COOKING POTATOES LIKE A CHEF

Now, when it comes to side dishes, potatoes are the go-to vegetables, but knowing how to cook potatoes is actually harder than it looks because, you know, potatoes, they look simple, right? Yeah, I'm just going to peel them, cook them. But when you do, you start with that picture in your mind. I'm going to have a beautiful gratin with the cheese or the sautéed potatoes. And you can see the potatoes rolling in the pan when you make them. Why did it turn into a crumble or a mash? Why is my mash turned into a glue? Why are my roasted potatoes shrunk and hard as rock? That kind of thing. And, you know, the answer to all this is because potatoes are actually much more complicated than they look. OK, and we've just completed a new course that is entitled Cooking Potatoes Like a Chef. This course is all about giving you all the information, the skill, the cooking techniques that you need to know in order to successfully cook potatoes beautifully and consistently every single time. OK, you're going to be learning the variety, the type of potatoes, which one to pick for what dish. And then 20 recipes starting from the potato salad, the classic French dishes, the classic techniques. Also some one pot plus signature chef recipe. It is a unique course fully dedicated to potatoes. It's been live already with our student group and it's been super well received. Absolutely don't want to miss out. Link in the video description. Let me tell you one thing, you know, away from the course and bragging around. Potatoes, there's no middle ground. There's really two options. It's or you know how to cook potatoes or you don't. And that creates two life scenarios. The first one is that any time you're going to be mentioning the word, I'm making a potato dish, people are going to be running to the table. Oh, when can you make that dish again? You know, it's all happy and stuff. The other camp is the opposite. Anytime you mention the word potatoes, people are going to be running away from your table and you've been there, right? That picnic, garden party, you know, gathering with friends when everybody brings a dish and you go that distance, a relative or friend, a neighbor on the phone going, hey, I'm going to make my potato salad again. You're like, oh, my God, you want to bring this potato thing again. Can you bring something else? You know, we've all been there. I've been there. We've all been there. And it's not the person's fault. OK, most of the time we don't have the right information because we don't know which potatoes to pick, which one works with what dish. And that is the problem. And this is what this course is all about, to give you all this information. But let me not brag about this because the proof is in the pudding. I'm going to take you through one of the recipes from the course, which is in our one pot section and the comfort crowd pleases, which is a recipe from my childhood. And it's a version of the pomme boulangère called the pomme de terre au lard, where a chunk of potatoes are sauté, mixed with caramelized onion, chunky bacon and braised with either stock or white wine, one pot style in the oven. What I want you to do to watch the video, make the recipe. Don't say anything at home. You know, it's just I'm going to make a side dish, put it on the table and wait for the magic to happen. Let me know in the comment section what kind of praise or comment you are getting. And that is truly going to help you make a decision. So remember, the course is available now. It's called Cooking Potatoes Like a Chef. We're launching an early bird promotion. Amazing value, 20 recipe technique, chef recipes. And it is a unique course. Do not miss out and check it out. But for the time being, let's start by making a beautiful potato side dish. Let's go. So to make my home version of the pomme boulangère, it's going to be extremely simple. You'll find everything on the recipe card. I'm going to use here all round potatoes. I would not recommend using floury potatoes. Definitely the all round is good because it will absorb some liquid while still keeping their shape. We're going to use some onions. So quarter potatoes, sliced onion, a slab of bacon. I'm going to cut them in slices and thick lardons. And I'm going to be using lard here for the fat because we've got lots of pork in here and lard, you know, is going to work nicely and bring some nice flavor. Just a one pot. I'm going to use a saute pan. Make sure you get something that can go on the stove and the oven. And you're going to need a lid on top. And of course, we're going to need some stock. Now, I did mention just before that we can use wine. And yes, it's an old practice that you can use if you want. You can mix your stock with wine, so half stock, half wine. Or if you want, simply use all wine to have a very distinctive taste. Now, I'm not going to go for the mise en place. And I'll show you the results. And for the mise en place, a very simple, we're going to peel and wash the potatoes. You cut them in quarters like this. It's medium sized kind of chunks, not too big, not too small. Keep them in water. The onions sliced not too thinly because that's going to have to cook for 40 minutes and the bacon, nice chunky kind of lardon. And this is what I like to have because they're visible. They're going to be noticeable. They're going to diffuse the flavor during the entire cooking process. The stock, you can buy a store bought stock like here or make your own for chicken stock. But if you want, you can also use white wine instead. A nice dry white wine is going to go perfectly with these potatoes. And that's about it. The rest is just a lard, salt and pepper. So let's go on the stove and see how we make this. Now, for the process, simple. I'm using my Panheim saute pan, medium to high heat. And I'm going to melt about a tablespoon worth of lard. As soon as the lard, remember the lard, by the way, is pork fat. As soon as it's melted, we're going to start with the onion. And just spend a good five minutes to pre-cook them. That's a nice and translucent. So mix them through the lard. And we add a bit of salt and pepper. A bit of salt, a bit of pepper. Reduce my heat a bit. So it's a medium heat. OK. Mixing regularly, five minutes. After five minutes, as you can see, I've got a little coloring that starts in here and that's enough. I'm going to take this off and put them back in the bowl that I had. And we're going to follow up with the bacon. Now, for the bacon, we don't want to have some color in there. So I'm raising my heat to high. I'm going to put anything in here up. Wait for the fat to render a little bit and get some coloring in here. And I'm not doing this with the onions because then the onions are going to start to brown, the bacon is not going to sear properly on some parts. So I like to do the things individually and then we combine everything before we put this into