Roscoff salad

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This Roscoff salad, named after the pretty little town on the Brittany coast, is a delicious mix of regional ingredients: sliced cauliflower, smoked sausages and, of course, onions.

Poached eggs

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Poached eggs are cooked, without the shell, in barely simmering (nearly boiling) water. White should be firm and yolk soft, that's the difficulty. This recipe teaches you how to succeed with three important points.

Preserved lemons

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For this recipe, the lemons are sliced first (this makes them easier to use later), then salted to drain off the juice before being bottled in herb-flavoured olive oil. These preserved lemons can be used in all sorts of dishes, especially with fish and poultry.

Breton sablé biscuit dough

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Brittany is famous for its rich, sandy textured "sablé" biscuits. Similar to shortbread, they are made with lots of butter and egg yolk, and just a hint of vanilla. This dough can be made into simple biscuits – already delicious on their own – or used as the base for tarts and other desserts.

Quick orange marmalade

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Just oranges (organic) and sugar in this simplified marmalade recipe.

Vegetable tartare

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This amazing recipe from a great chef is surprisingly straightforward to make. You will need lots of different raw vegetables. These are diced really small, then bound with mayonnaise.

Crunchy salad

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Crunchy vegetables, pine nuts and rice with a rémoulade dressing.

Courgette tart with mint

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Fried rounds of courgette in a puff pastry case with a feta and mint filling. You will find that this combination of feta with mint gives an agreeable fresh lift to this tart.

Blackcurrant, vanilla and lime verrine

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Vanilla-lime, confectioner's custard and blackcurrant coulis, topped with a layer of whipped cream (chantilly) and dusted with a little matcha green tea powder. Light and flavoursome.

Fish "à la Bordelaise"

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Fish "à la Bordelaise" is a fillet topped with a crust of breadcrumbs, herbs and onions cooked in white wine, then oven-baked until golden brown. It is a classic frozen family meal that many French children have grown up with, but here is a home-made version that is far better.

Mackerel rillettes

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This recipe for mackerel rillettes (or potted mackerel) starts with poaching the fish. The flesh is then taken off the bones and forked into a seasoned mixture of butter, mustard, cream and lemon juice. In France this is...

Risotto-style celeriac

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In this recipe, the celeriac is cooked rather like for a risotto: diced small, softened in olive oil with onion, then cooked in chicken stock. The dish is finished with cream and maybe a little cancoillotte (or other creamy cheese). It is delicious on its own or to accompany meat.

Norwegian tartines

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Scandinavian-style bread with smoked trout, and a fresh topping with herbs and shallots.

How to peel pistachios

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If you buy pistachios shelled but still in their skins (cheaper than ready peeled), you shouldn't use them like this. They need to be "skinned", removing the skin which is pretty unpleasant to eat. Here's a fairly easy way to do it.

Creamy artichokes

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This hearty vegetable recipe uses the whole globe artichoke (heart and leaves), combining the creamy artichoke texture with the crunch of sautéed potatoes.

Vanilla ice cream

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Rediscover the full flavour of a real vanilla ice cream with this classical recipe.

How to prepare green beans

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Here's how to turn freshly bought (or picked) green beans into ready-to-use vegetables.

Home-made terrine of foie gras

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Preparing your own home-made foie gras from raw is immensively satisfying: good quality liver and a simply amazing flavour – much better than anything you can buy. This recipe is a bit tricky, but quite within everyone's grasp, as long as you follow the 3 most delicate stages carefully. These are, in order: de-veining the liver, seasoning and cooking. As usual, I have explained every stage of the recipe in full, with photos to help you.

Baked Alaska

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The name may be odd, but Baked Alaska is an elegant dessert. The core of this version is a "sandwich" of vanilla ice cream and blackcurrant sorbet between 2 layers of sponge soaked in rum-flavoured syrup. This is then covered in a layer of meringue and put in a very hot oven for just a few minutes to brown the outside. The magical and delicious effect comes from the contrast between the hot meringue and the cold ice cream and cake inside. It is a little tricky to get right, but the main elements...

Bread oven

Building a bread oven was until a few years ago a job for the professionals. But now you can buy a kind of kit which allows you to build your own bred oven without professional masonry know-how. You should know that the kits only provide the main part of oven, the hearth, where you light the fire...
October 15^th 20241.19 M3.6

What is this site, and who am I?

The important thing is the content of the site, the recipes and information you can find, but some of you want to know who is behind it all.
November 16^th 2025242 K 44.2

A Mendeleiev periodic table in 3D

It's an old idea that was in my mind for years: making a real periodic table of Mendeleiev (who always fascinate me) in 3D, where in each element box, there is some atoms (at least) of this element.
August 24^th 2024220 K 13.6

Make your own hot-wire or styrofoam cutter

A filicoupeur is a hot-cutting tool for polystyrene, which can be used to enhance any piece of polystyrene you've salvaged, and to do all kinds of things with it: model building, model making, arts and crafts, and so on. See here how to make your own.
February 20^th 2024534 K 433.5

Fried potatoes or fried mash?

In cooking there are a lot of dishes that appear to be extremely simple but which can actually prove to be very tricky. Amongst those that I'm aware of having this reputation are omelette and fried potatoes.
February 6^th 201125 K4.5

Should a sausage be pricked before cooking?

If you are using sausages in a recipe, you may have already asked yourself the question: Should you prick it before cooking it, or not? You will certainly find as many opinions "you should prick" as "you should not". Let's try to untangle all this.
September 29^th 201848 K4.1

Stand mixer tools

Whether we call it a stand mixer, food processor, or simply refer to it by brand (Kenwood, KitchenAid, etc.), this machine is a valuable tool for amateur cooks, bakers or pastry chefs like ourselves. All these machines come supplied with 3 different tools. Let’s take a look at their names and...
November 2^nd 201937 K4.5

The 3 secrets of successful mousses

When you make a traditional mousse, that is to say without using a siphon, whatever the recipe, it's always the same principle: on one side you have a dense mixture, very tasty, and on the other side egg whites beaten until stiff. All the difficulty of the success of a mousse, it will be to mix the...
April 3^rd 20219,6394.6

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 202212 K5

In Praise of the Vegetable Mill

When a recipe or preparation calls for something solid to be pureed, as in a soup for example, the natural reflex is to take out the blender and plunge it into the saucepan. This works very well in most cases, but there are times when you'd like to puree something and at the same time remove the...
July 12^th 202311 K5

It's spinning too fast!

When you need to grate or slice vegetables, you generally use an electric machine that does all the work: a food processor, a mixer with a "slicer" extension or similar. Are these machines really suitable? Generally speaking, yes of course, but there's one criterion that often poses a problem,...
November 12^th 202311 K5

Who's making the croissants?

When you look at a bakery from the outside, you naturally think that in the bakery, the bakers make the bread, and in the laboratory, the pastry chefs make the cakes. It's very often like that, with each of these professions having quite different ways of working, but sometimes there's also one...
November 23^th 202595