Ina Garten’s Best Potato Dishes for the Holidays, Ranked

Garten’s rosemary roasted potatoes couldn’t be easier to make. All you need are small red and white-skinned potatoes, fresh rosemary leaves, garlic, and olive oil.

After tossing the ingredients together, you just need to throw the potatoes in the oven for an hour.

Just because they’re in sixth place doesn’t mean Garten’s rosemary roasted potatoes aren’t delicious — the competition is just that fierce when it comes to “Barefoot Contessa” potato dishes.

The potatoes develop a beautiful golden color in the oven, and the pop of rosemary makes for a lovely Instagram photo. Plus, this dish makes your kitchen smell incredible.

Garten’s rosemary roasted potatoes are also deliciously crispy, with a soft and creamy middle. Both of my parents were huge fans of the dish and liked that it was a lighter alternative to mashed potatoes or a gratin.

Get the full recipe for Ina Garten’s rosemary roasted potatoes here.

Garten loves to give a new twist to a classic dish, and her Parmesan smashed potatoes are no different.

Her recipe involves smashing the potatoes with an electric mixer, a great time-saving technique. It features unpeeled red potatoes, half-and-half, sour cream, butter, and freshly grated Parmesan cheese.

“The key to mashed potatoes is what you add to them to make them have great flavor,” Garten told Al Roker while demonstrating this dish on his podcast, “Cooking Up a Storm with Al Roker,” in 2021. “Two things people really miss a lot, in almost every recipe, is the salt. It needs a lot of salt to give it flavor.”

I love the texture of these thick and creamy potatoes, and the salty sharpness of the Parmesan pairs really well with the subtly sweet red potatoes. I made these for the first time at a Friendsgiving, and they were a huge hit with my fiancé and friends.

“The smashed potatoes were deliciously salty and also not overcooked,” my fiancé said. “They still had a bit of texture to them — it wasn’t just like a bowl of soup.”

“The best mashed potatoes I’ve had!” our friend Kayla added. “So creamy and thick.”

Get the full recipe for Ina Garten’s Parmesan smashed potatoes.

I know what you’re thinking: How can store-bought mashed potatoes be so high on this list? But if anyone can elevate something from the supermarket, it’s the Barefoot Contessa.

Garten developed this recipe, a spin on her Parmesan smashed potatoes, for The New York Times in 2022 after declaring that she was burned out from cooking.

“Mashed potatoes are an essential Thanksgiving side dish but can be time-consuming,” she wrote. “Instead of starting with raw potatoes, then peeling, cutting, and boiling them, start with these prepared potatoes, and no one will know you didn’t make the dish from scratch.”

Garten’s recipe features a pack of refrigerated mashed potatoes, plus butter, sour cream, and freshly grated Parmesan cheese. All you have to do is heat the refrigerated potatoes over a pan of simmering water and then throw in the extra ingredients.

Garten’s elevated mashed potatoes were super creamy, with the Parmesan cheese infusing each bite with a lovely richness. I made these for my parents when I was home for Thanksgiving and they couldn’t tell the mashed potatoes were store-bought.

What’s really great about the recipe is how quick it is. You could easily whip up these mashed potatoes in less than 20 minutes and have a side dish that everyone will love.

Get the full recipe for Ina Garten’s elevated store-bought mashed potatoes here.

Garten uses diced instead of shredded potatoes for her hash browns, and her husband, Jeffrey, is a huge fan.

“When my husband tasted them, he wanted to know if he could have them for dinner!” Garten writes. “Hey, why not? What makes him happy is just fine with me.”

Garten’s hash browns feature boiled potatoes, chopped yellow onions, butter, scallions, and fresh flat-leaf parsley.

Garten’s hash browns were a huge hit when I whipped them up for a brunch with my fiancé and our friends.

The potatoes have a deliciously crispy exterior that gives way to the soft and creamy middle, and the parsley and scallions add so much extra flavor. One friend loved these so much they declared they could’ve eaten the whole pot.

I served the hash browns with Garten’s delicious sweet banana pancakes, but I think they’d also pair well with chicken, turkey, or any other holiday centerpiece.

Get the full recipe for Garten’s hash browns here.

Emily Blunt’s English roasted potatoes were such a hit that the “Barefoot Contessa” website temporarily crashed when Garten shared the recipe in May 2020.

Blunt taught Garten how to make her family’s special recipe for roasted potatoes on a 2018 episode of “Barefoot Contessa.” The simple dish only requires two main ingredients — Yukon Gold potatoes and parsley — and features some helpful cooking tips.

After parboiling the potatoes, Blunt shakes them in the pot to help roughen up the edges.

“If you rough up the edges, once you roast them, it just gives a really nice, sort of crispy, crunch,” Blunt explained to Garten during the episode.

Blunt also lets the potatoes dry for 15 minutes before baking them, which she said creates “such a fantastic crust on the outside.”

I will always love my dad’s recipe for Greek roasted potatoes the most, but these English roasted potatoes are a close second.

Blunt’s two quick tricks really pay off in terms of texture. There’s such a satisfying crunch on the crust of the potatoes, which are deliciously soft and creamy in the middle.

These potatoes go great with just about everything, but you’ll definitely have a lot of happy guests if you make them for the holidays.

Get the full recipe for Emily Blunt’s English roasted potatoes here.

Garten’s potato-fennel gratin is the first dish I ever cooked for my family’s holiday menu. The recipe, which appears in “The Barefoot Contessa Cookbook,” features russet potatoes, fennel, yellow onion, heavy cream, and Gruyère cheese.

“I love to make potato gratin and fennel gratin, so I decided to combine the two,” Garten writes in the recipe’s description. “If you make this in an old French gratin dish, it looks wonderful and can go from the oven to the table with style.”

Garten’s potato-fennel gratin is just so creamy, comforting, and delicious. The potatoes always come out perfectly cooked, the combination of heavy cream and cheese is a dream, and the sautéed fennel cuts through with some lovely sweetness.

The dish couldn’t be easier to assemble, especially if you want to hand off a holiday cooking task to a younger chef in the family (or that cousin whose most-used app is DoorDash).

I make Garten’s potato-fennel gratin every holiday season, and it’s always one of my favorite dishes at Thanksgiving and Christmas.

Get the full recipe for Ina Garten’s potato-fennel gratin here.