Come on, don’t these sound delicious?

Time: 1 hour 40 minutes

Difficulty: 1/5

Ingredient Availability: 5/5

You need some kind of potatoes at thanksgiving. You might even need two or more different potato dishes. I won’t judge. This year, I didn’t want traditional mashed potatoes or a potato casserole. However, I wanted something that could be a little bit of all of the holiday potato dishes. This one claiming to be crispy and cheesy caught my eye, as those two were at the top of my list. While it’s probably not going to be fluffy, I doubt that the potatoes will be crisp all the way through in a stack, so there should be some textural contrast there.

Key Ingredients & Omissions:

For this recipe I say that you should really get some nice quality cheeses, as that is where most of the flavors come from. Also, I have to note that this recipe calls for salted butter, but I used unsalted butter, as that’s all I ever buy. Other than that, all of the ingredients are pretty standard.

Tools:

• Mandoline or sharp knife

• Muffin Tin

Cooking Review:

Prep: 20 minutes

To start, I cleaned my potatoes and sliced them on my newly acquired mandoline. I put my potatoes in water to prevent them from browning while I worked on shredding the cheese, grating the garlic and working on some other things.

Assembly: 16 minutes

To assemble, the butter was melted and all of the remaining ingredients were added to it to be mixed. The potatoes were then added to this mixture and tossed/stirred to coat them evenly. I dried my potatoes with a paper towel before adding them to the butter mixture. I used 4 potatoes and felt like it was a little too much for the amount of the butter mixture I had, so I didn’t use all of the slices. I then layered my potatoes in the greased muffin tins.

Baking: 56 minutes

The stacks were baked covered in aluminum foil for 30 minutes before baking for another 26 minutes uncovered. I sprinkled them with some salt once they were done.

Analysis:

I was disappointed with this recipe. The flavors were pretty flat and they weren’t as crispy as I would’ve liked. Some parts were crispier than others. Those parts had the most flavor, too. The rest had fairly muted flavors, so it definitely could’ve used more salt. I know I didn’t use salted butter, but I added more salt to the butter mixture, yet it still wasn’t enough. I would’ve expected the cheeses to pick up some of the slack, but even the cheese flavors weren’t coming through very much. The potatoes were well cooked, having a slight bite to them. I kinda just think that the recipe might call for too much potato for what the mixture can really handle. Maybe the salted butter would’ve made all the difference, but I doubt it. I can see others stretching the butter mixture too thin and ending up with something not as good as it could be. I’m giving this recipe a 6/10. Sure, I missed the salted butter, but I think a few other things could be tweaked in the recipe to make it more successful.