the oven. I mean, just in a few minutes, look at this. I mean, you've got to love bacon, these nice chunky bits like this. And remember, there's a lot of bacon because these are really the bacon potatoes. OK, so that's going to be enough. I'm going to take everything off. I'm going to reduce my heat to low, dry my potatoes. I'm going to take them out of the water, dry them very well, and then we're going to put them in. Now, of course, before doing this, what I'm going to do, I'm going to scoop out my bacon here, OK, into the bowl with the onions. And I'm leaving the fat behind. I get all these flavors in here that I don't want to lose. All right, ready. So I've got my potatoes straight in there. OK, if there's not enough fat, you can add some more because you don't want anything to stick. And I'm just going to start to have this potato to kind of color slightly in my pan in here. So I can raise my heat to medium and let's go. Same thing here, salt and pepper, because potato can be, don't put too much salt because there's the bacon, but always a bit of seasoning. So in a few minutes, as you can see, all the caramelization starts to detach and it sticks to the potatoes. The potatoes start to color nicely. We've got some nice coloring. And this is the beauty of copper pans. They re-transferred it very, very well. And I don't even need a huge burner. Look at the size of my burner. It's tiny. And yet it's cooking a kilo of potatoes, searing everything with no problem. And next year, what we're going to do is the deglazing. So for the deglazing, think of it exactly the same as when you're making a pan sauce. And the reason I was telling you that you can use wine, because the technique here is the same. We've seared some onion. We've got a caramelized juices from the pork belly that sticks to the pan. So we've got plenty of meat juices in here. And you could use wine in here to detach everything. Now, here I'm going to use stock, but you could use a bit of wine to start with. OK, so I'm going to have my stock and like a deglazing. OK, a little bit. Hear that noise? Oh, it starts to detach and slowly I'm going to shake everything and, you know, lower my heat slightly and make sure I'm detaching all the juices and mix everything together before I'm adding the onion and the bacon. So my stock is now boiling and all what I'm going to do here, I'm going to take all my mixture of bacon and onion and everything, put this back in and then slowly, I can reduce my heat a bit, toss everything very carefully and mingle all these lovely onions and bacon with the juices and the potatoes. Sorry, I was a bit messy before, some onions on the side of the pan, but I'm going to put some bay leaves, so two small bay leaves in there. And I had about 250 ml, maximum 300 ml of stock. And what we're going to do here is the easy method, is turn the heat off. I'm going to preheat my oven now at 180 degrees Celsius. We can do this before ideally. I'm going to put a lid on and just put this into the oven. And we're going to leave this to cook for what? About 35, 40 minutes until the potatoes are cooked. And this is the easy way. And that's what my mom used to make, a little bit like five or ten minutes on the stove, then in the oven. And then, yes, it's ready. So pretty much that's about it. I'm going to put a lid, put this in the oven and then boom, we're ready to eat. So it's been 40 minutes, took me 40 minutes. Always make sure you use it when you handle it, because sometimes you forget it's hot. And so to hold that thing here. And when it's cooked, basically there's two styles that people like. So here you have a little, it's a little bit wet at the bottom. You can see it's still wet. There's not much liquid, it's been absorbed. And I like to have a little bit, but the top like this, which is just being kind of almost steam, it almost reminds me of kind of a stew. So what I like to do personally is to spend five minutes under the grill just to kind of crisp up a little bit the potatoes, just for the presentation, just before I put it on the table. But away from that, really, it's cooked. So what you can do, just in case, of course, is to check and you take a knife or anything like this. Every time you take the potato, but you see that goes through. No problem at all. It starts to break. It's not a problem. I've tasted this. It's perfectly seasoned. So salt, pepper, plenty of taste of bacon and onion. It is exactly just what we want. So I'm going to do that last five minutes and then we'll have a little taste. Yes, the potatoes are ready. Les pommes de terre au lard. You can call them the pommes de terre boulanger, if you want. The pommes boulanger, the boulanger potatoes, whatever you like. I know them already. Let's say I've had these a few times, but that's what it looks like. So it's a really simple dish. So it's a family thing. But the juice is what I want to use. You see, it's kind of just glossy and caramelized. So it's braised, almost like this braised potato with these large chunks of bacon. And for me, really, that's what I like. It's absolutely, you know, I want to have this piece of bacon on here because it's beautiful. The potatoes, look at that. So see, they're cooked and the orange potatoes. Mm-hmm. Now this is infused. You know what? This is one of my childhood favorites. The taste of the bacon is totally through the potatoes, with the stock. It's all simplicity, simple flavors. And look at this. Honestly, large chunks of bacon, of delicious potatoes. But let's not forget that you've got the onions and you can see that they're totally disintegrated. But they add another layer of complexity. I could eat this by the bucket. So there we have it. This is my childhood version of the pommes de terre boulanger. It's called actually the pommes de terre au lard, the bacon potatoes. Now, what is the difference with the real thing? Well, the real thing, in the classic way, sometimes there's no bacon, first off, and you would just like pan-fry the onions and you layer layers of potatoes with onions just in a baking dish where you don't really see the potatoes like I've done. And you just cover with the stock. What I kind of don't really like with the old, the classic version is that you get something that's a little bit, can be a little bit soupy, a little bit stewish. So here, I like the fact that we pan-fry the bacon, we release the flavor with the onions, with the bacon, saute the potato. You can use some lard, you can use some duck fat. So you're really bringing some good flavors in there. And then you put this into the oven. And at the end, honestly, it is something that I'm sure I dare to say is almost better than the classic way. You know, there's just more taste to it. And if you add wine, well, you're going to be onto something extremely good. But that's it for this video. I hope you enjoy it. And if you make it, please let me know what you thought in the comments.