So I’ve been doing something a little weird today.

The New York Times website has a page that shows you how to make Pommes Anne, a delicious looking potato recipe from France. I’ve been obsessing over that page today.

If you’re interested, the page can be found here. It’s behind a subscription wall, but it’s a free signup. They don’t email me anything and they don’t ask for money. If you’re willing to sign up for a login, you can see the page yourself.

If you’re unable or unwilling to sign up to see for yourself, here’s the basic gist of how to make the dish. It’s labor intensive, using simple ingredients, but the end result looks delicious.

Start by preheating your oven and placing a rimmed baking sheet on the rack so it will heat up with the oven. Cut Russet potatoes into roughly evenly sized and shaped cylinders, then use a mandoline to slice each potato into thin slices. (If you like, you can add slices of garlic to the dish, but the traditional recipe doesn’t include the garlic. Slice the garlic cloves with the mandoline just as you did the potatoes.) Blot the potatoes dry.

Put a cast iron skillet on the stove and turn it to medium. Add clarified butter and begin placing the potato slices in concentric, overlapping circles to fill the bottom of the skillet. Add salt and pepper to taste, then drizzle more clarified butter over the potatoes. Add a second layer of potatoes (adding the garlic slices evenly spaced across the top of the layer, if you chose to add garlic), salt, pepper, and clarified butter. Continue adding layers like this until the skillet is full – potatoes, garlic, salt, pepper, clarified butter. This will eventually form a dome. Occasionally shake the skillet to prevent the potatoes from sticking to it.

Butter the bottom of a pan and use it to press down firmly on the potatoes. Cover with foil, then cover the foil with a lid. Bake for 20 minutes.

Remove the skillet from the oven, remove the lid and the foil, and press down firmly on the potatoes again with the pan. Return the skillet to the oven, uncovered, and bake for 20-25 minutes, or until the sides are dark brown when lifted away from the skillet.

Remove the skillet from the oven and press down firmly on the potatoes with the pan, then use the pan to hold the potatoes in place while you drain any excess butter off the dish. Use a thin offset spatula to carefully run around the sides and bottom of the skillet to release anything that’s stuck on, then turn out onto a serving dish. Slice into wedges and serve. The end result will be crisp on the outside with a mashed potato-like interior.

I haven’t actually tried this recipe, but it sound absolutely fantastic. We’re short the cast iron skillet, the mandoline, and the thin offset spatula, but as soon as we can pick these items up – and can figure out where we’ll store them in our tiny kitchen – I want to try this dish.

There are secrets to this dish to make it turn out perfect, and the webpage goes into detail about those. There’s even a video that shows you the process, and that video is magic.

Most cooking videos available on the internet tend to rush you through the whole process of cooking, using time-lapse photography to compress the whole thing down to an easily digested TL;DR-like nugget of a minute or so. The video for Pommes Anna is somewhat longer, but the process is unhurried, and the shots are shown in real time. Doing this shows the complexity of preparing the dish and also gives the video a respectful feeling to it – you can tell that preparing this dish is a labor of love, not a quick meal on the go. It’s amazing to watch and the finished dish has a lovely presentation. The video is as much a work of art as the dish itself.

I don’t know why I’ve been obsessing over this recipe today. It’s done nothing but make me hungry for something I can’t eat for some time. But it’s gotten me looking forward to the day that we have everything we need to make it.