Recipe of the Week: Orlando Murrin’s Potatoes Dauphinoise

It’s easy to get stuck in a culinary rut with your evening meals. While my boyfriend and I are generally pretty good at eating balanced meals of protein-carbohydrates-vegetables, I can’t eat wheat, so nine times out of ten that carb element ends up being potatoes. Let’s face it: there are only so many times you can alternate roast-boil-mash before you start to get a little bit bored.

We’re both pretty busy people, so we’re huge fans of the various supermarkets’ two dine for a tenner offers which, if you hunt around, you can probably find for every day of the week. These are great because they offer something a little different in the way of side dishes, so we usually end up choosing something like Potato Dauphinoise as a change from our customary olive oil roasted new potatoes.

After inspecting the packet of the last lot we bought, I realised it was actually pretty easy to make, so set about finding a recipe to try it out for myself. After trawling through recipes that used so much double cream I could feel my arteries clogging up just thinking about it, or so much Gruyère cheese it would break my bank balance (seriously, that stuff is expensive), I stumbled upon this BBC Good Food recipe by Orlando Murrin, Masterchef veteran and ex-editor of Good Food.

Just a few things I did differently to the recipe – I used semi-skimmed milk as we never have full-fat in the house (I can’t stand the stuff) and I didn’t have any nutmeg, so I left that out too. Also, I blinkin’ love cheese so I used way more Parmigiano-Reggiano than 25g.

I used Rooster potatoes, because they’re fantastic to cook with and they were on offer in Sainsbury’s (result). Now, I don’t have such a thing as an 8cm brownie tin, so I just used a ceramic oven dish that was quite a bit bigger – but it worked out fine. Because I felt that there wasn’t quite enough liquid, I covered the dish with foil for the first 30 minutes of cooking, then uncovered it for the final half hour. As you can see, it turned out looking luscious and tasted so damn good that between two of us we polished off the lot.

Verdict: foolproof and delicious!