"GRATIN DAUPHINOIS
A few tips to ensure your potatoes are cooked to perfection. First, don’t use cheese for this recipe, or you will end up with something ridiculously cheesy and oily — even freshly grated parmesan is unnecessary. Second, you must heat the cream or you will have trouble cooking the potatoes. Third, if you have the oven too high, the cream will curdle — not a disaster, but the result won’t look so good.
Serves 6
150ml milk
550ml crème fraîche
1-3 cloves of garlic (according to taste), finely chopped
Sea salt and freshly ground pepper
Freshly grated nutmeg
1.2kg potatoes (preferably waxy rather than floury)
30g butter, and extra for greasing
Put a large baking tray in the oven and set it to 150C/ 300F/Gas Mark 2. Butter a large gratin dish thoroughly. Put the milk and crème fraîche into a saucepan. Add garlic and season generously with salt, pepper and nutmeg. Put on a low heat while you prepare the potatoes. Peel and slice the potatoes (about 3mm thick), then spread them out in the gratin dish, pressing down lightly.
Bring the crème fraîche mixture to boiling point and pour it all over the potatoes. There should not be so much that the top layer is submerged, and it shouldn’t reach the top of the dish, otherwise you could end up with a real mess.
Dot the top with little pieces of butter. Cook in the oven for 1 hour until the surface is golden and bubbling, and the potatoes are cooked through (use the point of a knife to check those at the centre).
"