Baked potatoes and bagna cauda

I bring you a way of doing baked potatoes that I love: candied potatoes in oil and butter that we just finally roasted in the oven. Once roasted, I suggest you enjoy them with a the most intense Italian sauce, Bagna Cauda sauce , typical of the Piedmont.

For the potatoes, we will use a good amount of herbs and garlic, so that they come out aromatic.

The bagna cauda sauce, for its part, is a sauce based on anchovies and garlic which is most tasty. It is a salty sauce with a lot of intensity of flavor. Typically, the bagna cauda is used as a fondue, to bathe all kinds of vegetables and meats (bagna, from "to bathe", "to dip").

On this occasion, I suggest you use the sauce to accompany the roasted confit potatoes. And bread, on the table that there is no lack of toasted bread!

I leave the recipe on video and below the ingredients and step by step :

Ingredients

For the potatoes:

2 kilos of potatoes
4 or 6 whole garlic cloves
1/2 cup of extra virgin olive oil
Salt
75 gr of unsalted butter
A few sprigs of fresh rosemary

For the Bagna Tail :

1/2 cup of extra virgin olive oil
10 cloves of garlic
20 anchovy fillets preserved in salt (approx 1 can of anchovies)
50 grams of butter
Parsley
1 hot pepper (optional)

NOTE: If you want to make more or less sauce, you should know that the proportion of garlic and anchovy fillets in the bagna cauda is more or less twice as many anchovies as garlic.

Preparation

How to make roast potatoes

1. Clean and cut the potatoes in half.
2. We put them in the Le Creuset cocotte , season them with salt and pepper and bathe them in a good amount of oil.
3. Cut the butter into cubes and add it on top of the potatoes. We also introduce the peeled garlic and a good amount of herbs.
4. We put the cocotte on the fire, covered and on low/medium heat. We leave them cooking for about 45-50 minutes, until a tender point is observed.
5. Preheat the oven to 180 ºC, without air.
6. Pour part of the liquid from the cocotte, the oil and butter that has been flavored during cooking, on a baking tray. Add salt to the oil and transfer the potatoes to the tray (with the cut side facing down).
7. Place the tray in the oven until the potatoes look roasted.

How to make the bagna cauda sauce:

1. Peel and cut 10 garlic cloves and transfer them to a mortar . We begin to crush the garlic.
2. Under the tap or in a bowl, desalt the 20 or 24 anchovy fillets and dry them with kitchen paper. We cut them and pass them to the mortar.
3. Crush together with the garlic until a more or less homogeneous lumpy mixture is observed.
4. Transfer the mixture to an iron saucepan and add the oil and the diced butter. If you want, you can now add the pepper to give it its flavor.
5. Leave over low heat until the sauce is seen to be done (the anchovies have lost their color intensity and the garlic is tender). Let it cool down a bit.
6. Peel and cut the small parsley and add it to the saucepan. We mix, and the sauce is finished.

Le Creuset iron saucepan and Revol porcelain pieces

To serve, as bagna cauda is typically a sauce to be dipped in, you have several options:

• Well, you can take a dish with roasted potatoes and the saucepan directly to the table, as a fondue, so that diners can bathe potatoes or toasted bread in the sauce.
• You can serve a plate for each diner, and use a bowl or a glass to serve the sauce, so that each diner can enjoy it individually. To serve it, we have made use of the Revol porcelain No.W collection, which has ideal sizes for it.

Le Creuset Round Iron Cocotte and Revol No.W Plate and Glass