Seasoning to Cook a Potatoes Au Gratin Recipe

"Hi! I'm Louis Ortiz on behalf of Expert Village and I'm back to show you potatoes au gratin and this is a simple basic recipe. There are a million variations on this whole theme but what we are going for is we are going to get bread crumbs and cheese on top of these potatoes so that they have a nice crisp, crusty, golden brown finish on them. So I've got some butter that has already been softened here and I've got a small little tin, little loaf tin. I'm just going to use my finger and kind of put some butter around the edges in the bottom of this and I am kind of making a nice little flavorful finish on these guys so that they won't stick after the cooking process. So I am going to go ahead and start layering these potatoes on the bottom, like so and in between each layer I am just going to put a tiny little dab of half and half, a little bit of pepper and a little bit of salt. I'm not going to over do it because these are thin potatoes again. So I'll put another layer down here; just kind of going to alternate them back and forth and I won't season every layer. We'll leave a little bit of variation. What you are concerned with is you get a nice even smooth flat finish and I am kind of pressing these down because we want them to compress down upon themselves throughout the cooking process any way. What's going to happen is the natural starches are going to come out of these potatoes as we are cooking along and it's going to thicken up that half and half cream and make this real nice gooey mixture in between the potatoes which everybody likes. So we'll throw some more of these on there. Again this is a whole Idaho Russet Baking Potato. I tend to like using these types of potatoes because they have a little bit higher starch content. A waxy Yukon Gold would probably work okay. I would stay away like from the red B potatoes, red c size; they have starch but these tend to work. It's a bit hardier potato, the Idaho Russet. Keep layering these potatoes in there. Now I'll get a little crazy put some of my cheese which is just a grated swiss, a little bit more half and half on him. Let that kind of run down, down and over on those potatoes, some more fresh ground black pepper, a little bit sea salt and we are heading home for the finish here. The higher you make it the longer the cooking time required for these guys. So we will make this the last layer. I'm going to go ahead and do one more shot of half and half; let that run down, seek down; okay. Let's go ahead and do a final layer of sea salt, some black pepper, okay there. Now I'm going to hit these guys with bread crumbs on the top and these are just store bought bread crumbs. Actually it's got a garlic and herb seasonings real nice and easy, a last dose of cheese here and that's that. So all I'm going to do is take this sheet of foil, cover them and throw them in a pre-heated oven. As I said it is set about 450 actually and these should take about 15 minutes and we will pull these out when they are done and show you what the finished product looks like."