The Secret Ingredients In Stanley Tucci's Mashed Potatoes

If you've watched "Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy," you know that the actor turned foodie knows his way around a kitchen, especially when it comes to Italian cuisine. On the CNN food and travel show, Tucci is seen exploring the different regions of Italy, cooking up dishes like risotto al nero di seppia in Venice and hunting down the perfect timballo in Sicily. 

If you want to eat like Tucci does, you can find plenty of his favorite recipes in "The Tucci Cookbook." While many of them he learned from his Italian family and while living in Florence during his childhood, Tucci's repertoire isn't limited to Italian cuisine. In fact, he actually credits his best mashed potatoes recipe to his British wife, Felicity Blunt, the New Haven Register shared. From Blunt, Tucci learned to skip out on the milk and cream entirely and substitute them for just a bit of butter and a couple of surprising ingredients. Even without all the dairy, says the reporter who tried his recipe, the mashed potatoes are every bit as creamy as you'd want them to be.

Per the New Haven Register, Tucci and Blunt's go-to mashed potato recipe uses olive oil and egg yolks, plus butter, for creaminess. As Southern Living explains, olive oil functions a lot like butter in many recipes, but too much of it can easily make your dish oily instead of creamy. To avoid oily mashed potatoes, treat the olive oil as a butter substitute, using extra virgin olive oil and a conversion rate of 8 tablespoons of butter to 6 tablespoons of olive oil in the recipe. The reporter who tried Tucci's recipe used twice as much butter as they did olive oil for Tucci's recipe, and they seemed to be very happy with the luxurious consistency and "peppery" flavor. 

To try Tucci's method, simply cook the potatoes as you normally would, but instead of waiting until they're mashed to drizzle in the olive oil, do so while you're going at them with the masher. Once the olive oil is well incorporated, go ahead and mix in that extra butter, along with raw egg yolk for added richness. The eggs will cook once they're quickly stirred into the hot potatoes, and then they're ready to serve.