How to Make Mashed Potato Pancakes

Hey, Sam here, and today I’ll be showing you how to make mashed potato pancakes. Alright, I wanted to share this recipe right after Thanksgiving because I know a lot of us have leftover mashed potatoes, one of my personal favorite things, but here’s a way to enjoy them that doesn’t involve just, you know, reheating them and putting gravy on top.

Why You’ll Love This

My dad used to make these after the holidays with our leftover mashed potatoes. I always loved it, so I just wanted to share my own recipe. Of course, you can make these any time of year, but it’s great when you have leftovers.

I feel like you either grew up making these and don’t need a recipe for them and have your own way of doing it, or you’ve never done it before, in which case I hope this is a really nice guideline for you, a helpful guideline. This is just how I do it.

This is my favorite part. Make sure you can see inside. It’s like mashed potatoes. It’s like, it’s even better than mashed potatoes. I think you’re going to like this one.

Ingredients

2 cups of leftover mashed potatoes (cold)
¾ cup of shredded cheddar cheese
¼ teaspoon of garlic powder
¼ teaspoon of onion powder
¼ teaspoon of ground black pepper
¼ teaspoon of salt
2 tablespoons of flour
1 egg

Instructions

Stir the mashed potatoes together with the cheese, garlic powder, onion powder, ground black pepper, and salt. You can use your hands for this too.
Whisk the egg before you add it to your potatoes. That way, it is easier to combine everything. Stir this together.
Prepare a place for them to land. Grab a baking sheet, lining it with parchment paper just to make cleanup a little bit easier. Dust this with some additional flour.
Scoop the potato mixture by one-fourth cup. You should get eight of these.
Dust the tops with a little bit of flour, and flatten these.
Take a skillet and add a couple of tablespoons of neutral cooking oil to this. I’m using avocado oil.
Turn your stovetop on to medium high heat and cook this until the oil is nice and shimmering.
Grab your potatoes out of the fridge.
Place the pancakes in the hot oil.
Check it after like a minute or two. You want it to be a nice deep golden brown color and then you can flip it over.
Move them to a paper towel lined plate.

Cooking Tips

You could try a different cheese if you prefer, like Colby Jack would work really well too. It’s my son’s favorite cheese.

Assuming you have a basic mashed potato recipe that you are using, I like to add a little bit of spice that’s not always in your Thanksgiving mashed potatoes. You can alter this depending on how flavorful your dish is, but I like to add a little bit of that.

Bonus points if it’s freshly cracked.

Sometimes you can get away without adding any flour to this recipe, but that’s risky. What can happen is they can just fall apart. They can be really difficult to work with. They can make a huge mess in your frying pan.

Two tablespoons is a very safe amount. I find if you end up having to add more, the pancakes can get a little bit bland. And if that happens, you might want to add a little bit more spice as well.

If you find your potato pancakes are not holding when we get to that step, you can always add a little bit more flour as needed.

The mashed potatoes being cold really do help with this step. I’m just stirring until everything is mostly combined.

I have found I really like the egg. It adds as a nice binder to hold the potatoes and the other ingredients together. And I just think it makes for a better potato pancake. Adding that egg really does help the pancakes hold their shape. It holds their shape better, fries them better. It works nicely for me.

We are not baking these. We’re going to be frying them. This is just a place to help form them.

I like to use this scoop. I never remember what number it is. Look it up later.

I want to make sure that these are manageable. So I want to make sure I can pick them up because that’s the next thing that we’re going to do is we’re going to need to move them to fry them. And I’ll be using a spatula, but I want to make sure they are… I want to make sure that they are transferable. So I can pick this up. We’ll be able to fry it, no problem.

Normally, I will have my oil heating up while I am preparing the potato pancakes. I’m going to pop these in the fridge while I heat up the oil just because I don’t want them to get too warm.

The important thing is that we have a nice layer of oil on the bottom of the pan. You don’t want just like a really thin sheen because if you do not have enough oil, what’s going to happen is the pancakes are going to stick. They’re going to fall apart. You won’t be able to remove them. And it’s just going to be a sad day.

You need a place to put your pancakes after they are done cooking. So I just have a paper towel lined plate right here. This is where they’re going to go.

You do not want to cook too many pancakes at one time. Don’t want to overcrowd them.

How long it takes for these to cook all the way through is going to depend on like, you know, exactly how hot your oil is, how much oil you used, a lot of different variables.

If you’re worried about them not being cooked all the way through, you can use an instant read thermometer like a meat thermometer and just check that the center has exceeded 165 degrees.

They don’t need to be a deep golden brown, but there should be golden browning happening.

Oh, don’t make my mistakes. Confident in your flip. There’s a lot of oil, so be careful you don’t splash yourself.

I really do like using a cast iron for this because a cast iron heats so thoroughly and evenly. I like using my 10 inch cast iron. Two tablespoons of oil does the trick perfectly. So if you have those tools at home, I would definitely use them here.

If your pan gets really messy, you can always wipe it out with a paper towel.

You’ll probably need to add a little more oil in between batches.

Serving Suggestions

You’re going to want to serve these while they are still warm. These are good plain. You can eat them that way if you want. But what I like to do, what my family likes to do, is we’ll top them with a little bit of sour cream and chives or scallions or green onions. Tastes amazing with it.

That is how you make potato pancakes, mashed potato pancakes using leftover mashed potatoes.