Comfort food without the calories! What’s not to love?! Technically not a dauphinoise; it’s a no-dairy potato bake, but calling it a fake dauphinoise sounds so much cooler. Super tasty and your teen will love this.

Ingredients

Feeds 4-6 as a side dish when accompanying meat and other veg / salad:

• 5 potatoes (medium/baked potato size)
• 3 cloves of garlic, crushed
• 500ml powdered Brown Onion soup mixed with boiling water (Available from South African shops) *see note in the method on alternatives

Method

Pre-heat the oven to 180 degrees celcius.

In a jug, make up your soup as it will thicken as it stands. Depending on the size of your potatoes and dish, you need enough liquid to cover everything so you might want to make a little more vs less just in case.

Peel the potatoes and slice thinly. (If you keep the skins on, they become stringy and ruin the comfort element of the dish)

Spray some light oil / non stick into your dish so that the base doesn’t stick. Then start adding layers of potato slices.

Add a crushed garlic clove and season generously with salt and pepper between each layer until you have filled the dish with all of the potato slices.

Pour the soup over the potatoes until they are covered.

Cover the dish tightly with foil, and then place a heat-proof weight on top so that it makes the potatoes compress into a firm slab. To do this I add another dish on top, and fill it with ceramic baking beans.

Bake in the oven for 1 hour.

Be careful when you peal the tinfoil off the top before serving; use a spatula to gently prize the top layer of tatties free.

Delicious served with my Pork Loin Steaks or Chargrilled Chicken and the veggies your teen enjoys.

Brown Onion Soup Powder alternatives

If you live in South Africa, you’ll find this little gem in any supermarket. If you don’t, it’s pretty hard to find. It’s such a favourite in any SA household that the SA Export shops in other countries stock this alongside other nostalgic SA basics. I’ve tried and tested other soup powder varieties available to us in the UK, and the closest match alternative I recommend is Beef Oxtail Cup-a-Soup. An option for a European-based resident would be French Onion Soup in powdered form. Please, however, do not attempt to use pre-mixed and tinned soup with the same flavour – it just doesn’t work unless it’s made from powdered form.