Confectioner's custard (Crème pâtissière, or French pastry cream)

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Quite similar to crème anglaise but much thicker. It is used in many pastries like choux pastry (pâte à choux) or millefeuille.

How to cook hard-boiled eggs properly

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A hard-boiled egg is properly cooked when: shell is not broken, white and yolk are firm, yolk is only yellow with no traces of green around it. Here are some tips to make this easy.

How to break a chocolate bar into small pieces

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Most of the time chocolate needs to be broken into small pieces before use, because it melts faster and more evenly. Here is a way to do it quickly.

Small ratatouille with

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It's a hotch-potch of vegetables, cooked in two stages, onto which eggs are broken and cooked until the white only is just firm.

Lemon Meringue Pie Verrines

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This is a new twist on the classic lemon meringue pie. All the elements are there: sweet crunchy bits, meringue and lemon custard, but presented in layers in a glass.

Eggs with tomatoes and courgettes

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Melting courgettes with tomatoes and onions into which the eggs are slid carefully, without breaking the yolk, and cooked gently. The secret of success in this recipe is to combine the tomatoes and courgettes when they are really soft, and cook the egg white, leaving the yolk still runny.

Chestnut Fudge Cupcakes

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This recipe allows you to enjoy a delicious brownie-style combination of melting fudgy texture and cake, with the distinct flavours of chocolate and chestnut purée.

Mushroom and artichoke omelette

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This French "broken" omelette is not neatly folded like a classic omelette. There is more filling than egg: mushrooms and artichokes here, pan-fried with spring onions. It can be served flat, like a Spanish omelette, but I prefer the more original broken look.

Dipping bread with cheese

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In France, "pain trempette" (dipping bread) is a loaf made to be broken easily into bite-sized morsels, perfect for serving with any dip. The dough is fairly soft and I have added shallots and fried bacon bits. The dip shown here is a hot box Mont d'Or, but there are plenty of other possibilities.

How to seal a terrine or casserole dish

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The French have a term for it: "luter", which means to seal around the lid of a cooking dish with dough. The dough forms a crust and hermetically seals in all the steam and flavours while the dish is cooking in the oven. This is a good way to concentrate flavours. The dish is brought to the table sealed and the crust broken open in front of diners so that everyone can share the delicious smells as they are released at that fleeting moment. It is possible to use ordinary bread dough, but an...

Peach and blackcurrant sundae

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Peach and blackcurrant flavours work well together. Here is an indulgent sundae that makes the most of this: poached peaches with blackcurrant sorbet and Chantilly cream. Delicious!

Lambé salad

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Lambé's salad is a rather original salad with chickpeas, mimosa eggs, cheese and, above all, a crunchy buckwheat pancake, broken into small pieces and added at the last moment.

Broken eggs with mushrooms

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For this quick and easy recipe, we pour beaten eggs over sautéed mushrooms and bacon.

Sbrisolona

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Sbrisolona is a traditional Italian cake, originally from Lombardy. It's a crumbly, crisp shortbread made from corn flour, hazelnuts and butter, which is broken by hand into irregular pieces rather than cut with a knife.

Warm broccoli and Tuna Salad

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In this recipe, the broccoli is served only just cooked and still warm with tuna, chopped shallot and cherry tomatoes in a good vinaigrette dressing.

Bounty-style tart for Alison

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This Bounty-style tart combines, as you might expect, chocolate and coconut in a sweetcrust pastry case.

Mousse with two chocolates

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Chocolate mousse is a great classic home-made dessert. Here's a version using two different chocolates (dark and milk) with a hint of vanilla, that owes much to a recipe by Christophe Michalak.

Green beans with tomatoes

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Cut green beans simmered with tomatoes and mixed with onions and lightly fried lardons (or small pieces of bacon).

Chocolate madeleines

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Simple and delicious, goes very well with tea or coffee.

Chocolate Chantilly

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If we look at the more scientific side of Chantilly cream we can see that it's mainly cream, and cream is a mix of very small droplets of milk fat and water, which is called an emulsion. When we whip this emulsion, we incorporate air into it and so create a mousse or foam. In the end Chantilly is a foaming emulsion. The interest of this observation is that we can imagine doing the same not only with cream. We just need water and fat. And it works, so you can make chocolate Chantilly. Please...

bayleaf

Bay is a kind of laurel, grown as a shrub or small tree, of which the leaves are used, fresh or dry (other laurels are toxic). Bayleaves are used frequently in mediterraneen cooking.
August 29^th 202396 K4.2

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...
March 29^th 201625 K4.9

When preparing artichokes for cooking, you may well already know that we often need to remove the first round of leaves, if they are tatty or dirty, as well as the inedible stalk. The operative word here is “remove” , rather than “cut off”.
October 25^th 201655 K4.3

The next instalment in my life as an apprentice baker at the French INBP professional school. I’m now halfway through training and it’s still as exciting as ever, and exhausting – but maybe I’m just getting old, or both… Anyway, a few days ago we had to go through the mock CAP exam. A sort...
May 1^st 201823 K4.4

Let's take a look at an old baker's legend: You may have already read that somewhere in a recipe that uses baker's yeast(bread, pastries, leavened doughs in general) it is often specified "Don't put salt in contact with the yeast, you'll kill it (the yeast)"! Well, that's a belief, and there are...
March 15^th 201976 K4.3

It may have already happened to you: You prepare a sauce, a cream, a ganache etc. and then suddenly or almost, the whole thing dissociates, and from a smooth mixture that you were preparing with love, you end up with a horrible thing with a more or less solid part and another liquid part. It's...
January 22^th 202215 K4.9

Brisures

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Remaining parts of a product, after cutting, which are edible but not very attractive.
14 K4.1