• I often love Ina Garten's easy, flavorful recipes, so I gave her buttermilk mashed potatoes a try.
• The buttermilk made this dish more flavorful than other mashed-potato recipes I've followed.
• From now on, I plan on making this recipe every time I host or attend a dinner party.

I firmly believe that no fall or winter dinner party is complete without a big bowl of piping-hot mashed potatoes.

That said, there's nothing worse than digging into a pile of fluffy potatoes, only to discover that they're bland or dry.

Although there are dozens of ways to dress up spuds with mix-ins like cheese, sour cream, and extra butter, kitchen queen Ina Garten has a wonderfully simple recipe that I had to try.

I'm so glad I did. Not only is Garten's recipe short and sweet, but the dish is flavor-packed, ultra-creamy, and about to be a part of every future holiday spread in my house.

Here's how to make Garten's mashed potatoes.

The ingredient list is short and simple.

You only need six ingredients for this simple side dish: kosher salt, potatoes, whole milk, unsalted butter, buttermilk, and black pepper.

Garten recommends using a potato that's easy to boil, such as Yukon Gold. Russets would work well, too: Compared to other potatoes, these varieties contain more starch, which breaks down when mashed into a light and fluffy texture.

Yukons are my personal preference; I've found them to be slightly creamier than other options.

The potatoes took me under 10 minutes to prep.

Once I collected my ingredients — and set a big pot of well-salted water to boil on the stove — I started on the prep work.

The first step here is peeling the potatoes, but don't worry about doing it perfectly.

I've found that, as long as the spuds are clean, a few pieces of potato skin in the mix won't really change the dish's quality. Some home chefs might even like to leave a bit of skin on for extra texture.

The potatoes should then be cut into roughly equal-sized pieces so they cook at the same rate.

Garten recommends 1 ½-inch cubes, but it's OK if you're not super precise, since everything will be mashed together later.

Cook the potatoes, and don't let them get gummy.

Once the water came to a boil on the stove, I added the prepped potatoes and reduced the heat to maintain a gentle simmer with the lid off.

An important part of the recipe is to avoid boiling the potatoes, which can make them turn gummy. Instead, keep the water at a nice simmer until you can easily pierce the spuds with a paring knife. This took me between 10 and 15 minutes.

When they're done, drain the potatoes in the sink and return them to the pot to finish the dish.

While the potatoes simmered, I warmed the butter and milk.

Next, I created a mixture of melted butter and whole milk to infuse the cooked potatoes with rich, creamy flavor and texture.

A key step in Garten's recipe is to warm these two ingredients in a small saucepan while the potatoes cook. The butter will melt into the milk, causing an emulsion.

Dry spuds absorb hot liquids better than cold ones, and you'll have an easier time combining the ingredients without any cold lumps of butter.

Just don't let the mixture come to a boil, which can cause the milk to separate from the butter.

Then, I mashed the potatoes.

When the potatoes are done cooking, strain the water over the sink and return them to the pot. Now, it's time to start mashing.

Garten's recipe calls for using a food mill to break down the potatoes, but I live in a New York City apartment with barely enough room to store a large pot. So, I used a good old-fashioned potato masher.

Once I'd crushed the potatoes into a mostly uniform mush, I added the warm butter and incorporated it with a rubber spatula, per Garten's instructions.

I added just enough buttermilk for a super creamy mash.

Once you've folded the butter and milk into the potatoes, it's time for the star ingredient: buttermilk.

I halved Garten's recipe, which typically feeds five or six, and decided to add a half cup of buttermilk. At first, I was worried I'd overdone it — my mash looked soupy.

After a little more stirring and time, though, the starchy potatoes absorbed the buttermilk, and I had myself an incredibly light and fluffy mash.

The seasoning — and the buttermilk — made Garten's recipe stand out from the rest.

Adding the right amount of salt and pepper is essential for any dish, but mashed potatoes are often tragically overlooked in the seasoning department.

Garten recommends adding another 2 teaspoons of salt and pepper to the mash, and I agree wholeheartedly.

The result is a rich, tangy, and flavorful side dish you don't need to wait for a holiday to make. In my opinion, the buttermilk stole the show: I've found that potatoes can be a bit "blah" when not properly seasoned, and this recipe had a slightly acidic quality that I loved.

