How to succeed in making sabayon (syllabub)

(Found inTexts)
A sabayon is a delicious and delicate preparation based on egg yolks and sugar, with a liquid added (wine, alcohol, fruit juice, etc), which is then whipped in a bain-marie until it is both light and smooth. Usually sabayon is sweet (syllabub), but you can make it savoury, in which case there is...
November 12^th 2017929 K 54 20 min.

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...
March 18^th 2013234 K5 2 hours 25 min.

Foie gras cured in salt

(Found inTextsStagesIngredients)
This a quite different preparation from the terrine of foie gras, this time it does not go in the oven, the liver is salted for 48 hours and it "cooks" (or cures) in this way.
December 23^th 2017558 K5 2 days 16 hours 30 min.

Icelandic-style fish and vegetable pie

(Found inTextsStagesIngredients)
This recipe is made from vegetables cut small and blanched, mixed with pieces of salt-cod and cream, then baked in small soup dishes with a puff pastry lid.
September 7^th 2018274 K3.9 4 hours 35 min.

Tomato tart

(Found inTextsStagesIngredients)
This tart is very easy and quick to prepare.
January 13^th 2011275 K4.8 1 hour 20 min.

Sorrel soup

(Found inTextsStagesIngredients)
Smooth with a slight sharpness, this soup has a very particular taste.
May 8^th 2011393 K3.8 1 hour 4 min.

How to cook hard-boiled eggs properly

(Found inTexts)
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.
November 4^th 20131.37 M 65 1 hour 30 min.

Surprise bread

(Found inTexts)
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.
December 27^th 2020697 K 84.5 6 hours 25 min.

Salmon "en papillote" with small vegetables

(Found inTextsStagesIngredients)
A fresh salmon escalope just salt and pepper with small dices of small vegetables.
June 22^th 2011241 K 15 1 hour 30 min.

Morteau sausage

(Found inTextsStages)
In this recipe, Morteau sausages are cooked on a bed of chopped potatoes. The trick is to cook the Morteau sausage slowly, so that its delicious, smoky flavor descends on the potatoes, which are crispy on the outside and melt-in-the-mouth on the inside, a pure delight.
September 29^th 20241.22 M 34.1 1 hour 35 min.

Potted meat (rillettes)

(Found inTextsStagesIngredients)
Potted meat (rillettes) is cooked long and slow in fat. Rillettes can be of pork or duck. Here is the pork version.
October 3^rd 2019434 K 25 6 hours 50 min.

Choux pastry (pâte à choux)

(Found inTextsIngredients)
Choux pastry is used for making profiteroles, eclairs and other small pastries.
February 13^th 2022528 K4.5 1 hour 4 min.

Shortcrust pastry (pâte brisée)

(Found inTextsIngredients)
This is for sweet or savoury tarts, quiches or pies. The difference between this and sweetcrust pastry (pâte sablée) is in the very small amount of sugar and the absence of ground almonds.
December 29^th 2019378 K 24 35 min.

Express sauerkraut

(Found inTextsStagesIngredients)
Sauerkraut (choucroute in French) is a traditional Alsatian recipe. It consists of fermented cabbage slowly cooked with white wine, potatoes and a variety of salted pork meats. This is a simplified and fairly quick version.
February 21^th 2011357 K 13.9 2 hours 25 min.

Poached eggs

(Found inTextsStages)
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.
January 8^th 2013309 K5 2 hours 40 min.

When to add salt to cooking water?

(Found inTextsStages)
Is it better to salt cooking water, for vegetables for example, at the beginning when it is cold or when it boils? I always heard that one should salt "after", when water is boiling, because if it is salted "before" it will take longer to boil. True or false? Let's try the experiment...
July 25^th 2017143 K4 15 min.

Pan-fried potatoes

(Found inTextsStagesIngredients)
What could be simpler than fried potatoes? No need of a recipe for that! Quite right, but it's also very easy to end up making fried mash instead. Here are the main pitfalls to avoid.
February 3^rd 2011294 K4.5 1 hour 40 min.

Leek and tuna loaf

(Found inTextsStagesIngredients)
This loaf is a savoury cake (quite popular in France) made with tinned tuna and leeks that have been lightly cooked with shallot.
October 3^rd 2010190 K4.4 1 hour 20 min.

Ocean bread

(Found inTexts)
The idea for this bread was inspired by an amusing coincidence: the proportion of salt needed for good bread is 35 g of salt per litre of water, which just happens to be the exact concentration of salt in the Atlantic Ocean. So it's possible to make bread using sea water to provide all the salt...
October 24^th 2017169 K 63.8 5 hours 7 min.

Tomato tatin

(Found inTextsStages)
A savoury shortcrust pastry with Parmesan is used to cover tomatoes cooked in two stages, first in the pan, then in the oven. As for a classic tart tatin, the whole thing is then turned upside down.
December 5^th 2010142 K4.8 2 hours 35 min.

