Crafting the ultimate potato gratin : the one recipe to rule them all

Welcome back to the channel, this is Stéphane on the French Cooking Academy and today I'm going to try to solve an old dilemma with the gratin dauphinois, the potato gratin. Why? Because I think we still have across the board a problem with inconsistency and I've posted recipes before the gratin, I've posted some on the channel, some of an online course and yet there's something lagging in the back of my mind that still tells me that you every time you make a recipe, one recipe is never the same as the other and the results are widely inconsistent and sometimes people think yeah it's good, the potato could be different, yeah it's creamy, it's not creamy enough, so that's still great recipes but they're not giving you that kind of perfect result every single time and that is the thing I've been honing on, I've been obsessing on this for the past weeks and weeks and I've been diving in my books and my research and what I've realized is that in hundreds of recipes out there, nobody is making gratin the same way, so I thought being a home cooking channel that I had to find the ultimate recipe that is going to be working every time and it's going to bring you that perfect gratin with the right amount of consistency, the creaminess and something that does not take hours and hours and hours to prepare and cook. All right, so if you want to discover the fruit of my research, continue watching the video as I'm trying to build the one recipe to rule them all. Now why is potato gratin so inconsistent? This is the big question I've been asking myself because at its core, this is all the ingredients that are used across the board by any chef. Okay, you've got potatoes, you've got dairy product in the shape and form of heavy whipping cream, milk, creme fraiche and then you get a simple seasoning of salt, pepper, garlic and a little bit of nutmeg. There's also an addition of butter to coat your dish but I didn't put it on here. And what really fascinates me in this is that depending on, for instance, the type of potatoes you're going to be using, the way you're going to cook them, choosing which cream, the milk or combination of both and the way you're going to season the dish can yield dozens and dozens and dozens of different results. All right, so to be able to create that kind of ultimate recipe, the way I've approached this, I really looked at the ingredients one by one. So let me start talking about those potatoes because that's the most important. Now the first thing we need to look at, of course, is the core of the dish which is the potatoes. Now, technically speaking, the advice is you should use always a starchy potato because it allows for the cream to be absorbed in the potatoes. Now these are usually white flesh and I've tried that but to me, honestly, all of these tries I've done with the starchy white flesh potatoes has just not reached that kind of level of quality that I tend to expect in a beautiful gratin. The first problem I had is that using the white flesh starchy potatoes is that they cook very well, they can absorb the liquid, but as soon as they start to be overcooked, either in the cream or milk or anything like that, they fall apart. They transform into kind of a mashy puree stuff and when you cut your gratin, you just don't see these layers of potatoes that you expect to see at the end. And this is why I've decided to change the norm and to go for this. A yellow flesh potato that is a waxy type of potato. These are dutch cream potatoes. The reason I'm using this is because, first off, they got the good looks. They look yellow, they look beautiful. When they are done, they look very appetizing. The second reason is that these ones are great to be cooked in sauce. You can slice them, you can cook them in milk or cream, they're going to hold their shape and when you cook the gratin at the end, you're going to have these clearly visible slices of potatoes that you can bite into and have the real nutty potato effect. So that's my first choice for this recipe. Dutch cream, I'm using waxy yellow flesh potatoes. Now the next question I had to to deal with is what kind of dairy products are we going to be using to cook the potatoes? A lot of recipes said no, it's only cream. Some others said no, you just use milk, it's fine. Some is like a combination of both. Now I've tried everything and for me, the best of all has been to combine all of these three together in a very specific amount that I will give you afterwards. And I'm going to be mixing heavy whipping cream, which is liquid cream, with creme fraiche and with milk. That's what we're going to be using. So that we've chosen the potato, we need to answer the question, okay, how do we cut the potatoes? Now this is an interesting one because this is one of the reasons so many gratins out there are so widely inconsistent. And that resides in the cutting. If you don't cut the potatoes precisely the exact same way, like the exact same thickness, your gratin, first off, is not going to cook the same way all across the