Lyonnaise Potatoes is one of my favorite ways to eat potatoes. This dish is extremely decadent and quite frankly isn’t a dish you should enjoy too often. I make mine by using ample amounts of heavy cream, butter, potatoes, and Swiss cheese. I usually only make these lyonnaise potatoes for a special holiday or when I have guests over, making lyonnaise potatoes for myself, wouldn’t be advisable, I simply love lyonnaise potatoes. My recipe for lyonnaise potatoes is loosely based around one of Julia Child’s recipe for lyonnaise potatoes, in her recipe she uses chicken broth to cook the potatoes in, I had read in another source the cooking liquid is cream, and it wasn’t too much of a jump for me to use the cream as well. When using creamin lyonnaise potatoes, the cream simply soaks up into the lyonnaise potatoe. For me, the real key of this dish is not to let the garlic brown, but simply to cook through. I find that when I use Emmentaler, a style of Swiss cheese, I need to salt these very little.

Lyonnaise Potatoes

Yield: 8 – 10 servings.

2 pounds potatoes (preferably Yukon Gold, others work well too)
1 quart heavy cream
1 cup shredded Swiss cheese (Emmentaler)
4 tablespoons butter
4 cloves garlic, sliced thin
Salt and pepper to taste

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Wash and peel potatoes. Slice potatoes very thin, slice to about 1/4 inch thickness. In a large skillet, melt butter, add sliced garlic and lay potatoes into the warmed skillet. Watch the temperature of your skillet, leave it on a low to a low-medium setting, you do not want the garlic to brown. Cook potatoes for about 10-15 minutes. Salt and pepper potato slices in skillet, stir thoroughly, you want to coat the potatoes with the butter. After about 15 minutes, add 1 quart heavy cream, and add the 1 cup of shredded Ementaler cheese. Bring the cream and potatoes to a boil, once this mixture has reached a boil, take off of stove, and place into the oven. Allow potatoes to cook for approximately 45 minutes or until the top has become golden brown.

I hope you enjoy the my recipe for lyonnaise potatoes, I love to make these for the holidays. I jokingly call these Lyonnaise potatoes my ten dollar potatoes. Do you have any special dishes that you like to make for the holidays?