Potato Tourte from Everyday Dorie - Cook the Book Fridays

I finally managed to catch up with everyone else participating cook the book Fridays - Every Day Dorie. The recipe this time is Dorie Greenspan's Potato Tourte on page 220. I must say that I did a lot of walking to gather all the ingredients for this recipe! Our friends helped us with the main grocery run, but then I had to walk back to the store twice to pick up ingredients that I forgot! As you can see there aren't too many ingredients needed in this recipe. The main ingredient, of course, is the 2.5 lbs of potatoes! 

For this recipe I chose to use fresh sage, rosemary and green onions. Dorie also suggests that tarragon, parsley, dill, and chives can be used as other herbs for the potato tourte. 

The rolling out of the puff pastry went fairly well. You just need to remember to have a ruler of sorts in order to make sure that they are the right size. I ended up using a small tape measure. 

The recipe calls for slicing the potatoes in a mandolin or to cut them to approximately 1/16 inch thick. Using a mandolin made slicing consistently much easier! I borrowed one from a friend in order to do this part of the recipe. Definitely use one if you are able to get access to one as it makes this part of the recipe preparation super quick.

Making sure all the ingredients are prepped (washed & cut) ahead of time will help with the assembly of the entire potato tourte because all the pieces will be ready and all you have to do is put it together. Layer herbs, followed by potato slices, garlic, butter pieces and repeat!

I prepped my potato tourte to the point where I topped the top crust and cut the air vent. Then I wrapped the potato tourte with saran wrap and refrigerated the tourte to be baked up for dinner the next day. 
The next day, I took the potato tourte out of the fridge an hour or so before I baked it. I did this to make sure that the heat differentiation would not cause the pie dish from breaking in the oven (which has happened to me in the past!). Egg washed and then popped into the oven at 400F for 45-60 min.

Success! This potato tourte turned out beautifully! It smelled amazing as it baked up in the oven. Oh and that puff pastry crust? Delicious. 

The layers of the potato tourte! Turns out there were at least 9 layers of potatoes in there! The one difference is that after the tourte has baked for almost an hour, you take it out and then gently pour in 1 cup of heated cream. It's amazing how the cream is able to just flow between all of the layers.

 

I would most definitely make this potato tourte again. Though next time, I am thinking I'll have to use a different herb. Don't get me wrong, sage and rosemary go perfectly well with potato but I am thinking the sage that I used was super fragrant and seemed to overtake the flavour in the tourte. Mushrooms would certainly go well in this potato tourte, which I intend to try next time!