Recipes: 25 results
Macarons (the original French macaroons)
(Found inTextsStagesComments)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,...
1.6M 714.6 2 hours 38 min. October 3rd 2019
Montbenoit's canapés
(Found inTexts)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.
270K4.6 1 hour 45 min. October 13th 2010
How to know when a cake is cooked
(Found inTextsStages)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.
279K4.1 1 min. May 7th 2020
Creamy risotto with diced vegetables and flax seeds
(Found inTexts)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.
249K 14.2 1 hour 49 min. February 21th 2011
Boiling potatoes in their skins
(Found inTextsStages)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...
608K 34.4 30 min. July 25th 2017
Pan-fried potatoes
(Found inTexts)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.
290K4.5 1 hour 37 min. February 3rd 2011
The fastest type of hob
(Found inTexts)You may have asked yourself already: between gas, electric and induction, which is the quickest? Let's try the experiment...
115K3.7 22 min. February 21th 2011
Fraisier (French strawberry cake)
(Found inTexts)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.
169K4.2 2 hours 43 min. September 18th 2011
Vol-au-vent
(Found inTexts)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.
140K4.3 1 hour 23 min. October 20th 2013
Smoked eggs
(Found inTexts)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".
60K4.9 12 hours 30 min. March 15th 2015
Asparagus "en petit pois"
(Found inTexts)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.
31K 42 min. May 2nd 2021
Seeded loaf
(Found inStages)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.
148K3.8 4 hours 27 min. October 24th 2017
Classic French white bread
(Found inStages)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.
289K4.1 3 hours 50 min. June 6th 2017
Potimarron and Parmesan tart
(Found inStages)This moist tart has a shortcrust pastry case, filled with a mixture of potimarron purée and Parmesan, bound with egg.
34K 2 hours 14 min. December 12th 2018
Yeast-based flaky dough (for croissants)
(Found inStages)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,...
141K 4 3 hours 58 min. June 9th 2019
Ocean bread
(Found inStages)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...
167K 63.8 5 hours 7 min. October 24th 2017
Plain cake
(Found inStages)This is a classic, loaf-shaped cake, deliberately left plain for you to embellish as you choose.
75K3.7 1 hour 26 min. December 30th 2019
Chinese Soup
(Found inStages)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.
109K 24.5 1 hour 15 min. April 6th 2017
New leavened bread
(Found inStages)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.
896K 34.3 7 hours December 30th 2019
Pages: 8 results
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.205K 44.2 August 29th 2023
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...724K 413.6 June 3rd 2024
Webmaster tools
Page for webmasters and bloggers who wish to add tools or widgets (links, feeds, images...) to their own sites.231K3.5 August 29th 2023
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.166K 44.1 August 29th 2023
Make your own hot-wire or styrofoam cutter
Cut polystyrene and foams easily with your own hot-wire cutter.505K 433.5 February 20th 2024
Blog articles: 18 results
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...87K 23.9 June 16th 2021
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...47K4.4 February 6th 2011
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...23K4.5 November 3rd 2011
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?11K4.7 November 2nd 2017
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?37K4.3 February 28th 2018
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...16K4.4 May 1st 2018
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?".11K4.7 March 23th 2020
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.15K4.0 March 30th 2020
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...6,7414.8 April 25th 2020
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...12K4.6 March 20th 2021
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...24K4.5 April 16th 2021
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...9,5604.8 June 26th 2021
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...8,5694.8 December 18th 2021
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...13K4.6 April 30th 2022
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...8,5324.9 May 7th 2022
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.9,4994.9 May 14th 2022
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.7,5933.3 August 29th 2023
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.8,134 September 5th 2023