Name: Aligot (Mashed Potato Beaten with Fresh Tomme)
Prep time: 25 min
Cook time: 45 min
Total time: 1 h 10 min
Yield: 6 servings
Cuisine: French
Ingredients: 1 kg floury potatoes; 1 tbsp salt; 400 g tomme fraîche; 400 g mozzarella; 80 g unsalted butter; 150 ml double cream; 1 clove garlic; 1 tsp salt; 0.5 tsp white pepper; 4 sausages

Ingredients

6servings

The potatoes
floury potatoes · russet or similar; waxy ones will not stretch1 kg
salt · for the water1 tbsp
The cheese
tomme fraîche · unripened, a day or two old — 40 percent of the weight of the potato400 g
mozzarella · if you cannot get tomme: fresh mozzarella drained well, not the low-moisture pizza kind400 g
And
unsalted butter80 g
double cream150 ml
garlic · crushed, warmed in the cream and lifted out1 clove
salt1 tsp
white pepper0.5 tsp
To serve
sausages · grilled Toulouse sausage beside it is aligot-saucisse4

Steps

Boil the potatoes whole and in their skins in salted water. Cut up, they take on water through the cut faces, and waterlogged potato will not stretch. Until a skewer goes straight through.
⏲ 40 min
Slice or coarsely grate the cheese. In lumps the outside melts while the middle is still solid and the strands never form evenly. Take it out of the fridge to come to room temperature.
⏲ 10 min
While the potatoes cook, warm the cream with the crushed garlic to scent it, then lift the garlic out.
⏲ 10 min
Drain the potatoes and peel them while they are hot, then push them through a ricer or a fine sieve. Once they cool the starch retrogrades and sets, and after that no amount of beating will make it stretch.
⏲ 15 min
Set a heavy pan over the lowest possible heat and stir the riced potato, butter, warm cream, salt and pepper together with a wooden spatula until smooth.
⏲ 10 min
Add the cheese in four or five goes. A handful, stirred until it has completely gone, then the next. All at once and the cheese clumps to itself.
⏲ 10 min
This is the dish. Take the spatula to the bottom of the pan and work in wide figures of eight, lifting the mass and letting it fall. After about ten minutes the resistance suddenly increases and the spatula pulls up an unbroken ribbon. Stop there.
⏲ 10 min
Serve at once. Left to cool it sets into a block you have to cut. Spoon it out in one large heap with the grilled sausage beside it.
⏲ 2 min

Tips & Variations

Variations

Aligot-saucisse: with a grilled Toulouse sausage beside it, which is how the Aubrac serves it — and what the photograph shows.
Truffade: the cousin from the same country, where the potato is sliced rather than mashed and pressed in a pan with the cheese. It builds a cake of potato layers instead of stretching starch, so the two are less alike than the map suggests.
Against fondue and raclette: Swiss cheese fondue holds cheese dispersed and flowing, kept there by wine acid and a little starch. Aligot knits cheese into potato starch and makes a mass. One is dipped into, the other is spooned out. Raclette is neither: nothing is mixed into it at all, and the cheese is melted as itself and scraped off a layer at a time.
How much cheese: the Aubrac goes up to half the weight of the potato. Forty percent is the comfortable floor at home; below that no ribbon forms.

Tips

This is the thing mashed potatoes tells you not to do. That page ends with "Don't overmix — working the starch too much makes it pasty." Quite right, and the gluiness is the point here. Stirred hot and long, amylose comes out of the starch granules and tangles into long chains.
The cheese has to be young. Dairy and heat sorts melting into three behaviours — mozzarella stretches, parmigiano melts in, cheddar goes oily and clumpy. Aligot needs only the first, and that stretch survives only in a cheese whose casein network ripening has not yet cut apart. An aged cheese will give you oil however long you beat it.
What is new is that two networks overlap. The guide's stretching example is mozzarella on a pizza, which is cheese on its own. Here the stretching cheese stretches inside a starch, and the starch stretches with it, so the two become one material.
The temperature window is narrow. 60-70C. Hotter and the fat separates exactly as dairy and heat describes; cooler and it seizes. The burner is barely on.
No blender, no food processor. A blade ruptures the starch all at once and gives paste with no elasticity. Stirring by hand draws the same starch out slowly and builds it into chains, which is a different result from the same ingredients.
It is one of the dishes with no grace period, in serving temperature's sense, alongside fried food, cheese and noodles in broth. It cannot be made ahead; it is the last thing you make.
Leftovers will not stretch again. Cut it thick and fry the slices — it makes a good crisp-edged potato and cheese cake.
Not to be confused with gratin dauphinois, where cream is poured over sliced potato and the starch only has to hold the cream together. Here the starch is the subject.

The basics behind this dish

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