Authentic gratin dauphinois, vegan

A vegan version of the authentic gratin dauphinois, a traditional French oven-baked potato dish. As simple as it is delicious, the perfect comfort food for a cold Winter season.

Serves: your neighborhood (seriously, the suggested quantities are huge)

Preparation: 60 minutes

Cooking: 2 hours and 30 minutes

The final dish, or dishes in this case since I cooked two — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

I have a backlog of recipes I fancy cooking and which I intend to publish on Guillaume Cooks Vegan. I regularly review the list, and I reshuffle the recipes according to what matches more Summer time or Winter time — in the North hemisphere I live in. Sometimes it’s a combination of events which pushes me toward one recipe instead of another: promotional sales at the grocery store, or people about to visit us — even the weather impacts my cooking mood. I had bought a 25 kg bag of potatoes from a local producer. It’s a fair load of potatoes for two, even when both enjoys these starchy roots. I had already cooked miscellaneous Indian and Thaï dishes, and we were about to leave for a week. Shorter daylight, holidays season, and a wish for comfort food lead me to cook a simple yet delicious recipe decreasing my stock of potatoes. And then I cooked it again, taking pictures and notes to share with you this second time.

This is a vegan version of the authentic gratin dauphinois, a gratin of potatoes originating from Dauphiné, a former region in the South-East of France. It’s authentic in that it doesn’t include cheese, a common mistake which turns a gratin dauphinois into a gratin savoyard. Although there are some slight differences, the latter is also a gratin of potatoes, from the department of Savoie, and it’s also located in the South-East of France. Actually, today’s Savoie is included into what the Dauphiné region was. Anyway, the present recipe is not that authentic, since it’s vegan, and the original is not. The main ingredient is still the same: potatoes.

About potatoes

A close-up on the potatoes selected for this recipe, sitting in a large bowl — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Potato is one of the most appreciated vegetables¹ since it was brought from America by the Spanish explorers during the sixteenth century. The small tuber from South America conquered the rest of the world progressively, although it acquired a bad reputation in the last decades. With so many cultivated varieties (more than 5,000!) and suitable cooking techniques, the calories and glycemic index differ greatly from one potato to another. Sure thing if one’s diet consists of deep-fried potatoes, they’ll have more chances to gain weight than another person eating boiled potatoes in moderate quantity. From a nutritional perspective, potatoes contain a lot of water, and its carbohydrates mostly come from starch, not sugar. It’s because the starch helps thicken the liquid in this recipe that you shall not the wash the potatoes after peeling them.

Ingredients

The ingredients for this recipe; it’s mostly potatoes — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

• 3.3 kg potatoes

• 1 L unsweetened oat-based alternative to milk (thereafter shortened as “oat milk”)²

• 250 mL cooking soy alternative to cream (thereafter shortened as “soy cream”); the one I used was 14% fat, the higher the better!³

• 1 garlic head ~ 35 g

• 1 whole nutmeg ~ 8 g

• Black pepper

• Salt

• Vegetable oil or vegan butter (not pictured)

And that’s all. Depending on your appetite, or plans, you may want to reduce the quantity of potatoes to serve only yourself, once or twice, and not cook a month-time supply of gratin dauphinois. It can be difficult to find smaller packages of oat milk, so prepare to cook other recipes using the rest of the bottle. Or go for the full recipe and freeze the left-overs.

Preparation

Despite the small number of ingredients, the preparation part of this recipe is pretty long. This duration varies linearly with the amount of potatoes, whose peeling and slicing represents the longest part of the work. It’s often recommended to use a mandoline for this job, however I’ve found myself to be more efficient with the small knife visible on the picture below. It’s purely a personal preference, and likely due to the model of mandoline I have; use whatever works for you. As you progress through the Preparation steps, plan to turn on your oven so it’s preheated to 220°C at the time you move to the Cooking part of the recipe.

1. Peel the garlic; halve two cloves and rub them inside the baking dish

2. Add a very thin layer of vegetable oil or vegan butter on the bottom of the dish

3. Grate the nutmeg finely

4. In a pot, heat the oat milk on low temperature

5. Add salt, ground black pepper, the grated nutmeg, and the soy cream; whip to incorporate the ingredients into the oat milk

6. After 10 minutes, crush all the garlic cloves (including the ones you rubbed) and add them to the pot; stir and leave to cook on low temperature while you complete the Preparation steps — it shall heat, not boil

7. In parallel, wash the potatoes, peel them, then slice them as thin as possible; layer them in the baking dish

8. Pour the seasoned mix of milk and cream on the potatoes; it’s expected the top layers surface from the liquid

Halving two of the peeled garlic cloves (step 2) with the small knife I prefer to the mandoline — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Grating the nutmeg (step 3) — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Preparation completed; disregard the inelegant garlic and black pepper bits, they’ll add to the good-looking top of the dish — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Cooking

When I cook this recipe with such an amount of potatoes, I use my glazed cast iron pot. However, since my intention was to freeze the dish to eat it later, I preferred to cook into two separate sealable glass baking dishes. As mentioned in the Preparation steps, you can parallelize (and save some time) by ensuring your oven has reached the right temperature by the time you move from to the Cooking steps.

1. Place your dish in an oven preheated to 220°C, in its upper area; let it cook for 30 minutes

2. Reposition the dish to the middle of the oven; lower the set temperature to 160°C and cook for 1 hour

3. Turn off the heating, and keep the oven closed for 1 hour; it will continue to cook while it cools down progressively

Repositioning the dish in the middle of the oven (step 2) — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

You can serve as soon as you complete the Cooking steps. If you “meal prepped”, and plan to serve it later, let it cool to room temperature without closing the lid of your baking dish. You don’t want to trap moisture which could soften the crispy potato slices surfacing the liquid. This can be a perfect Winter time lunch or dinner, however it can also pose as an unusual potato salad.

As I mentioned earlier, the two baking dishes were sent straight to the freezer, and they will delight friends visiting us in few days. Although potatoes usually unfreeze badly, turning into mashed potatoes, it’s not an issue this dish suffers from. Let it return to room temperature, then re-heat it in the oven to 160°C until the liquid bubbles. You can also re-heat separate servings in the microwave oven; it’s faster, however the crisp top layer may soften a bit.

Cooking completed! — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Enjoy!

If you’ve tried the recipe, and would like to comment (whether you loved it, or hated it), please do so! I’m welcoming ideas, even if these are non-vegan recipes I’ll have the challenge to “veganize”.

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Here’s a tip before you go

Even if your potatoes are clean, wash them thoroughly before peeling and slicing them. Because you shall not wash the potatoes after you peel them, to keep as much starch as possible, you want to avoid any dirt to slip from the skin. Secure your operations ahead: wash your potatoes.

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1. My wife insisted that you know potato is, by far, her favorite vegetable!

2. Be cautious: oat is a known allergen

3. Be cautious: soy is a known allergen