Tim Walz's hot dish recipe is heavy on the tots, light on the pretense

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Article: https://www.washingtonpost.com/food/2024/08/22/tim-walz-hotdish-tater-tots-candidate/
Gift link: https://wapo.st/4dNF1KJ

Recipe link: https://www.washingtonpost.com/recipes/tim-walzs-tater-tot-hotdish/
Gift link: https://wapo.st/3MbNcnT



At some point while preparing Tim Walz’s Turkey Trot Tater Tot Hotdish, I was struck by the self-effacing nature of the Minnesota governor’s recipe. The instructions call for you to make a roux, but they don’t call it a roux. They ask you to add milk and half-and-half to the roux to create a béchamel, but they don’t call it a béchamel. They ask you to add cheese to the (admittedly enhanced) béchamel to turn it into a mornay sauce, but they don’t call it mornay sauce.

Tucked into Walz’s Upper Midwest hot dish, in other words, are techniques that would not be foreign to anyone with a copy of “Mastering the Art of French Cooking.” I’m loath to make pronouncements about a dish I knew so little about three weeks ago, but based on conversations with food-writing peers and my own spasmodic Googling, I think it’s fair to say that hot dish, at least historically, has leaned more into manufactured foods than into Mmes Child, Bertholle and Beck and their authoritative cookbook.

Walz’s recipe is no ordinary hot dish. It won the 2014 Minnesota Congressional Delegation Hotdish Competition, back when Walz was a U.S. congressman representing the state’s first district. The Democrat beat out nine other entries, including a dessert variation from Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D), which she dubbed, with a kind of prosaic country-radio whimsy, “It’s So Cold My Hotdish Froze.” In announcing the winner, the Minnesota Star Tribune wrote, “Walz’s recipe requires a do-it-yourself cream of mushroom soup, which probably goes a long way in explaining its appeal.”



Walz, 60, is now, of course, Vice President Kamala Harris’s running mate, and as such, pundits and reporters have been dissecting every aspect of his life, practically from the moment he was born in West Point, Neb. This relentless newsgathering has included a healthy curiosity about the Walz’s go-to dishes, a reliably blue-collar roster that he promotes as if reading off a list of signature foods from his native state and his adopted one: The governor digs a good Juicy Lucy, runzas, cinnamon rolls dunked in chili, cookie salad and, as noted, hot dish (sometimes condensed into one word, hotdish, as if careful not to violate our personal space).

This can warm you up this winter.