I'll be bringing these potatoes to Thanksgiving dinner this year, and every holiday party for the foreseeable future.

This story was originally published on November 20, 2025, and most recently updated on October 22, 2026.

• After our second child, my husband and I were struggling to balance our jobs and household admin.
• To outsource some of the cooking, I found a local chef to batch-cook meals for us once a month.
• Having a freezer packed with homemade meals saved us time, and I learned a lot from the chef.

When I returned to work after my second maternity leave, our family of four found ourselves very short on free time.

Back then, my husband and I had jobs in finance in London. We were working long hours, with video calls stretching from seven in the morning to nine at night.

On weekdays, like most families with young children, we felt like we were in a never-ending cycle of rushing everywhere. Our plates were filled with nursery drop-offs and pickups, Teams calls, making dinner, cleaning up, and getting the kids ready for bed and baths, with household chores and personal admin to be completed in what was left of our free time.

Though we had full-time childcare, we had little else in the way of daily support, as our families were not local.

In our social circle, we knew that dual-career parents with young children often bought supermarket-ready meals or ordered takeout. However, these options often felt too high in salt and sugar, and limited in their selection.

That was how I found myself posting in a Facebook group for Malaysian moms in the UK, desperately trying to find someone to cook for us.

I wasn't envisioning a personal chef who would shop and make three meals a day — our budget didn't stretch that far — rather, I hoped to find a decent home cook and had a few hours to make big, batch meals that we could freeze, then reheat on our busy weekdays.

That was how we found Evelyn.

For $150 a visit, we paid for someone to batch-cook meals for our family

Evelyn was an experienced pastry chef on furlough, like many in the food-service industry at the time — we connected in 2020, amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

She lived in a neighboring borough in London, which made our arrangement convenient. Equally as important, she was good at cooking Chinese-Malaysian dishes.

She would visit once a month, for about four to six hours. Our arrangement cost us around $150 per visit at the time. Before she arrived, we would discuss the menu over WhatsApp. Crucially, the dishes had to be easy to freeze and easy to reheat.

I would then shop for the ingredients she needed, which meant a combination of online grocery shopping and trips to Chinatown for less-common items.

On her visit, she would cook large portions of three dishes, which she further subdivided into another three family-sized portions. In total, we had around nine portions, which were then packed into containers and frozen — like a supermarket-ready meal, but tastier and probably healthier.

The meals she cooked were Malaysian Nyonya or Chinese-Malaysian dishes: ayam tempra (chicken dish), chai boey (a delicious sour and spicy stew with leftover roast meat), babi pongteh (a braised pork dish), and chicken with ginger and spring onion.

The 4-year arrangement had both expected and unexpected benefits

As a result of Evelyn's visits, we did not spend precious hours batch cooking on the weekends. We could spend our limited free time with our children.

Although her meals did not completely replace the need for us to cook, the constant everyday drudgery of preparing food was partially mitigated. On weekdays, after a long day of work calls, I would grab a container out of the fridge and pair it with plain white rice.

And the biggest unexpected benefit was that she taught us more of my culture. Though I'm Chinese-Malaysian, I was never taught how to cook growing up. When I started living independently, my cooking repertoire did not extend much beyond pasta, curry chicken, and whatever I could learn from YouTube videos.

Nothing compares to being shown what to cook and how to do it by a more experienced person. It was a learning experience for me to hunt for the ingredients that Evelyn had asked for in the local Chinese grocery store. On one of my trips, I had gotten a vegetable that I believed to be kai choy (Chinese mustard green), only to be told by Evelyn that it was choy sum (Chinese flowering cabbage).

By watching her, I also learned about different types of tofu and which work best for various dishes, plus how to get a good sear on meat (very high heat and a willingness to tolerate oil splatter).

Evelyn continued to come to our place every month or so until we left London about four years later. We did not restart an arrangement like this in our new place, as the kids were older and our jobs were more flexible.

I am a firm believer that you have to make your own village in this modern world, especially for those of us who have found careers far away from our families of origin. So I am forever grateful to Evelyn for her help in the intense years with babies and young children.

We had been looking for a "batch-cooking service," but instead we got a stand-in "aunty."