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Root for Gratins: Welcome fall vegetables with creamy, crusty casseroles
• by By Caleb Melchior • Photo by Carmen Troesser
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Autumn’s chilly nights and cooler days herald a return to real cooking. No longer do our dinners consist only of vast chopped salads and platters of succulent summer fruits. I welcome the oven’s warmth filling the kitchen and linger to prepare roasts, braises and sustaining stews of all sorts.
But while we may yearn for warm and sustaining eats, that doesn’t mean we need to neglect our veggies. Fortunately, autumn’s vegetables tend to be starchy and sweet – just what I’m craving at this time of year.
One of the nicest preparations for autumn vegetables is the gratin. In a gratin, layers of carb-rich ingredients alternate with layers of oozing liquids, the whole thing crowned by a crusty upper layer. The textures combine in mouthfuls of utter delight.
Gratins are excellent accompaniments for all the roasted and baked foods that you’ll be enjoying now that autumn has come. Almost any starchy fall vegetable will make an excellent gratin. Try beets, carrots, celeriac, potatoes, rutabagas, turnips and winter squash. You can combine several complementary vegetables. United by a blanket of béchamel, their flavors will blend nicely.
Gratins are easy to make and forgiving (they’ll wait in the oven even if your company shows up two hours late), but a few simple practices will vastly improve the flavor and texture of your gratins. Here are four things you can do to ensure that they come out perfectly.
SEASON EACH COMPONENT INDIVIDUALLY
Professional chefs season every component of a dish individually, especially in composed dishes such as gratins. Do you? Most gratins are made up of several layers of vegetables with a flavorful liquid or sauce poured over and penetrating the whole. Season each layer of vegetable pieces, and also season the liquid. This way, the flavor of your seasonings will impregnate the whole dish and each bite will burst with flavor.
HOLD OFF ON LIQUIDS
One of the greatest temptations in gratin-making is to be overly generous with liquids and sauces. Many vegetables, even the harder ones of autumn, will exude water as they cook. Extra sauce plus vegetable liquid equals a soupy mess. Even if it doesn’t look like enough liquid, hold off.
PRECOOK VEGETABLES
I find it useful to partially cook the main ingredients of a gratin before assembling it. This is especially true of hard vegetables like potatoes or winter squash. If dealing with a large squash, you may want to bake the whole thing at 400 degrees for an hour to soften it before cutting it up. Preliminary blanching is also useful with watery veggies like summer squash, as partial cooking eliminates some of that excess water.
NO METAL PANS
Some people make gratins in metal pans. I wouldn’t. If your gratin cooks too quickly, the top will brown and harden before the bottom is cooked and excess liquid is evaporated. Glass and ceramic dishes provide a mellow heat.
While preparing for this article, I debated over a number of different gratins: winter squash with Gruyère, Toulouse-Lautrec’s gratin of pumpkin, potatoes dauphinoise and others. In the end, I settled on this gratin of carrots. It captivated our tongues with its exquisite balance between sweet carrots and sharp Cheddar, while the curry adds a mild heat that makes every mouthful sing with flavor. It admirably contrasts the cookery of the 20th century with that of the 21st (or what we know of it). Also, it differs in style and appearance from the standard potato gratins, which everybody knows and loves.
Caleb Melchior writes, cooks, gardens and plays Debussy on the piano in Perryville.
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Carrot Gratin
If the gratin’s not crusty and brown enough for your liking after cooking, you can flash it under the broiler for several minutes until the top is caramelized.
24 oz. (approximately 3 cups) baby carrots
2 Tbsp. butter
½ large onion, chopped
1 tsp. curry powder
1 Tbsp. flour
1 cup milk (at least 2 percent)
8 oz. extra-sharp Cheddar, divided
• Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.
• Bring a pot of water to a boil, add the baby carrots and cook until still crunchy but easily pierced by a fork. Drain.
• Meanwhile, make your curried béchamel. In a small saucepan, melt the butter, add the onion, and cook until soft and slightly browned, approximately 10 minutes. Add the curry powder and cook for 1 minute. Add the flour, cook for 1 minute more, then add the milk. Stir together and cook until thickened, about 4 minutes.
• Divide the block of Cheddar in half. Cut one half into matchsticks and put into a mixing bowl. Grate the remaining Cheddar (when grated, it should equal 1 cup) and set aside.
• Add the cooked carrots to the Cheddar matchsticks. Add the sauce and mix together thoroughly.
• Put into a greased 9-inch square dish, preferably glass or ceramic. Sprinkle the grated Cheddar over the top. Bake at 350 for 20 minutes, then raise the heat to 400 for 10 minutes or until browned.
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