Nanou's chocolate cake

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A moist melting cake, very very chocolaty...
271K4.6 1 hour 45 min. June 22^th 2013

Gingerbread

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Maybe this recipe will bring back memories.
273K4.2 1 hour 4 min. February 21^th 2011

Exotic fruit tart

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An exotic fruit tart (bananas, kiwi and pineapple), with crisp pastry and almond cream which are cooked beforehand. It's a rather simple recipe, but the final result will impress your guests.
307K5 2 hours 23 min. May 27^th 2020

Flambéd bananas

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The trick of this recipe is to end up with bananas caramelised on the outside, still firm on the inside, coated with a tasty syrup which is not 95% butter.
314K 14 40 min. February 21^th 2011

Brioche dough

(Found inTextsStagesIngredients)
It's a soft and rich dough, with butter and eggs which give a smooth and incredibly tasty brioche. This is the basic recipe for brioche dough, used for all other brioche-based recipes on the site.
508K 44.2 14 hours 27 min. September 16^th 2020

Clarified butter

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This is a way of melting butter to eliminate all the impurities. The clarified butter can then be heated without spoiling, and is more digestible. It is ideal for cooking at high temperatures where small black specks would spoil the appearance, or for emulsified sauces like béarnaise or mousseline.
448K4.2 2 hours 14 min. June 21^th 2017

Chocolate mousse

(Found inTextsIngredients)
Here is a simple quick recipe for chocolate mousse. It is just necessary to be careful at the final stage, when mixing the melted chocolate and the beaten egg-whites.
466K3.7 40 min. February 21^th 2011

Parcels of fish fillet in spinach

(Found inTextsStagesIngredients)
These parcels are made with small pieces of fish fillet, wrapped in a blanched spinach leaf and lightly fried in butter. They can be served with a salted white wine sabayon (as in the recipe of scallops with crunchy vegetables), a beurre blanc, a dash of olive oil with herbs, or any other sauce of...
230K5 2 hours 23 min. March 18^th 2013

Four quarters

(Found inTextsStagesIngredients)
It's "the simpliest cake in the world", called four quarters, because it's made with 1/4 eggs, 1/4 sugar, 1/4 flour and 1/4 butter.
309K3.7 1 hour 15 min. February 21^th 2011

French croissants

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In this famous and highly technical recipe from a piece of yeast-based flaky dough we are going to cut and shape ("roll") croissants.
608K 24.4 2 hours 34 min. June 26^th 2019

Surprise bread

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This recipe is for a large surprise bread so you can make six layers (48 small sandwiches if you divide each layer in 8), with three different flavours: smoked salmon/lime, smoked ham/butter, mayonnaise/chicken.
688K 84.5 6 hours 24 min. December 27^th 2020

Scallops with crunchy vegetables and wine sabayon

(Found inTextsStagesIngredients)
This is a bed of vegetables cut small, lightly cooked to stay crunchy. The scallops are cut in half and fried, filled with a morsel of foie gras, and served coated with a savoury reduced white wine sabayon. It entails some work, but the result is impresive.
299K4 2 hours 56 min. June 11^th 2011

How to prevent butter burning during cooking

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Butter, which is excellent for fixing flavours in a recipe, burns if the temperature is too high. It darkens and produces unpleasant small black specks (by the way, note that the famous recipe "raie au beurre noir", ray in black butter, is a kind of sacrilege!).
130K 24.1 3 min. February 21^th 2011

How to butter a dish or a mould easily

(Found inTextsStages)
Often when making gratins, crumbles or other oven-cooked dishes, you will need to butter the dish or mould. To butter (or grease) means to rub inside the mould with a knob of butter to prevent the mixture sticking too much. Instead of putting a knob of butter in the dish and wiping with paper, here...
137K4.1 1 min. February 21^th 2011

