5 Instant Mashed Potato Brands, Ranked

If you haven't been food shopping lately (or haven't been reading the news), grocery prices are absolutely astronomical. Even if you're preparing something as simple as mashed potatoes, you have to buy not only the potatoes, but also butter and milk, not to mention allocate enough time to peel, chop, boil, and mash the spuds. Luckily, there is a cheaper and less time-consuming alternative at your fingertips: instant mashed potatoes.

Listen, I don't like the idea of instant mashed potatoes, either. I grew up on homemade mashed potatoes, and I think that if my family got even a whisper that I was an instant mashed potato convert, they would disown me. However, I can't deny the attractiveness of this food product, given that a pouch costs around $1 and may just require water to prepare. Even with the cost and convenience factor out of the way, I wanted to see whether instant mashed potatoes could square up to the starchy, creamy, delicious spuds that I was raised on. To find out, I purchased as many instant, powdered mashed potato brands as I could find before preparing, tasting, and ranking them from worst to best based on flavor, texture, and whether I could pass them off as being homemade.

Stop & Shop instant mashed potatoes were the only brand that did not come in a small pouch. However, that didn't inherently knock it down on my list. What did knock it down on my list, however, was the outright complex directions: ⅔ cup of potato flakes, ⅔ cup water, 1 tablespoon butter, ¼ cup milk — heck, I even had to bring my own salt. I thought instant potatoes were supposed to take all the guesswork out of cooking and make things easier, but I guess not.

I was very glad that Stop & Shop explicitly said that I had to salt these spuds myself, considering what they considered "enough" salt is far from it. These mashed potatoes were very bland and lacked the buttery flavor of any of the other brands I sampled, despite the fact that I added a generous tablespoon of fat to the spud-filled elixir before microwaving it. I suppose if you wanted to spice up your mashed potatoes with salty toppings or mix-ins — like cooked bacon or cheddar cheese, or even garlic salt — you would want something that tastes a little more neutral and not as salty from the get-go. But if you were just eating a bowl of these straight, you would need to reach for the salt and pepper to make them anywhere near palatable. 

Overall, I don't think the effort is worth it for these mashed potatoes. "Instant" suggests "easy," and this Stop & Shop product is far from it, at least when it comes to preparation. If you're after something that's both easy and tasty, you're better off buying one of the higher-ranked pouches on this list instead.

If I were giving a first-place award based on shelf presence, Idahoan would win. Butter and herb? Baby red? Loaded? Roasted garlic? Four cheese? If there is an instant mashed potato variety out there, Idahoan probably carries it. I tried the buttery homestyle mashed potatoes to keep things fair for this ranking, though I was intrigued by many of the other offerings.

The instructions for these mashed potatoes were simple: 2 cups of boiling water, one pouch of instant potatoes, and let the mixture sit until it's fluffy and ready to serve. If you want an as-instant-as-physically-possible brand of instant potatoes, well, this one is going to be your best bet. Despite having "buttery" in their name, though, these potatoes really missed out on those tasty, buttery notes. I suspect this is because it didn't call for any additional butter. The lack of flavor is surprising in some respects, though, because I could smell a movie theater butter-esque aroma stemming from the bowl. The flavor isn't authentic by any means, and there's no way you could pass it off as being homemade, let alone made with real butter. 

The texture was also slightly off. While I appreciated that there was no crust on the outside of the Idahoan mashed potatoes — because it didn't need to be nuked after being mixed with the water — there were some flaky potato pieces left behind. It wasn't as creamy as my top picks, and it almost tasted like what you'd get at Kentucky Fried Chicken versus your grandma's kitchen.

Great Value wasn't the cheapest brand in this ranking — it lost that title by a mere penny. Its buttery-flavored complete potatoes (is there something wrong with saying "mashed potatoes," or is this just me?) have the same directions as the more premium Idahoan mashed potatoes: combine boiling water with the contents. However, the methodology was different. Instead of combining the potato flakes with the hot water, I was to mix the two together, then microwave them. It was about as unpalatable to look at cold as you would expect.

While Idahoan mashed potatoes immediately smelled like fake butter, these Great Value spuds were much more neutral and, overall, approachable. Rather than smelling and tasting like a bucket of movie theater original, these tasted almost meaty — like someone had made the potatoes with chicken broth rather than water. Therefore, I think that these instant mashed potatoes would be a good match for a homemade turkey or hearty beef gravy. 

