Smashed Potatoes with Lemon Dill Cream Sauce

April 4, 2019 By Whip & Wander 61 Comments

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Potatoes are basically the perfect food

Whether they’re baked, fried, boiled, diced, sliced, mashed, hashed, or smashed, potatoes are indisputably one of the most delicious and flexible comfort foods. Their superpower lies in their ability to soak up the flavor of anything they come in contact with, making them the perfect vessel for all things delicious.

Let’s get real for a second: There is an endless trove of smashed potato recipes out there. In fact, there was more than 6.5M results when I typed “smashed potatoes” into the ol’ Google to check. What makes these smashed potatoes different is the spectacularly creamy, perfectly balanced lemon dill cream sauce that I’ve slathered on top.

The basics of making perfect smashed potatoes

Smashed potatoes are cooked twice: First they’re boiled then they’re roasted. Boiling the potatoes first allows the potato to become fully cooked, while retaining their fluffy insides. Then, after a generous drizzle of avocado oil + sprinkle of good quality sea salt, the potatoes are gently smashed with a fork (or potato masher), drizzled with melted butter, and roasted in the oven until their skins and edges are nice and crispy. The 2-step cooking method produces a fluffy + crispy combination that is really the best of both worlds.

I used a baby potato mix that included red, gold, and purple varieties all perfect for boiling and roasting, but feel free to use whatever baby potatoes are easily accessible to you. This recipe also works lovely with fingerling potatoes as an alternative.

The magic is in the lemon dill cream sauce

After a salt and butter coated turn in the oven, these potato beauties get dressed in an ample drizzle of Lemon Dill Cream Sauce (citrus + dill + sour cream + mayo + Dijon + salt) to become over-the-top delicious. Every time I make these the fella and I end up eating nearly half of them directly off the baking tray before they ever even make it to our dinner plates, mopping up any remnants of sauce that happened to make it onto the tray rather than the potato.

I think this sauce is best flavored with a bit of lemon zest rather than juice. This allows the pure lemon flavor found in the natural oils of the peel to balance the flavor of the sauce rather than the sharp acidity of lemon juice, which can sometimes overpower a creamy sauce like this. Although most traditional graters come with a fine grating side, I find that a quality microplane/zester makes a world of difference when zesting citrus. This is the one I use.

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Perfect Pairings

These Smashed Potatoes with Lemon Dill Cream Sauce pair perfectly with chicken, beef, or fish (I love serving this with salmon) and a green veggie like asparagus or broccoli. If there happens to be any leftover sauce, I love to drizzle the other things on my plate with a bit of this scrumptious sauce too.

A note for special diets

These Smashed Potatoes with Lemon Dill Cream Sauce are grain-free, gluten-free, and vegetarian. If you opt to use lactose-free sour cream, they are also friendly for Low FODMAP diets.