or you don’t have the time to keep an eye on a boiling pan of water and potatoes, then this is a simple solution. It’s also handy for pre-cooking mash to complete a recipe you’re cooking tonight, or tomorrow.

Also, if you’re planning on making a cottage pie, or shepherd’s pie, or fish pie, topped with mash, tomorrow, then it might make sense to just pop the slow cooker on tonight and have the potatoes cooking for you while you relax in the evening, rather than preparing the mash tomorrow.

Boiling potatoes can create a lot of steam and condensation in a kitchen, especially in a small kitchen and small house – steam and condensation that’d need to be vented properly so mould didn’t get started. During the winter months nobody wants to have the windows open just to let the steam (and all your heating) out! Ditto in a holiday home, when you’re supposed to be relaxing, not cooking – and certainly not worrying about steam permeating throughout the whole holiday home. If you’re living in a studio bedsit, or studio flatlet, or even house sharing, sometimes it’s just easier to cook mash this way for a variety of space reasons.

Alternatively, if you’re catering for an unusually large party of people, it gives you that optional and additional side dish without needing another hob ring!

Today, for me, it’s because I don’t have a hob – and I have a HUGE bag of potatoes to cook, that are starting to go off and go soft… and so I need to cook them, but there are too many to do in my small microwave steamer. I will cook these up, then freeze most of them in portions, ready to use to top cottage pies and fish pies in the coming weeks. There might even be a little portion set aside for Christmas Day, when I’ll just want 1-2 spoons of potato.

Cooking mashed potatoes in a slow cooker is one of my favourite ways to use that gadget, because it just means I can pop them on and walk away…. knowing I’m not going to have to end up venting the room of steam, plus there’s no “time pressure” to catch them “just right”, which invariably means standing right there and watching potatoes boil, when I could be doing other things.