Alex's Celeriac and Swede "Boulangere"
The perfect addition to your Sunday Roast!
On Sunday morning, I nipped down to our fridge at CVB HQ and grabbed a few ingredients for our Sunday dinner.
I'm often experimental with my cooking, making stuff up as I go depending on what ingredients I have lying around. A friend of mine, who used to work at The Fat Duck, mentioned this recipe is as a great way to use celeriac, so I grabbed a few bits and started enthusiastically making my way home to start cooking the best meal of the week, a Sunday roast.
The boulangere was so good, I thought I would share my method with you. We even had the leftovers with some steak on Monday night!
This dish isn't necessarily your classic boulangere, it's a bit of a hybrid of a lot of these sliced-up-roasted-veg dishes, but it tasted good which is the most important thing!
You can exchange the swede for potato if preferred, you could use sage or rosemary as the herb too. Add breadcrumbs to the top or use whichever cheese you've got handy in the fridge. Or you can completely ignore my amateur method and use your own skills to make a better version.
The Ingredients
1 celeriac, peeled and thinly sliced
1 swede, peeled and thinly sliced
1 brown onion, finely diced
2 garlic cloves, finely diced
R-Oil Organic rapeseed oil
Veg Stock
Parmesan
Thyme
The Method
Lightly grease your roasting dish with a bit of the R-Oil (or butter), and place a few sprigs of thyme on the bottom of the dish, before creating the layers of your boulangere.
Add a layer of the celeriac, top with a few of the diced onions and a bit of the garlic, a thin layer of parmesan and some salt and pepper for seasoning, then add a layer of sliced swede, then add the onions, parmesan, garlic, salt and pepper. Keep repeating this process until you've filled the dish or run out of veggies.
Don't put any parmesan on the top layer just yet, you can add a bit later.
Add some vegetable stock so that it's covering about half of the mixture in the dish.
Cover with foil and bake in the oven. We put ours on at 120 and took a nice little stroll to the local pub for a couple of beers while this was cooking, this method is highly recommended. If you want to be quicker, you can put it in at 180 for around 45 minutes.
After 45 minutes, take off the foil and bake for a further 20/30 minutes. It's at this point you can add anything to the top. Parmesan, breadcrumbs, anything you fancy, really.
Cooking time can vary depending on how thinly you slice your veggies. A long and slow initial cook, followed by 20 minutes at a higher temp will get great results.
Enjoy!