Kyl Haselbauer has 20 years of experience working in fine-dining and modernist kitchens, including Bar Cotto and Anchovies &amp; Olives in Seattle. He is also the owner of Bright Spot, a café and coffee shop in Seattle.

Kyl Haselbauer

If you’ve ever wondered how to make pomme purée, the silkiest, smoothest mashed potatoes beloved by Michelin-starred chefs all around the world, you’re in luck: We have a step-by-step method you can use to replicate them at home.This dish is often referred to as Robuchon potatoes, in honor of Joël Robuchon, the chef who mastered the preparation. Robuchon’s innovation was, in retrospect, pretty simple: He figured out how to incorporate an over-the-top amount of milk and butter into a potato purée without producing any gumminess at all in the final product. The key to the dish is to break up the cooked potato into very fine particles without overworking the starches, which will make the purée gummy. Adding milk and butter to the passed potatoes helps to lubricate these fine particles, and the fat they contain serves as a slight buffer against overworking the starches. However, it can’t guard against it completely, so it’s important to pass the potato purée through a fine-mesh strainer while it’s hot. The warm purée will pass more easily through the fine holes of the strainer, and the quicker you can get it through the strainer, the less you’ll work the starches.To improve your chances of success, we call for fingerling potatoes, for a couple of reasons. First, fingerlings are quite similar to French ratte potatoes, which are the ones typically used in this preparation in France. Second, you can cook fingerlings whole, with their skins on, until they’re completely tender and they won’t fall apart, which limits the amount of water they’ll absorb; the less water in the potato purée, the less gummy it’ll be. Finally, fingerlings taste, for lack of a better word, very potato-y, and their flavor stands up well to the relatively large amount of fat you’ll incorporate into the purée.Is it kind of a lot of work for mashed potatoes? Maybe. But when you’re eating spoon after silky spoon of a legendary chef’s signature dish alongside a sous vide pork chop in the comfort of your home, we’ll bet that, when you think about it, it won’t seem like a lot of work at all.

Perfect Pomme Purée