The potato is one of the most underrated vegetables, it is very versatile, comes in all sorts of shapes and sizes and goes with almost anything. I have even been known to make a gluten-free lemon drizzle cake which uses potato instead of flour. We all expect to be able to buy them all year round though they should really be seasonal and only available in the autumn and winter. Potatoes became the favourite staple ingredient centuries ago when they came over from South America, taking over from bread, but due to its density and construction does not count as one of the five-a-day, which is a shame.
My brother loves potatoes, so when i read a recipe in Yotam Ottolenghi’s (also known as ‘my lengthy tomato’ in our house for some strange reason…) ‘Plenty’ for a potato style tarte tatin I had to cook it for him. It was as delicious as it sounded, and very easy to do. Prepare all the elements separately and then arrange them in a cake tin, top with puff pastry and bake.
- caramel simply made with sugar and butter
- picked thyme leaves. The recipe used fresh oregano, but that’s not easy to come across in England. Though i did grow some years ago which was very easy to do, it sort of looked after itself, perhaps i’ll plant another one!
- boiled new potatoes, cool, then take ends off and slice into decent sized pieces of at least 1.5 – 2cm
- oven-dried cherry tomatoes, halved with a squidge of olive oil and grind of salt and black pepper
- sautéd sliced onions, gently cooked till golden
- slices of a hard goats cheese
- All topped with puff pastry. Sainsbury’s now do a ready-rolled puff pastry which is cheaper than the usual one and it worked fine.
Cooking it in a cake tin made it easy to turn out, always the tricky bit with tarte tatins. The quantities in the recipes were perfect, sometimes I find that it needs more or less of one element or another but not this time.
I wish I’d taken a picture it looked so beautiful when it came out of the tin but before I remembered it was in our tummies. Yummy!