Mashed Potatoes, Yes, But Chock Full of Flavor

It took me almost a year and a half of living in Kunming, Yunnan, to try one of the city’s most ubiquitous dishes: grandma’s potatoes (lǎonǎi yángyù, 老奶洋芋). My delay was not from lack of opportunity. Laonai yangyu was practically everywhere I looked. It was on the menus at almost every restaurant, especially in the expat- and student-friendly area around Yunnan University, and it was recommended in many of the food-focused postings on the local English-language site, GoKunming. Sometimes when I went into a restaurant, the waitress would preemptively ask if I wanted to add it to my meal. It was also popular in Dali, another spot Westerners regularly traveled to (and where I often took visiting friends and family). 

But the very fact that it was so popular in these areas made me wary. The name, I was told, referred to the fact that the dish was so soft that even grandmothers without teeth could eat it. But the descriptions I heard made the dish sound suspiciously like Western mashed potatoes. I thought that perhaps the dish was something that had been specifically created to cater to expats and backpackers. And I’d learned early in my travels around China that the dishes created to cater to travelers were almost never the best options on the menu. 

I was so wary of the dish that it wasn’t until pretty late in my two-year stay that I finally gave in and decided to see what all the fuss was about. With my first bite, I realized that I’d been missing out. The potatoes were delicious. Instead of the bland mash that I’d anticipated, they were a riot of flavors: There were bright pickles, aromatic chives, roasty slices of garlic, and fiery dried chilies all mixed into the potatoes, their flavors melding with the starch to create something both comforting and delightful. The oils these ingredients were cooked in also permeated through the starchy bits, making the whole thing feel rich and unctuous. Taken all together, the laonai yangyu was good enough that I could have made a meal out of  it on its own, but it also worked perfectly as a foil for the other meats and vegetables on the table. It was, in short, a pretty perfect food.

Obviously, once I’d tried grandma’s potatoes, I immediately learned how to make them for myself, and they became a regular addition to our menu at home. The key to the dish is that you cook the potatoes twice: First you boil new potatoes (these waxier varieties work better than the starchy potatoes you might use for Western mashes), then you break them up and mash them right in the wok while they’re cooking with all of the other flavorings. This way, the cooking oil and all of the seasonings work their way through every part of the potatoes as they cook, so that even the bites that don’t have any of the aromatics in them are still full of their flavor. I usually serve these potatoes alongside other classic Yunnan dishes like beef with pickles or xiaochao rou. Sometimes I’ll treat the potatoes as one of the vegetables on the table and also make some steamed rice to round out my dinner, but often I’ll just lean into the tubers’ starchy qualities and use them as a unique, flavorful backbone for the entire meal.

Yunnan’s Delicious (and Sometimes Gorgeous!) Potatoes

Until I moved to Yunnan, I hadn’t really considered potatoes an interesting or important part of Chinese cuisine. The only times I’d really seen them in Chinese restaurants (in the U.S. as well as in places like Beijing and Hong Kong), they were turned into the ubiquitous tǔdòu sī (土豆絲)—cut into thin slivers and served stir-fried with a touch of vinegar and sometimes chilies—or as a supporting ingredient in braised dishes like Hunan-style braised beef with potatoes. In recent years, I’ve also seen them served as a street food, cut into cubes and stir-fried or cut into spirals, threaded onto skewers, and fried in a big pot (sometimes attached, improbably, to a vendor’s motorbike). But most of the Chinese cookbooks I own don’t even list potatoes as an ingredient in their indexes. In fact, potatoes have historically been so neglected in China that about a decade ago the government made an intentional push to try to get more people to adopt them as a food staple.

So, I was a little surprised to find potatoes pretty much everywhere I went in central and northern Yunnan. In a land where only rice or wheat (as mantou or noodles) really count as the starchy part of a meal, they are often treated like a vegetable, usually prepared the same way you’d cook slices of lotus root: stir-fried with a few simple flavorings. While living in Kunming and traveling around the province (and sometimes also in neighboring Sichuan), I ate them grilled at shao kao stands, shredded and fried into enormous latke-like pancakes in Hui minority restaurants, and stir-fried with pickles and chilies. In many restaurants, of course, I’d also see laonai yangyu listed on the menu.

The thing that surprised me most about these potatoes wasn’t just how often they were on the table but how very delicious and flavorful they could be! In a restaurant in Xiangelila, on the southern edge of the Tibetan plateau, I was presented with potatoes that looked like slices of gemstones, which turned out to be so delicious that they didn’t need anything other than a bit of salt and oil to become the most compelling dish on the table. (When I moved back to the U.S., I searched in vain for anything that resembled these potatoes, but the very few purple varieties sold here aren’t nearly as flavorful—though the “all blue” variety has a similar look.) 

It’s possible that potatoes took off in Yunnan because the locally grown varietals are so flavorful, but it’s far more likely that the causation went the other way around: In a province with very little arable land (even less than many other parts of China) and a history of tremendous poverty, potatoes must have been a very useful crop from the very moment they were introduced to the region. Developing and growing flavorful varieties likely came as a result of this popularity.

Flavoring Grandma’s Potatoes

The genius of laonai yangyu is that the potatoes create a perfect canvas for all kinds of other flavors to play on. In the years since that first encounter, I’ve had many varieties of the dish flavored with all kinds of interesting combinations of ingredients. I’ve had very simple versions with nothing more than some sliced scallions and dried chilies, and I’ve had loaded-up versions with greens and bits of Yunnan’s flavorful ham mixed in (sort of reminiscent of the mashed potatoes with peas and bacon my mom sometimes made during my childhood). Versions without meat often include some rendered pork fat mixed into the oil. Many renditions include flavorful fennel fronds, while others feature Yunnan’s delicious suancai pickles. Most versions also have either dried chilies or a drizzle of chili oil to add some flavorful heat. 

The version I’ve made here is pretty maximalist (though it doesn’t contain any ham). I’ve included both garlic chives and scallions, because they add two distinctly different flavors and textures to the dish, along with garlic, to round out the flavors, and pickles. (While suancai is traditional, I also really like using Sichuan-style zhacai; either will work well here.) And while I love the heat from xiao mi la, which are ubiquitous in Yunnan, I’ve opted for tiao zi jiao here; their almost fruity flavor and punch of heat add a really nice note.

For more delicious Chinese potato dishes, try Taylor’s Spicy Chili Crisp Potato Salad (Liangban Tudou, 凉拌土豆) or Kathy’s Sichuan Hot and Sour Shredded Potato (Suanla Tudousi, 酸辣土豆丝).