Scalloped Potatoes

One of my favorite potato recipes. Great on its own, just as great paired with leftover ham if you prefer.

What I like about this recipe is how creamy the sauce is that the potatoes bake in and I love that I can control how brown the top of the potatoes get. Personally, I love a little toasted potato flavor, so my potatoes always are browned.

Ingredients:

6 medium potatoes (approx 3 Costco-size potatoes)
3 Tbsp. butter
3 Tbsp. flour
1 tsp. salt
1/4 tsp. pepper
2 1/2 c. milk
1 Tbsp. butter (optional)

Baking Time: 1.5 hours
Baking Temp: 350 degrees

Start out by peeling and then slicing the potatoes to the thinness you desire. The thinner the slices, the faster they will cook through. Also try to be consistent with the thickness of the slices you make, or some parts may be overly soft and some parts could wind up being a little hard.

Once you have sliced up the potatoes, place them in a 9x13" glass pan. (If you want to use ham as well, go ahead and sprinkle it in at this point.)

Now you need to make your creamy sauce for the potatoes to cook in. You'll melt the 3T butter in a saucepan over medium heat. Once it has melted, add the flour and salt, stirring them until well combined. Next, add the milk to the mixture and stir it all together. I suggest using a whisk for this job so that you don't end up with flour blobs in your milk mixture. 

Depending on what kind of milk you use (I used skim on this particular day), your sauce may or may not thicken up very much. Skim milk will of course give you a runnier sauce than 2% or whole milk. Any of them work in the recipe, however. Keep stirring the sauce mixture frequently until you notice that it's starting to thicken up a bit, then remove it from the heat.

Next, you want to pour the sauce over the potatoes in your pan.

If this is sufficient for you, you can skip the next step. It involves butter. Like bacon, you can't go wrong by adding a little extra butter, so I choose to add 1 last Tbsp. of butter to my potatoes before they bake.

At this point, you will cover your potatoes with tin foil and place them in the preheated 350 degree oven and bake it for at least an hour. If you want your potatoes to brown up, after an hour, remove the tin foil. If you prefer them to be a consistent creamy color, then keep the tin foil on for the remaining 30 minutes of baking time.

Once the potatoes are done baking, you'll want to let them stand for about 5-10 minutes longer. This allows the sauce to finish thickening up and for the potatoes to set.

After they have rested for a few minutes, go ahead and serve them up on a plate with the rest of your meal while they are nice and hot!