Our Sweet Potato Gratin calls for this variety of sweet potato.
There's actually a couple varieties:
the white flesh, and then this one, which is an orange flesh.
Sometimes this is referred to as a yam, and that's just because
in parts of the country that's what it's known as.
But really, it is a variety of sweet potato:
bright orange on the inside, very moist, very sweet.
A gratin is chopped, or even very thinly sliced veggies,
layered in a casserole, topped with a sauce,
and then baked until all the liquid is absorbed,
and you have a nice brown, crunchy crust on top.
This time, again, we're using yams,
and we're gonna start out with adding some finely minced garlic
to the bottom of our baking dish.
This baking dish is perfect.
You want something that's shallow like this so that it cooks quickly,
but absorbs all of the liquid in there,
and you have a lot of even surface for browning on top.
Okay so that's in; and sometimes people just rub the garlic on top,
but we're doing it this way.
Now what we wanna do is layer the sweet potatoes into the dish,
starting on the outside of the dish, like this.
Just layer them in concentric circles all the way around.
When you get to the next layer, just keep going like this.
You wanna salt and pepper this, season it,
halfway in between so that if you layer again on top of that,
we've got seasoning in between each layer.
All right, let's just continue along with that.
I think we ended right here.
And we're gonna keep going around just like this.
Let's season that again a little bit more with some salt and pepper.
All right, now we're adding the sauce.
And in this case, the sauce is a half pint of heavy cream.
So very gently and carefully, I wanna add all of this to our gratin
so that everything has some liquid covering it.
And this is ready to go in the oven.
Now when we're done with this, all of this liquid should be absorbed.
We're putting this in a pre-heated 350 degree oven
for about 45 minutes, until that liquid is absorbed
and we have that nice brown crust on the outside,
on the top, that we're looking for.
After removing this from the oven, I just let it rest for about five minutes,
maybe up to ten at the very most.
It'll all settle down; it's much easier to cut into after it's rested for a little bit.
So this is a nice twist to a classic au gratin potato, if you will.
It's really not that hard to do.
I'm sure you will enjoy it, so give it a try.
