Wednesday, 29 April 2009
American Cooking in France: Potatoes au gratin
As promised in my Sunday roast article, here is the recipe I use for potatoes au gratin.
This came about from a sudden need to use up a lot of spuds that I had bought for baked potatoes, but that had begun to sprout in the cupboard. We used to bake our au gratin potatoes with a pre-mixed canned version that we were perfectly happy with, but this was a good way to use up a lot of potatoes quickly, and was pretty easy to make. After discovering how easy it was to just make these from scratch, and at lower cost than buying the canned ones no less, from now on I think I'll always be making my au gratin potatoes myself.
Ingredients
- 4-6 potatoes, peeled and sliced
- 2 1/2 cups grated emmental
- 3 tbsp. crème fraîche (similar to sour cream)
- 50 ml butter
- 2 cups milk
- Salt and pepper to taste
Preparation
Melt the butter in a sauce pan and stir in milk and crème fraîche. (I'm thinking that putting some chives or parsley in at this point would be good too, but I haven't tried that yet.) In a baking pan, mix potatoes and about a cup's worth of the cheese, and season with salt and pepper. Pour in milk and butter mix, and top with remaining cheese. Bake at 200° C for 1 1/2 hours.
Although you can serve these out of the oven, the longer the dish can sit together the better it will taste, since the potatoes have more time to suck up the flavour of the sauce, making this an example of a dish that tastes better as leftovers. (The ultimate example of this phenomenon, of course, is Shepherd's Pie.)
