Roasted potatoes and bagna cauda

I bring you a way to make roasted potatoes that I love: potatoes confit in oil and butter that we finally finish roasting in the oven. Once roasted, I suggest enjoying them with a very intense Italian sauce, Bagna Cauda sauce, typical of Piedmont.

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

The bagna cauda sauce, on the other hand, is a sauce made from anchovies and garlic that is extremely tasty. It’s a salty sauce with a lot of flavor intensity. Typically bagna cauda is used like a fondue, to coat all kinds of vegetables and meats (bagna, from "to bathe", "to dip").

On this occasion, I suggest using the sauce to accompany the roasted confit potatoes. And bread — don’t forget toasted bread on the table!

I leave you the recipe in 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 extra virgin olive oil
Salt
75 g unsalted butter
A few sprigs of fresh rosemary

For the Bagna Cauda:

1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil
10 garlic cloves
20 anchovy fillets preserved in salt (approx. 1 jar of anchovies)
50 g 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 to anchovy fillets in bagna cauda is roughly twice as many anchovies as garlic.

Preparation

How to make the roasted potatoes

1. We clean and cut the potatoes in half.
2. We put them in the Le Creuset casserole, we season them with salt and pepper and bathe them in a generous amount of oil.
3. We cut the butter into cubes and add it on top of the potatoes. We also add the peeled garlic and a good amount of herbs.
4. Put the casserole on the heat, covered, over low/medium heat. Let them cook for about 45-50 minutes, until they are just tender.
5. Preheat the oven to 180 ºC, no fan.
6. Pour some of the liquid from the casserole, the oil and butter that have become infused during cooking, onto a baking tray. Salt the oil and transfer the potatoes to the tray (cut side down).
7. We put the tray in the oven until the potatoes look roasted.

How to make the bagna cauda sauce:

1. We peel and chop 10 garlic cloves and transfer them to a mortar. We start crushing the garlic.
2. Under the tap or in a bowl, we desalinate the 20 or 24 anchovy fillets and dry them with kitchen paper. We chop them and add them to the mortar.
3. We crush together with the garlic until a somewhat homogeneous coarse mixture is observed.
4. We transfer the mixture to an iron saucepan and add the oil and the butter cut into cubes. If you like, you can add the pepper now to give it its flavor.
5. We leave on low heat until the sauce appears done (the anchovies have lost their intense color and the garlic is slightly tender). Let it cool a bit.
6. We peel and finely chop the parsley and add it to the saucepan. Mix, and the sauce is finished.

Le Creuset iron saucepan and pieces of Revol porcelain

To serve, since bagna cauda is typically a dipping sauce, you have several options:

• You can bring a serving dish with the roasted potatoes and the saucepan directly to the table, like a fondue, so diners can dip potatoes or toasted bread in the sauce.
• You can serve a plate for each diner and use a small bowl or a glass to serve the sauce so each diner can enjoy it individually. For serving we used the Revol No.W porcelain collection, which has ideal sizes for this.

Le Creuset round cast-iron cocotte and plate and Revol No.W glass