You Need Potatoes Au Gratin in Your Life

Potatoes au Gratin is French, easy, and delicious way of making potatoes. It’s made of potatoes on top of potatoes, with cheese and sour cream in between! I don’t care for mashed potatoes, so I make this instead.  I used the recipe from Le Creuset, which was very easy and tasty. I used a mandolin to evenly and quickly slice the potatoes, and layered them in a dish because I’m too poor to have the nice Le Creuset pan. But that’s okay! Maybe someday.

To spice them up, you can alter this recipe to go with different dishes. Try it with cheddar, hot sauce, and extra spices for a Spanish style, or add some basil and a little tomato sauce for Italian! You can even make this the day before and refrigerate it and put it in the oven when you need it, the perfect thing for a busy Thanksgiving.

So, slice up your potatoes, sprinkle your spices, spread some sour cream, top with gruyère, and repeat! The more layers you have the higher the deliciousness is going to be, but be careful because this stuff can take a while to cook. It’s done when it gets a little crispy (or a lot of crisp, I love some extra crunch) and the tomatoes are soft. I have a halogen oven, which could do it in twenty minutes. But with a standard oven you’re looking at about 75 minutes, but believe me it’s worth it. It’s a set-it-and-forget-it dish that is impressive and delicious, oh là-là!

6 Baking Rules of Thumb

The best way to learn is from your mistakes. But with baking, mistakes can be frustrating and wasteful! So here are my six rules of thumb for mistake-free baking, that I learned from my own mishaps.

1. Best recipes have few and simple ingredients.
2. Use exact measurements, except with these situations:
        a. When the recipe says “scant” or          “generous.” Scant means just under and generous means a little over.
        b. If you’re measuring vanilla. As long as you don’t put in 1/2 cup where it asks for 1 tablespoon, you’ll be fine. Who doesn’t love a little extra vanilla?
         c. When using chocolate chips or any other addition like nuts. You would need to use a lot of chocolate chips to ruin a batch of cookies, so go nuts!
3. Butter should always be softened when the recipe tells you it should.
4. Don’t open the oven unless you’re rotating what you’re baking.
5. Let your cookies, cakes, and cupcakes cool! Wait to add frosting so it won’t melt, and don’t close them in a container until they’re cooled off.
6. Prepare your equipment! For whipped cream, chill your bowl and whisk in advance. For egg whites/meringue, your bowl must be completely clean and cool, any debris can keep them from fluffing up.

I hope this helps! Do you have any rules of thumb that I missed here?