Home & Garden|KITCHEN EQUIPMENT; THE AU GRATIN PAN
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KITCHEN EQUIPMENT
By Pierre Franey
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DESIGNATING a dish as au gratin means that it is supposed to have a crusty top, usually consisting of a sauce of cheese and eggs and sometimes bread crumbs.
In these dishes, such as potatoes or broccoli au gratin, the crust is the prize. It must be intact - that is, without watery separation - and there must be enough of it to go around; there should not be a mound of potatoes accompanied by a bit of crust.
The vessel best suited for most au gratin dishes is, simply enough, an au gratin pan. It can be round, oval or rectangular, and most commonly it is about an inch and a half deep.
The material can be copper, stainless steel, enameled iron, aluminum, glass. It really does not matter much because the food is usually cooked elsewhere and transferred to the au gratin pan for a brief period under the broiler. You are not relying on the pan to do any special job of heat conduction; you are relying on it to look good when it is carried to the table so the crusty top can be displayed.
I have a couple of suggestions on how to insure that the gratinee turns out well. To protect against separation of the sauce's ingredients, never place the pan too near the heat; the appropriate distance is a bout two inches.
A crust-saving trick is to throw two tablespoons of water onto the wall of the broiler to produce a burst of steam just as the sauce begins to brown. This may be viewed as acting like suntan lotion does on the skin, protecting the crust from cracking.
There are times when a slightly deeper au gratin pan is useful. If what you want is a fillet of sole au gratin, for instance, that is one of the dishes that might be cooked entirely in the oven -baked, not broiled. It must be in the oven longer, but without drying out before the crust is done. A deeper pan, holding somewhat more of the ingredients, will retain more moisture.
A cassoulet au gratin (cassoulets are bean dishes with a variety ofother ingredients, such as goose and sausage, mixed in) would also require a deeper pan for the baking procedure .
Then there are the sumptuous potatoes dauphinoise, which differ significantly from potatoes au gratin. Potatoes au gratin are cooked before they are sliced and sauced and placed under the broiler, while dauphinoise potatoes are baked in the au gratin pan and benefit from a bit more depth.
Among the many au gratin pans available are handsome ones in copper at Bridge Kitchenware, 214 East 52d Street, for $85. Pierre Franey
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