Sweet potato and potato dauphinois – just 20 mins prep

This Sweet Potato and Potato Dauphinois takes the classic dauphinois and moves it onto a whole new level with the addition of sweet potato, anchovies and fresh sage. This is a perfect meal for cold winters days.
JUMP TO RECIPE

What could be better than a classic potato dauphinois – not much – dauphinois is creamy and comforting, makes a smart smart side dish and, even better, it’s easy peasy. Layer 1kg sliced potato and garlic in a buttered dish, pour over 600ml hot cream, bake at 180C for 1 1/2hrs.
When a whole recipe fits into 108 characters you know you are onto a winner.

This recipe for Sweet Potato and Potato Dauphinois takes that classic one and moves it up a level onto a whole new plain of deliciousness. It does this in three ways –
1. By replacing half the potato with sweet potato.
2. Including chopped anchovies
3. Adding fresh sage

Sweet potato brings a sweetness and slight tang to the creamy dauphinois. I love the colour it brings too. But that sweetness is the winning part of this addition.

‘Chopped anchovies, ugh’ I hear some of you cry. I promise you won’t taste the anchovies, cross my heart. What you get instead is a wonderful background kick of deliciousness that just improves the flavour of the dauphinois without any fishy taste.

Sage. Sage and sweet potato are a match made in heaven but it adds it’s salty earthiness to the rest of the dauphinois too.

I can’t take the credit for these additions. In his sweet potato dauphinois, Ottolenghi adds a lot of sage. While Nigel Slater in his classic dauphinois suggests adding anchovies. All I have done here is to bring you both of these in one dish.

I mentioned previously how easy this Sweet Potato and Potato Dauphinois is. A few pointers on that:
– You could use a peeler, knife, mandolin or food processor to chop the potatoes. Being lazy I use my food processor. It comes with a piece that you can use to push the potatoes down onto the cutting blade. In the past I have always used this and ended up with potato slices about 3-4mm thick. But I recently discovered that if I just let the potatoes work through on their own, I end up with much thinner slices which are great for this potato and sweet potato dauphinois.
– Don’t worry that the cream doesn’t touch the top of the potatoes; it will bubble up in the oven sufficient to cook the top layer.
– You can cook this ahead of time, cover in foil and reheat in the oven at 200C/180C/400F/Gas mark 6 for 30 minutes.

Quick dauphinois method

This Sweet Potato and Potato Dauphinois may only take fifteen minutes prep but it still takes 1 ½hrs cooking time. You can speed up the cooking by replacing 300ml of the cream with full fat milk, putting all the ingredients including salt and pepper, but not the butter, in a large (ideally non-stick) saucepan and simmering for 10 minutes or until the slices of potato are cooked. Remember to stir occasionally. Then pour into a greased oven dish and put in a preheated oven, 200C/180C/400F/Gas mark 6, for 30 minutes. So a little more prep but you save about an hour of cooking time.

Sweet potato and potato dauphinois – just 20 mins prep

• Author: Holly
• Prep Time: 20 minutes
• Cook Time: 90 minutes
• Total Time: 1 hour 50 minutes
• Yield: 4

Ingredients

• Butter for greasing the dish
• 500g potato (two large ones), peeled and thinly sliced
• 500g sweet potato (two large ones), peeled and thinly sliced
• 8 large sage leaves, finely chopped
• 4 cloves of garlic, crushed
• 6 anchovies fillets, chopped
• Salt and pepper
• 600ml double or heavy cream

Oven dish roughly 24cm/6½” x 31cm/12¼”

Instructions

1. Preheat the oven to 180C/160C fan/356F/Gas mark 4.
2. Butter an oven dish.
3. Place a layer of potatoes in the dish – I like to do one layer of potatoes and one layer of sweet potato but they can be mixed.
4. Add some garlic, sage anchovies, a little salt and pepper and then do another layer of potato or sweet potato. Repeat until all the potatoes are finished.
5. Put into the oven for 1½ hrs.