The texture leaves something to be desired, though. The mouthfeel is quite creamy, so creamy that it's clear that they're made with fine potato flakes rather than chunky Russets. The flakes soaked up the liquid well, even if it looked like a very wet porridge for the first few minutes after I pulled it from the microwave. This is an instant mashed potato brand that you need to let stand before serving so that the moisture can soak in. I couldn't rank it any higher, though, because I was really missing that authentic buttery and homestyle mouthfeel. In a pinch, though, it'll suffice.

And the winner for cheapest instant mashed potatoes goes to none other than the cheapest grocery store: Aldi. I didn't just rank Aldi's Chef's Cupboard mashed potatoes because it was the cheapest brand on this list and because Aldi is my favorite grocery store; I ranked it high because these buttery mashed potatoes give you a lot of bang for your buck (err ... less than a buck, actually). They didn't have the same artificial butter flavor as Idahoan (and they were about 30 cents cheaper), and they had a slightly less meaty flavor than Great Value. The butteriness tasted very authentic and meshed well with the creaminess of the potatoes. Overall, I liked these more for eating out of the bowl; they don't need any gravy to make them shine.

Like Great Value, I had to prepare these instant spuds by mixing the pouch with cold water and then microwaving. I really think that adding boiling water to them will also suffice, though I needed to follow the instructions to a tee for the sake of this starch-filled experiment. Like Great Value's mashed potatoes, Chef's Cupboard instant spuds were very creamy with few lumps. If you need to feed them to a potato-loving child, they would certainly suffice. However, as was the case with Great Value and Idahoan, these potatoes were a little too creamy, so much so that I would suspect they came from a package. The good news is they take only a few minutes to prepare and make a decent attempt at replicating the same flavor as the homestyle mashed potatoes you grew up on.

Betty Crocker's mashed potatoes came highly recommended, which is why I tried them first for my ranking. The package listed directions for both the stovetop and the microwave — I chose to go for the microwave method, since we are making instant mashed potatoes, and I wanted them to be as instant as possible. The package called for 1½ cups of water, ½ cup of milk, and 3 tablespoons of butter to be melted in a casserole dish in the microwave. Whose microwave can fit a casserole dish, I have yet to figure out, so I just melted the liquid ingredients together in a glass measuring cup instead. 

Once I stirred it with the mashed potato flakes, I realized it started to take on a lumpy, mashed potato consistency. Then, back into the microwave it had to go for another three minutes to reach mashed potato nirvana. Five minutes for mashed potatoes that were just like homemade? That was a concession I was willing to make. 

These mashed potatoes looked like just what you would find on the Thanksgiving table. There were no unsightly lumps, and the butteriness came through well; I was happy it called for a few tablespoons of fat for extra richness. The only critique I had was that I don't think it really needed to be cooked for the additional three minutes after the hot liquid was added. It formed a slightly dry top, which I don't necessarily love from my mashed potatoes. A couple of minutes to stand with the liquid would have resulted in a fine bowl of spuds. Just be prepared for folks at your table to ask you for your recipe.

I prepared each of these instant mashed potato brands based on the package directions. This included not only adding the correct mix-ins — which, for some brands, was just water, and for others was a mixture of water, milk, and butter — but also cooking each based on its specific microwave instructions. These packets all had instructions for stovetop preparations, though I figured that I wanted to make these spuds as quickly as possible and to standardize the process across brands.

There are several important considerations I made when deciding which instant mashed potato brand to rank as the best. The preparation process should be simple — as that's one of the draws of using an instant mashed potato mix over making your own from scratch. That said, having a long ingredient list wasn't necessarily the nail in the coffin — after all, my top-ranked brand called for butter, milk, and water — but the end should justify the means. I also looked at the flavor and texture of each brand. Many of these brands touted "buttery" profiles, so I wanted to taste an authentic rather than artificial butter flavor. The texture should also be creamy and fluffy. The top-ranked brand on this list was the only one that I could probably pass off as being homemade, which is ultimately why it earned its title. While the Great Value and Chef's Cupboard mashed potatoes were good, their ultra-creaminess made it clear that they were instant mashed potatoes, rather than homemade.