How long to cook dauphinoise

Prep Time 20 mins. Cook Time 50 mins. Total Time 1 hr 10 mins. Course Dinner. Cuisine French. Servings 8. Calories kcal. Lightly grease a large, shallow ovenproof dish. Place the cream, milk, garlic into a large saucepan and bring to the boil, then turn down the heat. Peel the potatoes and slice thinly using the slicing attachment on your food processor or a mandolin.

They need to be around 2mm thick. Add the potatoes to the cream and stir to coat. Bring back to the boil, then simmer gently for mins, stirring occasionally to ensure the sauce doesn't catch on the bottom of the pan until the potatoes are tender and just cooked. While the potatoes are cooking, mix together the salt, black pepper, nutmeg and white pepper in a small dish. Scoop half of the potatoes out of the pan and arrange them in the baking dish, being sure to separate any potatoes that have stuck together.

Discard the garlic. Spoon on the remaining potatoes and pour over enough sauce so the potatoes are coated in sauce, but not drowning in it. The sauce should be quite thick, so there won't be much left in the pan anyway.

Sprinkle on the remaining seasoning and the remaining cheese. Place in the oven and bake for minutes, until the cheese is golden. Dietary Vegetarian. By Mike Robinson. Share Share this with. Print recipe. Recipe tips. Recipe Tips Check the potatoes after half an hour, if the cream looks like it's splitting, your oven is too hot, so turn it down a bit. Halloween Recipes.

Related Recipes. Super spring salad By John Torode. Cool quickly and then freeze in the baking dish, wrapped in plastic or foil.

Top with cheese for the last 15 minutes of cooking. It is hard to give a comprehensive list of foods not to freeze, but a few notables would be: - salad greens; - most fruits and vegatables with a high water content; - most fried foods unless you have access to a flash freezer ; - mayonnaise and other sauces which may separate; - many cheeses; - custards or puddings; and - cooked egg whites.

Tomatoes can be prepared by washing and removing the hard part at the stem end, and then open freezing for later use in soups and sauces. Cheese will become grainy and unpleasant to eat but can still be used in cooking, and cooked egg whites become rubbery. Remember, this isn't a dish you're going to make every day, much as you might like to. Roux's simple approach is unusual: most of the other recipes I try either heat the milk and cream before adding them to the dish, as in Eggleton and Parle's dishes, or like Nairn, par-boil the potatoes in the dairy.

He cooks them until "almost tender", and, together with the floury variety he uses, this makes the finished dish slightly mushy — but the firm potatoes I'm using could do with a bit of pre-cooking, so I'm going to boil them more briefly. Cooking the potatoes in the sauce also has the benefit of thickening it, as their starch leaches out into the liquid. Starch is another vexed question when it comes to dauphinois — Nairn, Roux Jr and Blanc are firmly of the opinion that the slices should not be rinsed before use, so they retain as much of the starch content as possible, while Eggleton soaks his in water before use, and David writes that rinsing them in water thoroughly is "most important".

I'm all for a thicker sauce, however, particularly as my waxy potatoes are naturally lower in starch than flourier varieties and will need all the help they can get.

Eggleton bakes his dish , then presses it in the fridge overnight before reheating. This is a clever way of achieving the solid little slabs of dauphinois favoured by fancy restaurants, but unnecessary if you're just going to plonk the gratin dish on the table for everyone to fight over.

This is another one of those French dishes where it's easy to get one's culottes in a twist over issues of authenticity — Slater writes that "restraint with the garlic will be rewarded. The dish needs just a faint whiff of the bulb, and wiping the base and sides before adding the potatoes produces something more authentic than adding it crushed or sliced.

Adding it, crushed, to the dairy, as Nairn does, seems a much better option for my crude Anglo-Saxon palate. Nutmeg, as used by Eggleton, Roux Jr and Olney, is a classic seasoning for creamy dishes, and thus works brilliantly here.

Anthony Bourdain infuses the cream with herbs in his Les Halles cookbook, and indeed, Parle uses thyme in his gratin — I'm not keen on adding too many flavours to such a simple dish, but I do love the idea of the anchovies he also uses, which melt into the sauce to give the finished dauphinois a gorgeous savoury richness.