We are having oven baked lamb chops tonight for my husband’s birthday and I decided to make this dish to go along with the chops. The recipe is a French classic called French Potatoes Gratin Dauphinois.
Gratin Potatoes is a simple recipe but getting the flavors and textures, as well as the rich sauce just right is trickier than it might seem at first though. One of the tricks to get the sauce right is to use 3:1 cream to milk. This is a rich dish and not one that you will be making when you are counting calories, so don’t skim on the cream.
The next trick to a perfect sauce is the nutmeg. I use freshly ground nutmeg which adds a delightful flavor to the potatoes.
To make this dish, I lightly cooked the potatoes in the cream mixture and finished them in the oven with the cheese just for the last 15 minutes.
Put the cream and milk into a large pan along with the garlic and a good grating of the nutmeg, and bring the mixture to a boil over a medium-low heat. Season the potatoes with salt and pepper, and add them to the cream mixture, then turn down the heat and simmer gently for about 10 minutes until they are softened, but not cooked through.
Place the potatoes and sauce mixture in layers, with 2/3 of the cheese (be sure to reserve some of the cheese for the top of the potatoes. Cover and bake in the preheated oven for 30 minutes. Remove the covering and add the remainder of the grated cheese and cook another 10-15 minutes uncovered until the sauce is lightly browned and bubbling.
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