Choux pastry (pâte à choux)

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Choux pastry is used for making profiteroles, eclairs and other small pastries.

Bechamel sauce

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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.

Moussaka

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Here is my personal version of this famous recipe from the eastern Mediterranean. It's a kind of gratin, made with layers of aubergines, cooked meat with tomatos and bechamel sauce with cheese.

Endives

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A very classic recipe, but which can easily fail due to two main errors: too much water in bottom of dish because endives give off a lot, and endives that are too bitter so that children hate it. Here is a method which avoids these two problems.

Croque-monsieur

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A classic of French "street food" or bistros: a slice of ham between two slices of bread spread with béchamel sauce. The sandwich is then sprinkled with cheese and toasted in the oven.

Bolognaise lasagne

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Lasagne is an Italian pasta that comes in rectangular sheets. These are used to separate layers of filling, like a large savoury oven-baked millefeuille. A bolognaise lasagne combines bechamel sauce, minced meat and tomato sauce.

Potato and broccoli gratin

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A very simple recipe: a layer of potatoes, a layer of broccoli, bechamel sauce and grated cheese.

Gratin slices with spinach

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A slice of bread with a gratin of bechamel containing hard-boiled egg and topped with cheese, served with fresh spinach.

Cheese Soufflé

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A soufflé sounds difficult to make, but it's really not. The important thing is to break down the steps carefully: you start by making a béchamel sauce, then add cheese, then egg yolks (and it becomes a Mornay sauce), and finally the beaten egg whites. All that's left to do is place in a well-buttered and floured oven.

Spinach and hard-boiled egg gratin

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In this gratin, spinach and hard-boiled eggs are combined with bechamel sauce and topped with grated cheese.

Endive gratin with cancoillotte

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Here is a variation on the classic French recipe for endives with ham. This recipe uses cancoillotte cheese instead of the usual béchamel sauce.

Ham "friand" pie

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A "friand" (the word means "fond"!) is a sort of French pasty. This pie-style version has two layers of puff pastry filled with a mixture of cheese, ham and bechamel sauce.

Italian style gratin

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This gratin is built up in layers: sautéed courgettes, minced beef, bechamel sauce, fried tomatoes, more meat and bechamel, then grated cheese for a brown topping.

Gratin of purple artichokes

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This is a very simple recipe: just potatoes, purple artichokes, a sprinkling of Parmesan and into the oven it goes...

Spinach on toast with bechamel

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A slice of buttered toast, layers of spinach and sliced hard-boiled egg, topped with bechamel sauce and grated cheese, then browned in the oven.

Leek and Mimolette tart

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This baked tart has a shortcrust pastry case, filled with a layer of chopped, braised leeks topped with a bechamel sauce with eggs and Mimolette cheese.

Spinach Croque-monsieur

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A croque-monsieur is a French toasted sandwich. Here, the 2 slices of buttered bread are filled with bechamel sauce, hard-boiled eggs, blanched spinach and melted cheese. The assembled sandwich is popped in the oven to toast the bread and melt the cheese.

Harvest Gratin

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Purple artichokes, cauliflower and mozzarella combined with bechamel sauce in a gratin to cheer up the end of summer.

Stuffed artichokes au gratin

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For this recipe we'll attempt to use the whole of the artichoke: the heart, of course, but also the leaf bases in bechamel sauce with mushrooms and shallots, as a tasty filling for the hearts.

Scallops au gratin

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Scallops rapidly pan-fried, then arranged in shells on a bed of finely chopped leeks, topped with a bechamel sauce and browned in the oven.

The (small) miracle of béchamel sauce

Making a béchamel sauce is going to confront you with a little miracle that happens every time: You pour milk over a roux, it's very liquid, you stir over a low heat, and then all of a sudden, miracle, the sauce sets, it thickens, you've got your béchamel. Let's see what happened.
August 27^th 20246,4224

Let's rehabilitate the burger

The burger is a sandwich that is very fashionable at the moment, and as for all other sandwiches, the worst (often) rubs shoulders with the best (much more rare). In principle, I'm probably not teaching you anything, it's a sandwich made of a small round bun, rather soft, like a sandwich bread,...
April 10^th 20217,4464.9

The super powers of cornstarch

I start this new year by evoking an old product, that you most probably have in your cupboards, a white powder, often in a small cardboard package with a slightly outdated look, only the "gluten free" is relatively recent, it is simply cornstarch, hence its name of maïzena. It's used for a lot...
January 14^th 202212 K

Sorrel and its cooking

Do you like sorrel? This delicious plant with its beautiful bright green leaves, whose subtle acidity goes very well with many other things, including in particular cream, to form with salmon the emblematic dish of the 70's, "Salmon with sorrel" on which was built the beginning of the fame of the...
March 19^th 20229,5815

Parmesan cheese crusts

If you use Parmesan cheese (Parmigiano Reggiano) in your recipes, you may have already noticed: when you grate it, it becomes (very) difficult near the crust, especially if it is a slightly aged parmesan, as the cheese gets harder and harder. So we stop grating, leaving some crust on top, and a...
September 14^th 202215 K4.8

Half milk, half cream

In a multitude of recipes, savoury or sweet, milk is used as the main ingredient, or at least as the main liquid ingredient. Milk is used instead of water, for example, because milk contains a proportion of fat, which adds roundness and softness to the recipe. This mellowness is very pleasant on...
February 27^th 20247,1815