Whisk Wednesdays—Gratin Dauphinois (Potato Gratin with Garlic and Cream)

This week's class about browning has us making another of my all-time favorite food: scalloped potatoes. But it's not just any scalloped potatoes. It's Gratin Dauphinois prepared with love using the delicate Le Cordon Bleu method. Layers of flavor are built, and not just by layering the potatoes. Oh no. That would be too easy.

Steep the milk
The first step is to heat the milk and then steep it with a Bouquet Garni, salt and nutmeg. Sounds easy enough.

[And you must not burn the milk, as I did … twice. Burnt milk doesn't smell good. My house has a lingering burnt milk smell that will take days to fade away since yesterday it was rice pudding problems and today it's scalloped potatoes. I'm wondering if the skim milk I used was the reason and if whole milk has a higher smoke point. Ever heard of smoke points in milk? Any tips on getting burnt milk off the bottom of a stainless steel pot and while you're at it off a smooth top range? I guess I'm taking this class on "browning" too literally!]

Par-cook the potatoes
After the [third batch of] milk has steeped, then you add [the second batch of] thinly sliced potatoes [since I didn't notice the milk had burnt during steeping until after adding the potatoes for the first batch]. The potatoes steep and get partially cooked in this milky [unburnt] goodness.

[Actually, after the first two mishaps with the milk, I resorted to the microwave to heat the milk. Then, I let it steep on the counter for 10 minutes. When I put the potatoes in the pot to par-cook, I left them on the lowest setting and added more time. I was intent on not burning another batch of milk.]

Next, you drain the milk. DRAIN. I couldn't believe it. Such waste [that's 9 cups of milk in my case, and I was making a half recipe, thank God!]. It was a shock after saving and using so many parts of vegetables and chickens (namely, feet) in previous classes to make stock. As I'm writing this, I'm thinking that next time I should save that milk [not the burnt milk!] and make another, less wasteful batch of scalloped potatoes with it.

Prepare the gratin dishes
The garlic is even wasted. You must cut a clove of garlic in half and rub the gratin dish with it. What do you do with the rest of the clove of garlic that doesn't get rubbed into the dish? You throw it away. After smearing some butter in the gratin dish too, it was ready for the delicate layering of potato slices and sprinkling of salt and pepper in-between.

Heat the cream and finish with cheese
Instead of the flavorful milk that you just drained, you must scald some fresh, unflavored cream [next time I'll mince the leftover garlic and throw it in with the cream] and pour this over the potato slices. Finally, you top it with sprinkled cheese and it's ready for a hot oven. I used old cheddar, but you could use Gruyère cheese, which is traditional but not appreciated at our house.

Recipe
The ingredients shown in the photo are for a half recipe (serves 3).

Ingredients:
3 cups milk
Salt
Freshly grated nutmeg
1 Bouquet Garni
1¼ pounds baking potatoes
Freshly ground black pepper
1 clove garlic
1/3 cup heavy cream
2 ounces grated cheese
Unsalted butter, for gratin dish
You can find the recipe for Gratin Dauphinois (Potato Gratin with Garlic and Cream) in the book Le Cordon Bleu at Home. To see how the rest of the Whisk Wednesdays group fared with their recipe, click here (or check out the sidebar) and then click on each blogger!

Tasting Notes
They were the best scalloped potatoes we've ever tasted! I may have added too much salt when layering, but we tend to like a lot of salt around here.

Although this class was supposed to be about browning (not the milk but the potatoes and cheese in the oven), I learned a lot about heating milk on the stove: I'm not good at it. I'll stick with the microwave for this or use my old stand-by recipe for scalloped potatoes that doesn't involve all these tricky layers of flavors and still tastes good in the end. It's from Gourmet magazine, December 1997. 

Yukon Gold, White, Red Potatoes
I forgot to mention one last tidbit in this saga. I bought three varieties of potato: white, red, and Yukon gold. After all the trouble, there was no taste difference. I noticed one thing though: the red potatoes started turning brown sooner than the others while waiting for the milk to steep ever so slowly via the microwave/counter method. I solved that by covering them with water, but now I have three times the dishes to do plus all the burnt milk pots.

It was still worth it.

Next Week (November 26)
• Oeufs Mollets Florentine (Soft-boiled Eggs with Spinach and Mornay Sauce) pages 69-70

My Bucket List

Stay in the Dauphiné region of France to ski in the Alps and eat Gratin Dauphinois.

. . . . . . . . . .

Running total: $875.79 + $4.91 = $880.70

[Here's a little dilemma: should I count the failed attempts in the running total? I probably should, but I'm not going to. The number is starting to feel a little high given my ROI. It seemed like a good idea in Class 1, but I'm learning a lot. And that's all that counts, right?!]

Butter used so far: 8 pounds, 12 tablespoons

. . . . . . . . . .

::Whisk Wednesdays::
We're cooking our way through a cooking school curriculum using the Le Cordon Bleu at Home cookbook. The "classes" are based on the Le Cordon Bleu curriculum found online and used as a guideline. Not all the items in the curriculum are in the cookbook, but most are. Where the items are not in the book, we try to find a suitable substitution. Find out more here.

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