Boil ’em, mash ’em, stick ’em in a stew: The Takeout’s best potato recipes

With its beautiful piping, dusting of chives, and elegant presentation, the twice-baked potato starts with a humble tuber and transforms it into something fancy as hell. These Ultra Deluxe Twice-Baked Potatoes play up the textural contrast between the crispy outer skin and the velvety interior with lots of salt, sour cream, oil, and butter, and Heinz 57 sauce ties the whole dish together in an unexpected way. Go ahead and dress up your potatoes—you can pretend it’s a special occasion. Here’s the recipe.

Sometimes you find yourself with too many potatoes (they are sold by the sackful at most grocery stores), and in those cases, you should turn to tartiflette. It’s a French dish consisting of lots of potatoes layered with bacon, onion, and semi-soft cow’s milk cheese such as Port Salut. A tangy mixture of vinegar, hot sauce, and honey make this version of tartiflette anything but traditional, but the deviation is well worth it. Here’s the recipe.

Though The Takeout is based in Chicago, its roots are deep in Wisconsin. And there is nothing that says Wisconsin more than cheese. May we present to you the Potato Cauldron, the most Wisconsin—yea, Midwestern—side dish of all: a full gallon of potatoes blended with butter, two types of cheese, and bacon. If you’re going to bust a gut, you might as well go whole hog. Here’s the recipe.

Though it would probably be nice to win the lottery or get in on the ground floor of some very lucrative stock options and become a literal millionaire, eating these Millionaire Mashed Potatoes makes you feel like you’ve achieved greatness nonetheless. These are better than any mashed potatoes you’ve experienced in your life, richer and smoother and far more buttery. Top with a hefty, beefy gravy, or feel free to just eat them plain—they’re that good. Here’s the recipe.

Ever heard of pommes dauphine? That’s French for “deep-fried extra-fluffy mashed potato nuggets,” and the fact that they aren’t a bigger deal in North American cuisine is a travesty. They only require a few standard ingredients (potatoes, milk, butter, flour, etc.), and once fried, the whole batch can be tossed in spice blends, cheese powder, or seasoned salt and served hot. Here’s the recipe.

Most of us have tried adding potato chips to our sandwiches for a bit of crunch, but how about making potato your primary sandwich filling? This recipe for potato and egg sandwiches is an homage to the ones that have been made at Defonte’s sandwich shop in Red Hook, Brooklyn, since 1922. The brilliance of this sandwich is that it’s cheap, it’s filling, it can be made by absolutely anybody regardless of their skill level, and yet somehow it’s still better than any sandwich you’ve ever had. Here’s the recipe.

This recipe for Pyzy, or Polish potato dumplings, is all about building a chef’s instinct. You can’t go wrong when making this recipe; you might undermix or overmix your dough, you might add a bit too much flour or make the dumplings a touch too big. But that’s not a problem, because regardless of the texture, all pyzy is good pyzy—especially when the dumplings are smothered in an onion and mushroom gravy. Here’s the recipe.

Potatoes are a beautiful thing, so any holiday that puts this humble root vegetable at the center of the menu, pan-fried in generous amounts of oil, is one we ought to celebrate. These Buffalo latkes are somewhere in the middle of sacred and profane: they still follow the basic rules of latke preparation, just with an added bit of flavorful flair. Here’s the recipe.

Good news: this recipe will help you use up a lot of potatoes—three pounds of Russet potatoes, to be exact. Lefse are thin potato-based flatbreads traditionally enjoyed by Norwegians at Christmastime. But why they get pigeonholed into being a holiday treat is a mystery. This recipe provides instructions for a delicious jam to pair with your lefse, but lefse can be eaten with literally anything you want, because in the land of flatbread, there are no rules. Here’s the recipe.

The secret to the perfect hash browns isn’t in the recipe so much as the technique. There’s a reason most homemade hash browns are limp and soggy, utterly devoid of that golden, crackly crispness that makes these spuds so special. The secret lies in how you grate them, rinse them, dry them, and season them; it’s a precise process, but not a difficult one, and once you follow these instructions to the letter, you’ll be amazed at what kind of crunch you can achieve. Here’s the recipe.

Aside from Idaho, there is no place in the world associated more closely with potatoes than Ireland. The Irish are masters at dressing up their potatoes and mixing them with greens: scallions, cabbage, kale, nettles, they’ve tried them all. Learn about the Essential Potato Dishes of Ireland, enough for a separate multi-course meal: Champ, Colcannon, Boxty, and Potato and Scallion Soup. Here are the recipes.