Anybody know/make/serve French Medieval Dish: "Aligot" ?

Mel's Cookin'

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#21
We made it in school. We made a very small batch with the tomme d'auvergne cheese, which was stupid expensive. Then we made batches with cheddar cheese curds (like used in poutine) and with a mixture of a good gruyere and fresh mozzarella (has to be the fresh mozzarella, it is a different animal than the older, firm mozzarella.)

The saddest part of using the tomme d'auvergne is you are supposed to peel the rind off for the recipe and the rind in a soft, semi-fresh cheese is where a huge portion of the flavor comes from. The cheddar cheese curd version was okay, the gruyere and fresh mozzarella mixture was best, closest to the recipe but affordable and available for most uses. You subbed 75% gruyere and 25% fresh mozzarella for that version. The cheddar cheese curd version was a 1:1 substitute. Cheddar cheese curds are fresh also, they are not an aged cheese so that sub works well. If I was going to use the cheddar cheese curds, for about 3 pounds of potatoes, I'd take about 1/2 cup of mushrooms, chopped large, and 1/4 cup of toasted (to release the nutty flavor) walnuts and put it in a sachet and boil in the water I was going to cook the potatoes in, for about 10 minutes, then remove the sachet and cook the potatoes in that water. It would add some of the umami that is in the recipe cheese (and in the gruyere) but is missing in the cheddar cheese curds.

Also, when you drain the cooked potatoes (I'd save the liquid you drain off for the soup container in the freezer), spread out the potatoes around the edge of the colander and let them steam, stir them roughly to break them up a few times and let them steam each time until they no longer steam. That helps remove some of the trapped water inside the potato pieces, giving you more potato flavor and letting the other ingredients in the dish cling together better. That really goes for any time you boil potatoes in my opinion.
 

Mel's Cookin'

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#25
You're gonna have to go into detail here. I've never heard of using used potato water for soup. Not opposed to it, just not sure I've seen that.
I mentioned keeping that potato water for soup because it would have more flavor than you'd want to pour down the drain. Never cook with water if you can cook with something that adds flavor. But I do put potato water in my soup container in the freezer if there wasn't so much water in the pot that it is just too thin to bother with. Since I'm not that fond of hanging around waiting for water to boil, I usually don't have that much extra water anyway.

Regular potato water (without it having had mushrooms and nuts boiled in it) is great for making bread or rolls, as a base for gravies, as the liquid to put in when you cook a roast... all kinds of things like that. I rarely pour it down the drain.

If someone has an upset stomach that just lingers on, drinking potato water will give them nutrition, sometimes help settle the stomach, and is easier on the stomach than potato soup would be because of the lack of dairy products in potato water.


To derail a little more, when you cook pasta, save that water until you are completely ready to put the dinner on the table. Pasta water has the starch for thickening in it and if you need to stretch your sauce to serve another place at the table, add a bit of pasta water to the sauce and it will increase the volume but it will keep it thick if you stir it while it is cooking for a very few minutes.