I wanted a starchy side dish to go with the entree I'd made but wanted something fairly easy since I'd be spending a fair amount of time working on the entree. Pommes de Terre Sautees en Des ("Diced Potatoes Sauteed in Butter") seemed to be a perfect fit and it was an awesome surprise!! Let's just say there weren't any leftovers -- they turned into dessert as well as the side dish.
My experience with diced potatoes in the past has been pretty much limited to those bags of frozen ones you get at the store. I tried making diced potatoes once before but it took me hours to draw all of the dots on.... Get it? Dots? Like dice cubes with the little dots on each side. Go ahead and admit it -- I'm hilarious! Joking aside, these were much better than anything I've ever gotten out of the frozen food section! Here's how you do it:
Probably not a surprise first step but you need to get out as many potatoes as think you want to eat and then add a few more (I told you, they taste really yummy and you're going to want seconds). Here's a really important step -- after you peel the potatoes, don't wash them but dry them with a paper towel. One of the tricks that make these turn out so well is limiting the amount of moisture that goes into the pan -- that avoids steaming them and lets the potatoes absorb a bit of the butter. Once the potatoes were peeled and dried I cut them up into about 1/2" cubes and they were ready for cooking.
Once diced, I added enough clarified butter (or 2 to 1 ratio of butter and oil -- remember that lets the butter be at a higher heat without burning the butter) to put about 1/16" of butter in a moderately hot skillet. Then the potatoes went in for about 2 minutes before I tossed them a bit to get the next side. The goal was to let the potatoes cook for a minute or two on each side to give them a bit of a golden brown color on each side. This is a bit tricky with diced potatoes unless you have OCD and use a pair of tweezers to turn each cube individually. As for me, I enjoyed using my pan flipping technique (for the record, not one potato cube fell out of the pan this time) and gave them a good toss every minute or so until they had some nice color. I gave them a little toss every couple of minutes to make sure they knew I was paying attention, and it kept them cooking evenly.
Once that was done I sprinkled them with about 1/4" of salt, covered the pan, and cooked them for about 15 minutes over a low heat. About 2 tablespoons of melted butter was sprinkled over the potatoes and a heaping tablespoon of tarragon was added. A couple of final tosses mixed everything up and it was ready to serve.
These were so easy to make I think they'll be putting the frozen diced potato supplier out of business for our household. They were great as a side dish with dinner but they'd go equally well with some eggs and bacon (oops, not very French) for breakfast. If you don't try making these you'll be sorry! I hope you do -- let me know how they turn out!
Bon Appetit!
These look and sound delicious! I was trying to decide on a potato dish for a side dish tomorrow night and think I'll try these!