Macarons (the original French macaroons)

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This recipe really is "of the moment": the success of these small, highly-coloured cakes, in an infinite variety of flavours, is impressive. It's a recipe which needs some care, in order to produce a result worthy of a professional pastrychef. No problem, I will guide you through the recipe, particularly the tricky parts. This variety of flavours means that I test many alternatives, so don't be surprised if in the pictures the colour of the macarons changes, I used the best photograph available...

Montbenoit's canapés

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A recipe from Franche-comté (lovely region of eastern France): large slices of bread coated with melted shallot, grilled bacon dice, a big slice of Morbier (cheese from the same region) and a brief spell in the oven. It really is a winter dish.

How to know when a cake is cooked

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It's a frequently asked question and it's not so easy to answer it, especially for beginners: you can have a cake that's nice and golden brown outside, but which is not cooked enough in the middle.

Creamy risotto with diced vegetables and flax seeds

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Risotto is one of the great Italian recipes. It's the special way in which rice is cooked and mixed with several other things, which produces this famous dish. One can make different flavour risottos, here is a fairly simple recipe with diced vegetables and flax seeds.

Boiling potatoes in their skins

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Boiling potatoes has given rise to two sayings: 1) You should not peel potatoes before boiling. 2) You should not leave potatoes to cool in the cooking water. The first suggests that potatoes should be always cooked in their skins, to prevent water penetrating and making the potatoes go soft and break up. The second suggests that if potatoes cool in their cooking water, they will absorb some of it, which will give them an unpleasant flavour. True or false? Let's try the...

Pan-fried potatoes

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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.

The fastest type of hob

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You may have asked yourself already: between gas, electric and induction, which is the quickest? Let's try the experiment...

Fraisier (French strawberry cake)

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This classic French patisserie is a delicious assembly of 2 layers of genoa sponge filled with strawberries and crème mousseline (confectioner's custard with butter). The sponge is soaked in strawberry syrup and the cake is topped with a thin layer of marzipan.

Vol-au-vent

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The classic vol-au-vent of French cuisine consists of a very light puff pastry case (supposedly so light that it could fly off in the lightest puff of wind) with a cream-based filling. There are many different recipes for fillings. This version uses bacon, chicken, mushrooms and leeks.

Smoked eggs

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This sophisticated, smoky flavoured starter consists of an egg yolk, heated in a bain-marie and a smoked cream mousse with a scattering of chives, served with a buttered-toast "soldier".

Asparagus "en petit pois"

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As the name suggests, this historic recipe (see below for more details) treats asparagus like peas, Napoleonic French style: first cooked the usual way, then cut small (to look like peas), cooked again in stock, and finished with a cream and egg yolk sauce.

Seeded loaf

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This seeded bread is based on a French baguette dough, with a mix of dry-roasted seeds added (poppy, millet, linseed, sesame...). Delicious on its own, this bread makes excellent toast to go with foie gras, adding an amazing complementary crunch.

Classic French white bread

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This is the recipe for classic, everyday French bread raised with yeast. French bakers call this "pain courant". It is quicker and easier to make than leavened bread or new leavened bread, so ideal for a beginner.

Yeast-based flaky dough (for croissants)

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This yeast-based flaky dough (or croissant dough) is where puff pastry meets a yeast dough (such as brioche dough). This means that not only will we get flaky layers, but the dough will also swell and rise. The method is along the same lines as for a feuilletage: the basic dough is first kneaded, then layered with butter and folded over several times (in...

Ocean bread

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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 needed, rather than normal fresh water. Not only does it work, the resulting bread is excellent!

Panettone

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Panettone is a brioche-style Italian loaf, made with dried fruit (raisins and candied peel) and flavoured with left-over citrus fruit. The recipe is a bit complicated but, above all, it takes time, a great deal of time...

Chinese Soup

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This delicious soup is a flavoursome mix of herbs, mushrooms, soya noodles and small diced vegetables briefly cooked in vegetable stock. It takes a while to make and there are lots of ingredients, but the result is worth it.

New leavened bread

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This new recipe for leavened bread is simple and delicious, but needs rather long resting times. If you'd like more more information about making your own bread, look at this dedicated page.

French baguettes

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This classic of French baking is rather different from the recipe for leavened bread, it's a question of making a good crust and light crumb along the whole length. To succeed, you should know that there are two secrets: water first of all (much more than for normal bread), and the working of the dough, which is also very different.

Crème caramel

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Crème caramel (upside-down caramel cream) is a classic of bistro cuisine. The vanilla cream is made with eggs, cooked in a dish with a layer of caramel in the bottom, and placed in a bain-marie. It's traditionally served turned out so that the liquid caramel runs down over the cream.

