Paleron and Aligot

We want to make a warm winter dish. What could possibly be better than Pot Roast and Mashed Potatoes? The answer is: Pot Roast and Aligot. We first had Aligot in France and fell in love with it. It is mashed potatoes that was cheese melted into it. Making it even richer. There was a recipe for Aligot in The New York Times and we decided to make it. First we had to scramble to get the proper pot roast, which in French is called a Paleron. It is a full flat-iron steak. We finally found one.

I was prepared to make mashed potatoes, but we happened to stop in at Joan's on 3rd Street and they were selling a supper rich mashed potatoes. So we bought the mashed potatoes and used them. We then used a fabulous trick on mashed potatoes that we observed from eating a ChiSpacca. We had refrigerated the store bought mashed potatoes. When we were ready to cook them we removed from the refrigerator and let them reach room temperature. We then put them in a pan and continually wisked in cream and milk. They reheated perfectly. We then added the cheese. Shumon joined us and the dinner was perfect for a cool night.

You can get the recipe for the Pot Roast from our blog of: March 15, 2016. Click the date to get the recipe.

Aligot

Cheesy Mashed Potatoes for the Soul

New York Times

In times of great stress, or of flickering, low-level dread, I find that canceling all my plans and staying in to make mashed potatoes generally helps. This year, there were quite a few opportunities to do so. Election-related anxiety gnawed at me for months, lighting up old networks of pain in my shoulders and back. Mold bloomed around the mysterious wet patch that appeared in my bedroom ceiling. I started a thrilling, but terrifying, new job. And as the holidays neared, I worried about my grandmother, almost 80, living alone. Still, I let about half her calls go to voice mail each week, and hated myself for it.

I turned to aligot, the cheese-thickened mashed potatoes with roots in central France. Aligot doesn’t fix anything, but it does put a little cushion between you and the abyss, whatever form the abyss might take.

To make it, you’ll need a ricer. You could, technically, blitz everything together in the food processor, but you risk potatoes with the gooey, elastic texture of an industrial-strength glue, setting up between planks. If you’re in a delicate emotional state, as I usually am when I start these potatoes, it’s better not to risk it. Besides, pressing down on the ricer is an essential part of the process. Squashing hot, tender potatoes through tiny holes is a pure and simple joy, one of the rare cooking tasks that’s just as fun as those Play-Doh sets once had you believe. The potato rushes out in tiny, twirling, noodles. You don’t need to worry about lumps.

In France, aligot is traditionally made with tomme fraîche or unripened Cantal, but those cheeses can be hard to find. At North End Grill, a restaurant in Manhattan’s Battery Park City, the chef Eric Korsh makes aligot with a little bit of roasted garlic and a lot of Comté. Any cheese that melts well will do, but for aligot you also want to seek out a cheese with a capacity for stringiness. I’ve had great aligot with Comté, Gruyère and Emmental, and fresh mozzarella can also work in a pinch.

Aligot puts a little cushion between you and the abyss.

Ham el-Waylly, a chef at the Brooklyn diner Hail Mary, starts with Robuchon potatoes. Among cooks, the phrase “Robuchon potatoes” is shorthand for what many still consider the Platonic ideal of mashed potatoes: a flawless purée, mounted with an obscene amount of butter and named for the celebrity French chef Joël Robuchon. In a video dedicated to his famous mashed potatoes, Robuchon leans over a cook and says in French, quite sternly: “More butter! More butter! More butter! More butter! More, more, more!”

Robuchon uses ratte potatoes — an expensive variety from France. He boils them whole, then peels them while hot. After pushing the potatoes through a food mill, he adds loads of cold butter over the heat and finally some milk or cream, whisking the whole thing until it’s an airy, slow-moving cloud. Waylly starts around there, then adds a mix of Gruyère and a soft-ripened cow’s milk cheese from Vermont, even throwing in part of the bloomy rind. The key, he told me, is to whip the potatoes with confidence, vigor and speed once you add the cheese, to build up the stringiness as it melts. “When you pull it, you want it to seem like you’re pulling at fondue,” Waylly said. “You want to see a good amount of strands falling, and they should have some strength. They should fight with you.”

Stringiness is the whole point of aligot, that long, delightful stretch, the way it takes on all the qualities of melted cheese but remains mashed potato. And though it’s tough to get it like the cooks in Auvergne, some of whom can pull spoonfuls of hot aligot that stretch several feet, you can still get a good, cheesy texture as a beginner, working with a small amount of potato over low heat.

At home, in the 20 minutes or so it takes for the potatoes to cook through, I like to get the rest of the meal going. I brown sausages and wilt a big bunch of greens in the same pan. I have a glass of whatever wine is open in the fridge. By now, things are looking up. Cheesy mashed potatoes are on the horizon, like sunshine after a long, dark night. And by the time those potatoes are ready, so am I.

Ingredients

1       pound russet potatoes, peeled and quartered

¼      pound cold, unsalted butter, cut into 1/2-inch cubes

½      cup cream, heated

½      pound Comté or Gruyère cheese, grated

Salt to taste

Preparation

1.   Simmer the potatoes in water until very tender to the point of a knife, about 15 to 20 minutes. Drain potatoes, and tip out any remaining water from the pot. Push the hot potatoes through a ricer back into the pot. Over low heat, use a heatproof spatula to move the potatoes around the pot for a minute so that any excess water can evaporate.

2.   Add butter to the potatoes, half at a time, stirring until completely incorporated. Add hot cream, half at a time, stirring until incorporated. Add cheese a little bit at a time, stirring vigorously, until all the cheese is evenly melted and the spoon makes cheesy strings as you pull it away from the potatoes. If necessary, turn the heat up a little. Taste, and season with salt. Serve.