13 Easy Ways To Get Fancy With Your Potato Sides

Consider the humble potato. It's versatile, inexpensive, and readily available all year round. But if you're tired of simple mashed potatoes, boring baked potatoes, or plain roasted potatoes, it's easy enough to get fancy with your potato sides. Add in a luxurious ingredient, an unexpected cooking technique, or a fancy serving vessel, and that humble potato gets a whole new image — one that's fancy enough to serve at a dinner party when you've got guests to impress or a special holiday meal. 

Chefs know that a few special ingredients will elevate one of the most inexpensive ingredients in their kitchen to a dish that will be the talk of the town (and can also command a high price on the menu). Consider the $200 French fries served at Serendipity 3 in New York City: Blanched in Champagne and cooked in goose fat, they're seasoned with truffle, dusted with edible gold dust, and served on Baccarat crystal.

You might not be able to go to that extent to fancy up your favorite potato side dishes, but when it comes to the luxury treatment, a little goes a long way. Whatever way you like to prepare potato side dishes — mashed, baked, roasted, fried, and so on — we've found the best ways to get fancy with them. Dressed to impress, those inexpensive potatoes can become the elegant star of your dinner plate.

Hasselback potatoes emerged as a trend a few years back, and for good reason: the simple slicing technique for roasted potatoes gives the taters a crispier exterior area than regular baked or roasted potatoes, as well as creamy, pillowy interiors. Not to mention the beautiful accordion-like appearance is a showstopper.

This technique is a great way to make a potato side dish look like you made a fuss, but in reality, it's not hard at all to prepare. Just make a series of uniform slices into a potato, making sure to leave it connected at the bottom, and the potato will fan out while cooking into its trademark ridges. One trick to keep from cutting all the way through is to use chopsticks as a guide to stop the knife before it slices the tuber all the way.

Once the potatoes are cooked, they're a vessel for whatever sort of toppings you want. Try drizzling them with tarragon-spiked butter or infused olive oil. Even sweet potatoes can get the hasselback treatment, drizzled with butter mixed with maple syrup, sage, and red pepper flakes.

Ina Garten is just full of ideas on how to make potato dishes a little bit more fancy, and we love her suggestion for an unusual ingredient to give mashed potatoes a decidedly decadent, and super-creamy, texture. She starts with butter, sour cream, and half and half, but then stirs in softened herbed goat cheese, such as Montrachet. The sharp taste of the goat cheese and its rich, creamy texture, enhances the earthy potatoes. 

Goat cheese isn't the only type of cheese that can make ordinary mashed potatoes a little fancier. Why not try stirring crumbled blue cheese into mashed potatoes? The pungent cheese is an unexpected flavor and for blue cheese lovers, makes a delicious side dish that pairs particularly well with steak. 

Whatever cheese you add, make sure your mashed potatoes are as smooth as can be by using a potato ricer, which will break down chunks, leaving you with the creamiest, silkiest spuds. Don't have a potato ricer? Try pressing the cooked potatoes through a mesh sieve for a similar result.

Chefs and restaurants are catching on to the fact that the ubiquitous French fry can be elevated with a selection of dipping sauces that go beyond a boring bottle of ketchup. David Chang, for instance, loves dipping his fries into au poivre sauce, a mixture of butter, peppercorns, and liquor that usually accompanies steak.

You, too, can make the French fries you serve a little more special. Whether you're making fries from scratch or just cooking up some frozen fries, serve them with a trio of dipping sauces in cute dishes. Scour your condiment aisle for unusual options that would pair well with hot, crispy fries: ranch dressing, cheese dip, aioli or flavored mayo, or smoked ketchup, are all good options.

The Aldi Charcuterie Board of Directors even predicts that with the popularity of charcuterie boards, French fry boards will be the next hot thing. Picture a spread of various fries — shoestring, waffle, thick steakhouse fries, and tater tots— interspersed with dishes of dipping sauces ranging from beer cheese to truffled ketchup to garlicky aioli, and you get the picture.

Like twice-baked potatoes, loaded baked potatoes are a delicious individual serving of tater goodness that can be dressed up with gourmet ingredients to make a special side dish. For the ultimate in luxurious loaded baked potatoes, we recommend splurging on caviar and crème fraîche.

This is how Martha Stewart's Vegas restaurant, The Bedford, upgrades its smashed baked potatoes. The side dish usually comes with crème fraîche, chives, and bacon lardons. But for an upcharge, you can get your taters topped with Golden Osetra caviar (just be prepared for sticker shock: even the one-ounce portion of caviar will bring the price of the dish up to a whopping $115.95).

Even buying a tin of caviar to top your loaded baked potatoes at home can be expensive, so it's definitely a treat best saved for a special occasion. If you want to save a bit of money, look for other types of fish roe, such as salmon roe, which will still give your loaded baked potatoes a fancy feel. Don't forget the crème fraîche, which is a classic pairing with caviar. If you can't find it at the supermarket, it's actually easy enough to make it at home with buttermilk, heavy cream, and citric acid.

Next time you're serving mashed potatoes at a dinner party, delight your guests by folding in succulent chunks of lobster cooked in butter. The sweet, tender seafood is the perfect foil to creamy, rich mashed potatoes, especially if you've already stirred in butter and something creamy like double cream or crème fraîche.

Lobster mashed potatoes could be a meal in itself, accompanied by a green salad to offset the richness. If you're nervous about the prospect of cooking a whole lobster, consider instead using lump crab meat for a similarly indulgent feel.

Mashed potatoes with a fancy ingredient like lobster or crab deserve to be silky-smooth, so consider using a bit of culinary gastronomy to make them as supple as possible: mixing diastatic malt powder into cooked potatoes, then letting them sit for half an hour in a hot water bath. The enzyme breaks down the starch in the potatoes, so you won't even need to use a potato ricer or masher to puree them.

If you really need to impress, there are few potato side dishes as fancy as pommes de terre a la Duchesse, or Duchess potatoes. This classic French dish dates back to the 1700s, and was also a favorite of American cookbook author Fanny Farmer.

Duchess potatoes start out much like mashed potatoes: potatoes are boiled, then pureed through a ricer. Add butter and cream, as well as egg yolks, which give the potatoes a rich flavor and also provide structure for them to hold their shape. The mixture is loaded into a pastry bag and piped into rosettes, then baked until browned. The finished nugget has a crispy exterior and a creamy inside. If this sounds too fancy, you could spoon most of the potato mixture into a casserole dish and just pipe a few decorative rosettes or swirls on top. It'll taste just as good, and will still look fancy. Duchess potatoes have a retro feel, like something Midge Maisel would have enjoyed at a supper club, so serve them up with something that has a similar old-school fancy element, like steak au poivre or roast Cornish game hens.