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.
August 29^th 2023221 K 44.2

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 2024739 K 413.6

Oven housing

Once the domed oven is finished and dry, we can start to construct the housing around it.
August 30^th 2024116 K3.9

Polynesian arrow

A Polynesian arrow is an arrow with a tail that is thrown by hand, using a piece of string. The result is a "slingshot" effect that propels the arrow much further than if it were simply thrown by hand.It's a craft to do with children, for example on an afternoon when they're a bit idle...
August 29^th 2023198 K 14.3

Webmaster tools

This page gathers in one place all the free widgets available for webmasters or bloggers to incorporate (automatically) news from the cooking-ez.com site.
August 29^th 2023244 K3.5

The amateur baker

You may have noticed over the pages of this site, I am passionate about everything that is related to the bakery: I love making bread, pastries, maintain my leaven, etc.. This page contains links to all the different parts of the site where we talk about bread: recipes, special pages, etc.
October 15^th 2024179 K 44.1

All the RSS feeds of cooking-ez.com

Cooking-ez.com offers you a number of RSS feeds that you can use as you wish. These feeds are updated automatically, according to their content.
August 29^th 2023203 K3.9

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 2024519 K 433.5

The window-pane test in bread-making

The home bread-makers often ask themselves “Have I kneaded my dough long enough?” . A good question, as dough that is insufficiently kneaded will not rise properly or will fall flat when the top is slashed, which is very frustrating. To know when the dough is ready, one can rely on the length...
June 16^th 202192 K 23.9

The power of sayings and beliefs in the kitchen

One day, in the comments on the recipe for beaten egg whites, a young woman asked if you could beat egg whites stiff while having a period, as a friend had told her it wasn't possible. Sometime later another person commented that for mayonnaise it had been (get this!) scientifically proven that a...
February 6^th 201150 K4.4

Too much sweet and savoury

There is a food trend which is creeping in everywhere in France right now: mixing sweet with savoury. In some restaurants, it is becoming difficult to order a classic dish, like “roast veal” for instance, without being served fruits in the garnish or honey/conserves/syrup in the sauce or cooked...
November 3^rd 201125 K4.5

When should I change my knife?

I already spoke to you in a previous post about knives, those without which nothing is possible (or almost) in the kitchen, so I'm going to come back to them a bit and try to answer the question "When should I change my knife?
November 2^nd 201713 K4.7

Is it really necessary to cream egg yolks?

Let’s try and answer a question that crops up in cookery and patisserie, even if it verges on the existential: do the egg yolks in a custard recipe really need to be beaten until pale, or not?
February 28^th 201841 K4.3

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 201819 K4.4

The right way to cook potatoes

If you simply boil them (not steam them), or bake them in the oven, at some point you will have to ask yourself the question "are they well cooked?".
March 23^th 202014 K4.7

The green of leeks

We are all, consciously or not, very sensitive to the colour of our food. That's why a red strawberry will always seem more appetizing than a pale one, even if it's not necessarily true. This is true for red, but it is also true for the green of certain vegetables.
March 30^th 202018 K4.0

Herbs and temperature

I have already talked to you about herbs in cooking, and about their great power of "seduction". The example of a salad is a great classic: on its own, it's a salad, which is normal, but the same salad in which you have added finely chopped fresh herbs, just before serving, you have much more than a...
April 25^th 20208,8554.8

The return of the vegetable grater

If you are of a certain age (say +50) you may have known, when you were a kid, something that your grandmother had in her kitchen set, the vegetable grater. A kind of mill, to be turned by hand, and which with cutting discs of different sizes, allowed to grate a lot of vegetables, carrots first...
March 20^th 202114 K4.6

The so-called "nervous" meats

You've probably heard this before, we're talking about "nervous" meat, or meat with nerves, to describe what is indicated by the blue arrow on the left. This is a piece of beef, and what we call a nerve is not a nerve, it is in fact collagen (chemists sometimes call it a "collagen sink"), a...
April 16^th 202132 K4.5

How to break eggs properly?

It is a very common gesture in pastry, bakery and of course cooking: breaking eggs to incorporate them into a recipe. You have eggs (which professionals call "shell eggs" to differentiate them from liquid eggs in cartons or cans), and you must break them to incorporate the contents into your...
June 26^th 202112 K4.8

The return of the "Norman hole"

You maybe know the "trou normand", this old gastronomic custom typically French which consists in taking a (small) glass of calvados, generally between the last course and the dessert? It's something that seems a bit anachronistic nowadays, having a glass of an alcohol of more than 60° in the...
December 18^th 202112 K4.8

The color of the bread crumb

When you go to buy bread, at your baker's, at the time of the choice, if you hesitate of course, you will undoubtedly be very sensitive to the color of the crust, and you will be right. The color of the crust, from golden, to sometimes very dark, deep brown almost black, depending on the maturity...
April 30^th 202218 K4.6

Shall I take the tops off?

If you buy your vegetables at the market, at a farmer's stand, once you have chosen a bunch of carrots or beets for example, you must have already heard this proposal from the salesman: "Shall I pull the tops? This sentence is his proposal to remove for you all the tops, which he puts aside, to...
May 7^th 202210 K4.9

The delicious complexity of Jura wines

Do you know the wines of the Jura? Maybe not, it's a small appellation, 2000 hectares, with a production of wines that are both very atypical and very typical, even unique for some of them. Let me tell you a few words about it.
May 14^th 202211 K4.9

Cooking cauliflower

Dramatic observation: cauliflower when cooked has a bad reputation ("it doesn't smell good!" and the like), and yet it's an excellent vegetable, very Breton, that deserves to be treated well, to give the best of itself.
August 29^th 20239,3823.3

The softness of sandwich bread

You're probably familiar with what's known in France as "pain de mie", a very white, molded and rather soft bread, widely used in cooking, particularly for croque-monsieur. Let's find out what it's all about.
September 5^th 202310 K5

Sauce and salad: When and how to mix them?

When dressing a salad, there's a kind of golden rule: add the dressing very shortly before serving, especially if your salad contains crunchy elements such as croutons or fresh vegetables, which will retain their crunchiness or crispiness. But, as is often the case in the kitchen, there are...
November 29^th 20244,9115