dish. You're going to have some potatoes that are going to be totally overcooked and some of the potatoes are going to be slightly undercooked. Also for the visual aspect, when you're going to try to cut your gratin, instead of having that nice kind of brickwork layered potatoes, you're going to have some kind of big chunks on top of a small chunk and some pureed potatoes around it. And it's not going to look good and it's going to fall apart. And I want to make something really consistent here. And the result for me was the best of the best. You have to ditch your knife and use a food processor or a mandolin. I'm going to be using that blade here and the thickness that I'm using is four to five millimeter in size. I put the equivalent on inches on the screen. This is just the sweet spot when it comes to making a gratin. And here we are. So I've started slicing my potatoes and just to give you an idea, this is the type of thickness that I have. I've got no offcuts with the food processor, which is beautiful. This is something I wanted to have as well. If you cut by hand, there's always offcuts. I'm using all the potatoes and look at that, it's totally even. But now I was faced with an immense dilemma and this is starch. In the culinary world, in the modern culinary world, the big word out there, the golden rule is when you make a gratin, you should not wash your potatoes. You should put them in your milk or whatever and cook them as is because the starch is going to be used as a binding agent in the gratin. I've tried that many times and what I found is that the taste of starch was just way too prominent and I asked myself, that doesn't sound right. There's something is wrong there. And I've been to my old books like the Escoffier style of 1900, even back into the 80s, some great chef on television in some old French programs and what I found is that actually back then chefs were always washing the potatoes before making a gratin to remove the excess of starch and this is what I am gonna do in that recipe. Now one of the other challenges that I was faced with is the cooking of the potatoes. Now a comment I got from a lot of people, a lot of friends, they tell me when I make a gratin, the potatoes are just not exactly right. There's always that little bit of undercook or overcook and what I wanted to do here is to find a solution that's going to bring you the perfectly cooked potato every single time with an oven cooking time of one hour max. Okay and to achieve this, the only way to do this and to have that consistency is to first pre-cook the potatoes in a pan, in the cream, three quarters of the way and finish them off in the oven and this is exactly what we're gonna do. So let me show you how we're gonna proceed. So to pre-cook our potatoes we're gonna go as follows. I'm gonna be using 200 ml of full cream milk or whole milk, 600 milliliters of heavy whipping cream and to finish I'm gonna be using 200 ml of crème fraîche. If you don't have crème fraîche you can just use 800 milliliters of cream. So in total we've got one liter about four cups of liquid. For the seasoning I'm gonna put a tablespoon of rock salt, one or two pinch of black pepper. I'm using coarse pepper but you can use fine one and I'm gonna finish by adding some bruised garlic cloves. There's two garlic cloves in there. Now just before you add the potatoes what you can do is add a grating of nutmeg. Once all the seasoning is in we can now add the potatoes. Now the potatoes have been taken out of the water and I've dried them using a tea towel. Once all the potatoes are in you're gonna get a spoon and make sure it's all covered by the liquid and you don't want them to stick out too much and we're gonna bring that mix to the boil. Now usually when I refer to bring it to the boil I always mean just when these little bubbling things appear here when it's just the beginning. So when that happens we're gonna put the heat down back to low and we're gonna leave this to cook or pre-cook for 15 to 20 minutes give or take depending on your stove and I'll show you exactly the consistency of the potatoes we're looking after. It's been 15 minutes for me and my potatoes are ready so the trick to know when are your potatoes perfectly done or pre-cooked you take one of the slice and with one of your finger if you're able to pierce through like that very easily without forcing much it is ready that's all you need and we don't go any further than that okay so now we're gonna move on I'm gonna take this to my bench we're gonna prepare the gratin dish and I'm going to show you how we're going to do the layering of the potatoes and now for the layering of the potatoes so first off one of the things I've also noticed by testing a lot of gratin is that the gratin dish does matter a lot you want to favor something really long and large and not too deep I think about five centimeters which is about just a few inches I put that on the screen is the sweet spot when it comes to the gratin at the bottom of your dish has to be coated with butter and I've also sprinkled the equivalent of two garlic cloves