How To Make Dauphinoise Potatoes

You know those potatoes, with the lovely Gruyere cheese and the cream? Dauphinoise potatoes! What I've done in advance is I've just peeled a potato, because I worked in France, and I've still got some of it inside me, so you know, we like to make shapes out of food, but you don't have to do this. But, I'm just going to show how because I think it's quite a cute little tip. The other thing is, if they're all roughly the same height, then they'll cook at roughly the same time, so there's a nice little tip for you as well.

Now, what I'm going to do now is just slice this into equal quarters so that we've got nice even disks of potato. So what I'm going to do now is layer this dish. I'm going to do four potatoes.

The reason I'm doing it this way is because I think when you have it on the dish, if you just have the potato as a little tower, I think it looks more impressive than if you just sort of plunk it on in, perhaps, the way your mom would have done. But, if you see your mom, don't tell her I said that. So what we're going to do is we're going to layer each potato with a little bit of salt and pepper - chefs call that just seasoning, a little bit of Gruyere cheese, like that.

You're supposed to, for this recipe, see some police from the Dauphinoise region will probably now come around and arrest me because I'm contravening their method of making potato. I think you should maybe do two parts cream to one part milk, but the traditional recipe, which is the way I've got them here, is half and half. But what I'm going to do is just add that cream and milk just to bring it up to that one layer, and then just keep adding.

So, I'm just going to go all the way up to four layers. Now, of course, you don't need to watch me do all four layers, so maybe come back in a minute when I've done all four towers, and watch me put the potatoes in the oven. I bet you can barely wait.

Right, well as you can see, there are actually five now because what happened was, once you've layered all the cheese and the seasoning on, I only really wanted to do three because you want to cover the ingredients with the milk and cream. And, it sort of almost covered, so what I've just done is just ensured that those potatoes are nicely covered. Now, I could add cheese on the top layer, but all that will happen is that cheese will crisp up and then caramelize or burn, so we're going to leave that until the last 10 minutes of cooking.

Another little tip is because the potatoes are just coming up to the edge, if you put it another tin, it's not going to spill all over your oven, which you'll then have to clean or get someone else to do. Right, so that goes straight into the oven and we're going to cook those off for about an hour. And then for the final 10-12 minutes of cooking, we're going to sprinkle some cheese out, and then we'll plate up.

Those look fantastic! What's actually happened is that the cream sort of almost souffléd up over with the potatoes and cooked them through beautifully. My little trick of keeping the dish underneath works perfectly. Ladies and gents, that is how you make a Dauphinoise potato. .