Quail egg canapés

(Found inTextsStagesIngredients)
This starter is a small canapé consiting of a toasted and buttered bread slice covered with a slice of smoked ham topped with a fried quail egg.
321K5 54 min. February 21^th 2011

Salmon rillettes

(Found inTextsIngredients)
A terrine of two kinds of salmon (cooked and smoked) with butter and lemon.
275K4.3 2 hours 38 min. March 26^th 2013

Béarnaise sauce

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This very tasty sauce, flavoured with tarragon, chervil and shallot, with its hint of acidity, is perfect for grilled fish or meats. Its well-known as a difficult sauce, but here are all the tips that you need to succeed.
331K4 1 hour 6 min. May 22^th 2016

Bechamel sauce

(Found inTextsIngredients)
Bechamel sauce is a classic, made from a cooked butter-flour mix called "roux", where milk is added and slowly cooked. We get a thick sauce, used in many recipes.
412K4.3 18 min. February 21^th 2011

Scrambled eggs with butter-fried bread and fresh spinach

(Found inTextsStagesIngredients)
Fresh spinach, butter-fried bread and scrambled eggs: simply delicious.
285K3.8 2 hours March 18^th 2013

Puff or flaky pastry (pâte feuilletée)

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Puff pastry is an incredible assembly of thin layers of butter enclosed in thin layers of dough. After cooking this give a succession of thin crisp pastry leaves that produce exceptional desserts or pies. It's a jewel of French patisserie. Making your own puff pastry is not very difficult, it's just...
437K 63.3 2 hours 45 min. January 19^th 2011

The recipes

Hints for using the recipes: how to read and recreate them.
165K3.6 August 29^th 2023

Start off well to cook well

How to get off to a good start in cooking; what equipment and basic ingredients you should always have to hand.
303K 13.6 August 29^th 2023

Advices for writing your recipes

On-line document for writing a personal recipe.
55K4.4 August 29^th 2023

Soured dough

Underneath this strange name lies a baking secret: when you want to give a bread or pastry dough (without leaven, but with yeast) a certain percentage of fermented dough must be added, i.e. the same dough made the day before, and left to ferment overnight in the refrigerator.
143K 24.1 February 23^th 2024

Butter doesn't make you fat, unless you eat too much of it.

Whenever I'm discussing cooking and recipes, there is one idea which comes up frequently, like this: "Oh no! But that's got butter in it" (I should add, for the sake of accuracy, that this is something I hear more frequently from women, who are almost all concerned with keeping their figure). ...
38K4.5 March 26^th 2012

Properly cooked! (the taste)

Going out to a restaurant is getting harder at the moment. In France, at least, you have to try and find one that has agreed to pass on the new lower rate of VAT at anything other than a symbolic level, and there aren't many. And then, most importantly, you have to find a good one: one where you...
13K 14.6 February 6^th 2011

Maillard reactions

This subject cropped up recently in a discussion with my three charming nieces; do you know what Maillard reactions are? With a name like that, they could well be some principle in mechanics, but in fact the term applies to something much closer to all of us: it's what gives food more flavour...
32K4 January 28^th 2015

Cream and sauces

Have you ever wondered why making beautiful tasty sauces is so easy when you use cream? First of all, we need to be aware that some flavours only dissolve in water, while others only dissolve in fats. This phenomenon leads to this kind of accident: If you put a chocolate mousse uncovered...
17K4.4 October 15^th 2012

Different kinds of pastry and dough

When cooking in general, and particularly in baking, we can make and use many different kinds of pastry and dough. All built on the same "base": flour - a powder to which we add fat, liquid or both to produce the dough which is then cooked. .
105K 14.0 November 6^th 2012

The art of the charlotte

In cooking, a charlotte is a delicious moulded dessert, with biscuits around the outside that have been soaked in a flavoured syrup, filled with a light cream or mousse. The charlotte is left to set in the fridge before being turned out and served in slices. It is very light and a lovely sweet...
38K4.3 February 27^th 2013

