My recipe is similar to others that I have found on the internet but I have played with the cooking times and I have yet to create a bad batch.


Ingredients
750g – 1kg Maris Piper Potatoes
4 cloves of garlic
500ml cream
Butter
Salt and pepper


Method
Pre heat the oven to 150 degrees centigrade.
Generously butter a shallow baking dish making sure you get right into the corners as this will make washing up a lot easier.
Peel and finely slice your potatoes. By all means use a mandolin if you have one but I can never be bothered digging it out of the cupboard and setting it up so I use a standard, if a little blunt these days, kitchen knife.
Place one layer of your potatoes into the bottom of the baking dish. You can be as artistic or lazy as you like but try and make sure the layer is level and packed in.
Peel and finely chop all of your garlic and sprinkle about a quarter of it over your first layer along with a grinding of salt and pepper. Normally I would advocate white pepper with potatoes but with the amount of cream that I am adding you don’t seem to be able to taste the white pepper so I use coarsely cracked black peppercorns and sprinkle those instead.
Repeat the layer of potatoes, garlic, salt and pepper until you are either out of potatoes or the dish is about 0.5cm from being filled.
Pour on the cream, it should just start to cover the potatoes but no more. The top layer should not be floating. You may need a little more or less cream, use your own judgement.
Put the dish on a non stick baking tray and put in the oven uncovered for 2 hours. It is done when a knife inserted into the centre has next to no resistance.
Please, leave it out of the oven for around 10 minutes before eating as I have burnt the roof of my mouth more times than I care to mention.