Mashed potatoes are the champion of side dishes. They pair with every type of meal, from barbecued chicken to beef tenderloin, grilled fish to skewered vegetables. In short, there’s a time and a place for mashed potatoes—and that is all the time.

But if you’re looking for the creamiest mashed potatoes ever, there’s one thing you can add to the bowl of cooked potatoes to guarantee your spuds are swoon-worthy: cream cheese.

Most mashed potatoes recipes will keep things streamlined with butter, milk or cream, salt, and pepper‚ and those recipes absolutely are great. They’ll make for a rich and buttery scoop of potatoes. But if you want the creamiest mashed potatoes ever, cream cheese really is the secret. We think it’s such a key part of the recipe, even our Homemade Mashed Potatoes use cream cheese (but of course we also have Cream Cheese Mashed Potatoes recipe, too).

Before you add a block of cream cheese to the potatoes, however, there are a few things to know. And the great thing is, our Test Kitchen has made so many pans of mashed potatoes that we have lots of tips to pass along.

How To Add Cream Cheese to Mashed Potatoes

With baking, room temperature ingredients are key to creating smooth and well-blended batters and doughs. With mashed potatoes, it’s the same. Softened butter and cream cheese blend with boiled potatoes more easily. If you throw in cold dairy, you could end up with chunks of unmelted butter and cream cheese, and you’ll have to work extra hard to mash the potatoes (more on why that’s bad later).

So when you put the potatoes in the water to boil, bring out the cream cheese and butter, too. Let them warm up and soften.

Then, once you drain the cooked potatoes, push all the potatoes to one side of the pan, and add the butter and cream cheese to the other. Let the residual heat of the pan melt and further soften the cream cheese and butter. (The heat will also help dry out the potatoes so they don’t have too much water.)

Now it’s time to mash, and how you do that will impact the texture of the potatoes, too.

Tips for the Creamiest Mashed Potatoes

Cream cheese will make your mashed potatoes extra creamy, but a few other important steps will ensure your side dish is silky, too. So keep these tips in mind as you’re cooking and planning:

• Start with the right potatoes: You want starchy potatoes for mashed potatoes. That means russet potatoes or Yukon gold potatoes. Save the small waxy potatoes, like red potatoes, for smashed potatoes.
• Don’t overbeat: Overworking the potatoes can result in a gluey, goopy mess. Keep your eye on the potatoes, and as soon as they’re mixed completely, stop the mixer or put down the masher. There can be too much of a good thing.
• Top with pats of butter: For a final bit richness and creaminess, put a pat of butter on top of the mashed potatoes. It’ll slowly melt, and each scoop will have a bit extra butter.