Other cookery websites

List of my other favourite sites.
August 29^th 2023195 K3.9

Ice-cream and sorbets

Making homemade ice cream may seem complex, but with the right methods and a few tricks, you can achieve a creamy texture and incomparable flavors. On this page, we'll be revealing the secrets of successful homemade ice cream, guiding you step by step through the various stages of preparation. ...
August 12^th 2024433 K4.0

Making your own bread

You'll find a whole range of bread and pastry recipes on this site, but before you get started, perhaps you'd like to know more about the subject, get some tips and tricks, and find out what the main mistakes beginners make? If so, this page is for you.
August 22^th 2024565 K 63.9

Homemade plancha

The plancha is a cooking method that originated in Spain. It consists of a very hot metal plate on which food, usually cut in small pieces, is cooked with little fat.Contact with the hot plate means that cooking is very rapid, only a few minutes, and there is an obvious "cooked" side. Food is well...
June 3^rd 2024258 K 43.7

My best addresses...

Quite a few of you often ask me where I can find this or that? or is such and such a thing a good buy? or which brand is best for this or that? On this page, I'm going to group together my good addresses for suppliers of this or that product or utensil, and good books on the subjects that interest...
August 29^th 2023300 K3.9

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 2024201 K 13.6

Small history of elements classification

The road to Mendeleev's table of tables has taken centuries. Here's a brief chronology.
August 24^th 202441 K3.9

Start off well to cook well

What do I need to get started in the kitchen? First of all, a good website! That's it, you're there ;-), then a minimum of equipment, and the few products you should always have in your cupboards or fridge. Here are a few things to help you make your choices.
August 29^th 2023308 K 13.6

Advices for writing your recipes

If you choose to submit one of your recipes, you'll need to do so via a form (accessible when you're logged in), in which you'll need to enter all the information about the recipe. Please note that in order to log in, you must first create an account. Here are some tips on how to fill in the various...
August 29^th 202358 K4.4

Flours

At the most basic level, wheat grain is put through a mill, which produces a white-ish powder flour... Well, actually it's not quite that simple. First of all we need to distinguish between the different grains that can be made into flour: wheat of course, but also rye, barley, buckwheat, etc. So we...
June 3^rd 2024728 K 413.6

Salt and yeast

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 201969 K4.3

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?
August 13^th 201913 K4.5

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...
February 20^th 20215,1584.8

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 201121 K4.5

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...
January 28^th 201533 K4

Preservative oil, an asset for taste

When you prepare a dish using an ingredient that has been preserved in fat, for example a springtime mixed salad with tuna in oil or sun-dried tomatoes, you're probably going to make a french dressing (vinaigrette) next. In that case, why not use the preserved oil from the tuna or tomatoes?
June 5^th 20243,9955

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). ...
March 26^th 201239 K4.5

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. .
November 6^th 2012106 K 14.0

The secret of cooking until "done"

This is a real chef's skill: being able to look at a fish fillet cooking and say, "Stop – that's enough, it's cooked". I always admire this ability to see at a glance if something is done. It is what sets the professionals apart from us mere amateurs. And it's true that how fish is cooked is...
November 26^th 201216 K4.4

Foie gras without force-feeding: it can be done

I adore foie gras... I willingly admit it, I adore foie gras: the texture, the taste, the festive aspect – I enjoy all of it. I really love eating it, preparing it and, most of all, sharing what I have made with my family over Christmas and New Year. ...but then I begin to have doubts Of...
December 15^th 201445 K4.4

Perpetual stock

It's something you have probably have done yourself: cooked or pre-cooked vegetables before adding them to a recipe. This is almost always done the same way: peel the chosen vegetables (carrots, for example), cut them up, boil them in salted water (using a tablespoon or so of coarse salt per litre),...
November 22^th 201625 K5

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...
March 9^th 201712 K5

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.
December 5^th 20178,2255

The mock CAP baker's certificate exam

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 201817 K4.4

The taste of raw tomatoes

Let's take a look at tomatoes, which are still in full bloom at the end of summer (as I write these lines), and which make for delicious salads. I had already talked to you about the interest of peeling tomatoes, which gives them an extraordinary sweetness in the mouth, but let's talk about the...
September 8^th 201812 K4.9

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 201843 K4.1

The bitterness of endives

As I write these lines, we are entering the endive season, and if you like it, it's time to enjoy it, if possible with your local producers. Endive is good, but the reproach that is often made of it, and children in particular, is: "It's bitter! And it is (somewhat) true of course, endives...
February 9^th 20199,9324.9

Brioche for a savoury recipe

When we make brioche, it is generally sweet, that is to say that in the dough there is sugar or honey or dried or candied fruits, or even sometimes the 3 together. It's normal, it's very good, it's a pastry. But you may also need brioche for a savoury dish, like a sausage or a sausage in brioche...
June 30^th 20199,2904.9

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...
July 12^th 201919 K4.1

Cooking time for pasta

What is as good and simple as pasta? Not much, I think, and it's so easy to prepare: boiling water, salted (or not, depending on your taste), a few minutes of boiling and it's ready. The only "difficulty", so to speak, is the respect of the cooking time and the risk of, unfortunately, overcooking...
July 18^th 201919 K4.6