Potatoes can be cooked in so many different ways though boiled, steamed, or mashed are among the most popular methods for a quick meal.
That said, they are often the most bland ways to serve earthy spuds unlike creamy dauphinoise or seasoned chips.
With Mary Berry’s expert recipe, it’s easy to cook delicious potato gratin using very little in the way of ingredients and tools. What’s more, it takes just minutes to prepare.
Sharing her recipe for scalloped potatoes and roast chicken, as debuted in her cookbook ‘Cook and Share’, Mary said: “Chicken is great value but always buy free-range. Get two large birds for those who have big appetites.
“The scalloped potatoes are cooked in the oven at the same time, which makes it even easier.”
Method
First, preheat the oven to 200C/180C fan/Gas 6, then take a 1.8-litre shallow dish and grease it with some butter. Set aside for later when making the potatoes.
If serving the potatoes with chicken, prepare the raw, whole chicken by stuffing the cavities of the bird with bay leaves, sage and lemon.
Mary recommended covering the bird with butter seasoned with paprika, salt, and freshly ground black pepper. Before cooking, add the chicken to a roasting tin along with sage, garlic, wine and stock.
Now for the potatoes, start by peeling and slicing them very thinly into discs.
Peel the onion and slice it very thinly then arrange the sliced potatoes in the greased dish.
Scatter over the onion and sprinkle a few cubes of cold butter over the top. Prepare the stock (if using a stock cube and boiling water), then pour it over the potatoes and onion.
Season with salt and pepper then repeat the layers until all of the ingredients have been used. Butter some foil then cover the dish butter-side down.
Now place the chicken on the top shelf of the oven and put the potatoes on the lower shelf to cook for an hour and a half. At the 45-minute mark, remove the foil from the potato dish and return it to the oven to continue cooking.