at the bottom we're also going to need some seasoning to start with so a little bit of pepper a little bit of salt not too much because the potatoes are already salted so it's just a hint okay and most important always that nutmeg so grating again ever so slightly at the bottom before we put the first layer of potato now as soon as you've done that we're going to start laying the potatoes so I'm using a slotted spoon something like this and I'm not going to grab any of the juice I'm just going to get the potatoes and you know what the good thing is you don't need to care about how the potatoes are looking all what you want is to make sure that the first layer really thinly kind of covers all of the bottom of your dish like this that is the most important all right you don't want any gaps any hole something like that if the potatoes are broken or anything like that you know what it does not matter just make sure it's got a nice layer like that and once you've got that again you're going to do the same hint of salt hint of pepper and that grating of nutmeg and then again you can add another layer now as you will see I am not doing that thing of trying to get many many layers with salt and pepper you know just two or three layers maximum is usually enough as you can see I'm just going to reserve a little bit of the potatoes for the end so I'm doing another layer a bit of seasoning and I'm going to repeat the process until I'm done that's it all right so from here you got two options you can take the liquid here and pour some of it so it just barely cover the potatoes but that's usually just a little bit too much and what I tend to do and that new technique that I found is to put this back on the stove and I'm going to boil the heck out of this for just a few minutes to kill off the starch taste and reduce my cream so I've just have enough to pour over my potatoes and that's going to bring an extra thick cream so it's going to reduce again that time it takes to reduce that cream to that perfect creamy consistency my cream is now ready it's nice and warm and what needs to happen now is to basically pour this over my potatoes my creamy potato gratin is now ready to go in the oven I'm using a fan forced oven remember 160 degrees 45 minutes to an hour and that will depend on how strong your oven is because all oven domestic oven they can be different okay I'm going to put this in the oven and show you the result when it's done my gratin has rested as you can see the corner here sharp off a little bit with a spoon and that's the spoon test if you can cut through a spoon for the potatoes they are perfectly cooked and that was a success and now I'm going to try to show these layers I talked about you get a food stacker I'm going to try to plant it somewhere on here even though it hasn't rested long enough and I'm just going to try to pierce through take it out and show that on the plate now I did a bit of a messy job try to catch this out of the dish but that's the food stacker so you can cut a piece and we're going to try to open that look at that now sorry for the extreme zoom but I really wanted to show you this because this is the fruit of all my tests and research with that recipe right and what I call the brickwork is this all of these layers of potatoes with the thin layer of cream which is like the typical restaurant quality type of look you want and you expect when you eat and you order a gratin and with that recipe even though I've placed the potato in a bit of an untidy manner just to put them just like this in addition two or three times look at that that is a very very good result and if you cut it it is oh look at this it is super creamy all right let's finish with the trying I made a bit of a mess you see that if you don't wait long enough so that the cream sets that's what you're going to happen you know it's going to be still very fragile the tower but let's try this out wow oh that's it it works perfectly cooked potatoes the right texture it's got a bite to it it is well seasoned and most important I think that's really the cream you see look at that the cream really stays in the mix it's not become oil or anything like that you get a nice spoon of cream wow this is so addictive I'm gonna take a piece from the dish you see with a spoon I can basically cut the potato and that's the sign I'm gonna get all the cream your query there I can't stop eating that thing okay but let's wrap this up wow what a journey and I hope you've enjoyed that little ride into the process and the analysis on how to make that perfect gratin but trust me if you use that technique that is gonna yield that perfect brickwork and that combination of perfectly cooked potatoes and creaminess and you're going to be able to bring that on your table whenever you want as well as if you have any question about the recipe drop me a comment in the comment section if you made the dish please share your picture on instagram hashtag french cook academy and as for me I will see you all next week for another french cooking video on the french cooking academy take care all bye