5 really useful cooking tips

Cooking is about recipes, of course, but it is also an impressive collection of small gestures, ways of doing things, knowing what to do and what not to do. All these little tips and tricks can be very important: they can affect the way a recipe turns out, simply because you did just the right...
19K4.9 March 29^th 2016

Children and vegetables

This is an attempt to address the question that all parents and grandparents, maybe you included, face so often: how can we get children to like vegetables? And at the same time, we might get away from the familiar, day-in, day-out round of pasta, chips, toast.. Well, I can hear you say, it's...
11K5 March 9^th 2017

Lemon in recipes

Let's take a look at the lemon, yellow or green, which is used in a whole host of recipes, both sweet and savoury. It brings both its taste, and the small acidity that makes its charm. Mind you, I'm not talking about lemon used as an anti-oxidant that prevents it from turning black, or to just spice...
12K5 October 23^th 2017

Vegetable soups

As I write this post, we are slowly slipping into winter, and this late autumn is the perfect time for soups, especially vegetable ones. Soups, that somewhat "soft" dish, often associated with our childhood, infallible remedy against a cold evening or an ugly weather, or both.
7,4155 December 5^th 2017

Fats for cooking

If you need to fry or sear anything a frying pan or saucepan, the temperature is likely to be high. In particular, I have cooking red meat in mind. In this case, what should fat should we use? And at what temperature?
16K5 January 23^th 2018

The golden-brown finish on puff pastry

Let's take a look at the tricky matter of producing puff pastry with an attractive, golden-brown finish. French pastry chefs call this "dorure" (literally, "gilding"). Behind this quirky term there lurks a real problem (and the solution): when using puff pastry (pâte feuilletée) for a pie, or...
40K 24.6 February 8^th 2018

For well opened (puffed) cakes

It's always nice to have a well puffed up cake after baking, not only will it taste good but it looks great too. Let's see how to get this beautiful shape almost every time.
27K4.2 January 23^th 2019

The cake and the raisins

When you bake a cake, like a cake or pound cake, you may have already encountered this thorny problem: How to make sure that the raisins, or the candied fruits, or any other small filling, do not fall to the bottom of the pan during the baking process?
10K4.7 May 31^th 2019

Baking cakes

Where we see that to put a cake in the oven, once the dough is finished and in its mould, there is no hurry and that the cold is your friend.
39K4.1 June 28^th 2019

Double cooking of vegetables

When you cook vegetables, it's not easy to capture and preserve the flavours. It is easy to undercook, but you can make up for it, or overcook, and then it is unfortunately a bit cooked (in the sense of "ruined"). But above all, how to get the maximum of the taste of the vegetable in the pan, then...
18K4.1 July 12^th 2019

When should you salt?

In the kitchen, we salt very frequently, almost all the time, and we must be careful because this salt can influence the texture of what you are cooking. I'm not going to talk about the amount of salt here, that's for another time, but rather about : When do you salt?
12K4.5 August 13^th 2019

Baking a cake at the right time

When you make a cake, which most likely contains butter, a cake for example, chances are that as soon as the batter is finished, you put it in the pan and bake it immediately. Classic, everyone does it like that, and then if, on top of that, you have a few kids around you who are getting...
15K4.5 April 18^th 2020

The perfect boiled egg

Making boiled eggs is always a delight and it pleases the young and old alike. This little transgenerational side puts them on the list of "things to do on Sunday evening when you don't know what to do" in many families (including mine)... That said, it's not that simple, you have to pay...
12K4.7 January 30^th 2021

Let's go easy on the salt

In terms of cooking, I'm probably not teaching you much, salt is ubiquitous, we put it in almost all our dishes, in varying amounts depending on our taste, some like salty, others less, others still not. Its main role is the flavor, the taste, we say that it is a flavor enhancer, ie it reveals the...
4,5354.8 February 20^th 2021