Transform Boring Mashed Potatoes With One Flavorful Ingredient Upgrade

If you keep things simple with just butter, milk, and salt, mashed potatoes may never be bland, but they can be a bit boring. However, potatoes are essentially flavor sponges, and incorporating a bit of roasted garlic into the mix is a surefire way of introducing more taste with little effort.

The flavor of granulated garlic is powerful enough to smell across the house, but it lacks that homey, comforting depth that comes from roasting. By doing so, you mellow its bite, make it a touch sweeter, and impart an incredible golden brown coloring that'll make you want to eat it straight off the tray. Plus, as opposed to mincing and sautéing it first, roasting essentially turns it into jelly that you can mash and evenly distribute throughout an entire pot of mashed potatoes. This also gives you a chance to flavor the garlic with woody herbs, butter, or spices, removing the need to find a way to put it in the potatoes directly.

While roasting can take some time and effort, you can store roasted garlic in the fridge for a few days beforehand, giving you easy access to a powerful seasoning. A quick zap in the microwave ensures it won't cool your potatoes and liquefies the cooking fats to make them easier to mix in evenly. The end result is a side dish with an incredibly comforting aroma and depth of flavor that could take hours to replicate through other means.

The goal of roasting garlic is to concentrate its sugars, soften the cloves, and boost its flavor. While baking it in the oven for 30 or 40 minutes is the simplest way to do this, the air fryer may be faster, and grilling is an underrated method of cooking garlic that imparts second-to-none smokiness.

The biggest factor in an air fryer's favor is the quickness of preparing a whole head of garlic. It essentially cuts the time in half, only needing about 20 minutes for a similar flavor and coloring. The hands-off nature of the recipe only makes it more enticing. Since you can just wrap them in tin foil, stick them in the tray, and set a timer, it saves you focus and effort that you can instead put into your mashed potatoes. The only downside is that this tends to keep the cloves a bit firmer, but blending them into the milk beforehand gets around this issue quite easily.

If you want to go a step further with your mashed potatoes for something truly unique, grilling garlic is still quite easy. While you'd usually discard the skins from baked or air-fried bulbs, those crispy, blackened shreds from the grill are essentially pure flavor. While this method inevitably cooks them faster, you can wrap them in tin foil once they develop the right amount of char to preserve their moisture, soften the cloves, and give them that perfect creamy, spreadable texture.