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| As a Frenchie, here's the crêpe recipes I use. Enjoy!
French people often have a whole meal of crepes from time to time, as the batter is easy to prepare in advance. The meal usually consists of a couple of savory crepes followed by a deluge of sweet ones.
Sweet crêpes:
Traditional recipe:
Ingredients:
- 250 grams (9 oz) of white flour
- 4 large eggs
- 0.5 liters (0.9 pints) of whole milk
- A packet of vanilla sugar (preferably natural vanillin) except for savory crepes
- A pinch of salt
Add all ingredients except the milk in a large bowl without mixing.
Then add the milk very slowly and whip as you pour (to avoid lumps).
The final texture is liquid but heavy.
Cover and let rest in the fridge for an hour or two.
A robot mixer is usually more trouble than help for such a simple recipe.
The crepe frying pan is usually almost flat and non-stick.
Traditional pans were carbon steel and made non-stick by years of blackening and not washing them.
The pan should be light so you can easily flip the crepes, but not so thin that it will bend with heat.
Boil a big pan of water nearby, stop the fire and cover with a large serving plate.
Place a small ceramic bowl near the frying pan, so it will get warm.
Put a quarter of a stick of butter in the small bowl, it will get soft eventually.
Bring the bowl (never user a jug, for several reasons) of crepe batter near the stove.
The batter will likely have settled a bit at the bottom, so mix it again with the ladle until the texture is uniform.
Place a small bowl of crystallized sugar near the bowl of batter.
Warm the pan until hot. A gas stove works much better than an electric one. The fire should be rather hot.
Rub a paper towel folder in 8 against the butter then against the pan.
Hold the pan handle with one hand and the ladle in the other.
Pour quickly about a ladle full of liquid batter in the pan.
Move the pan around very quickly so that the batter covers all the surface.
Pour the extra batter back inside the bowl immediately, to keep the crepe as this as possible.
Cook on one side for 1 minute.
Start shaking the pan laterally so the crepe starts to glide on the non-stick surface.
Do not shake the crepe too early or it will rip apart.
You may want to insert a thin wooden or nylon spatula on the perimeter of the crepe first, that's where it sticks most.
To determine when the crepe is ready to flip, use the blade to look at the color of the underside.
When it's golden-light brown, it's time to flip, the fun part.
Flipping the crepe requires only a small but firm move of the wrist.
When the crepe is on its way down, maybe move the pan down a bit so the crepe falls flat, not folder.
Move it horizontally too so all of it falls in the pan, not half of it.
Put back on the fire and start shaking the pan so the crepe does not stick.
This second side will cook much faster than the first one, so be cautious.
The surface will also look different than the first side, make sure the brown spots don't burn.
If the crepe is intended to be stuffed and cooked in the pan later, barely pan-fry the second side at all, so it can cook and brown with the filling.
Once cooked, glide the crepe over the others on the serving plate that's on top of the pan of water.
This will keep the crepes warm until you're ready to serve a bunch.
For sweet crepes, immediately spread a medium pinch of crystallized sugar on top of the warm crepe.
Not too much, because people will add their own sweet spread, like jam.
Just enough to make the crepe slightly sweet. The sugar will actually melt and the crystals disappear altogether.
All this took of course only milliseconds.
Return the pan still piping hot to the fire, take the buttered folded towel paper and rub it against the pan.
It is used both to clean and oil the pan, even non-stick ones, as it gives that buttery taste to the crepes.
Start pouring for the second crepe and repeat.
Notes and tips:
- The first crepe is somehow always messed up, this sacrificial lamb is therefore for the cook to eat. Or the little kid jumping in your legs.
- Use a mix of milk and some water for a lighter (in calories) recipe, or 2% milk.
- For a lighter (in texture) crepe, add some beer or even yeast to the batter, the crepe will rise with some air in-between.
- To make clarified butter, just melt a stick of normal butter at low temperature like a water bath, let it rest a bit while the water and proteins fall at the bottom, and pour the top buttery oil into a bowl, making sure none of the water and proteins go with the oil.
- Replace the folded towel paper if it becomes too black from cleaning the remaining burnt bits on the surface of the pan.
- Keep 2 serving plates on the hot water pan, so you can continue cooking crepes while one plate is being served.
- Put only as much batter as you will cook in the bowl, as the batter will not keep (raw eggs) if you pour back the hot batter from the pan.
- Adjust your timing and stove temperature as you cook, the crepes should cook quickly but not so quickly that they burn and the batter does not coagulate on the other side.
- You can have the batter in a jug too, but I find it easier to use a bowl and ladle to measure the quantity of batter for each crepe, and you also can't mix the batter that continues to settle as you cook.
- Making crepes with 2 pans at the same time is hard work and difficult to coordinate. It works if you have everything close at hand and are real fast.
- Fresh crepes are better, but they also keep refrigerated, which is great for breakfast when you don't have much time, or for stuffed crepes.
Fillings and spreads:
You can make an elaborate dessert out of one crepe and ice cream, fruits, chocolate sauce, whipped cream, etc.
Usually though, you eat several crepes in a row, each with a different spread or just plain sugar.
- Nutella and sliced bananas is a favorite
- Any jam, jelly, marmalade, apple or pumpkin sauce comes second
- Melt and mix some honey with lemon juice, let it return to spreadable texture in the fridge
- Sauté some apple cubes in a little butter, add some sugar and caramelize a bit. Let it cool just a tad in a bowl.
- Custard with exotic fruit salad in it (in which case you can use coconut milk for the batter) which can be refrigerated in advance
- Real maple syrup
Recipes:
- Crepes Suzette are great if you have some Grand-Marnier or Triple-Sec around
- Roll a dozen crepes individually, dispose in a buttered oven dish, pour lemon juice and honey, bake until it starts to caramelize, bring to the table, switch off the lights, pour a small pan of boiling dark rum over it and flambé before serving.
- Make a crepe cake for a birthday party: Alternate layers of crepes and custard, cream or jam, then add icing all around and on top.
Savory crepes:
They are usually made from buckwheat or a mix of buckwheat and wheat flours, and called "galette" in Brittany, cooked on a totally flat surface, the batter is spread evenly with a large wooden flat spreader.
If you do not have buckwheat flour, the white flour recipe for the sweet crepes works well too, just don't add the vanilla sugar to the batter.
Buckwheat crepes are great for people with wheat or gluten allergies, as it is not a cereal.
Cook all the crepes in advance according to the previous recipe, do not fry the second side much, as it will continue to cook and brown.
If you use buckwheat crepes, cover the precooked crepes with a plate and a slightly wet towel on the sides, or they will dry out on the perimeter.
Savory crepes need to be served immediately, so keep a pile of warm plate over a pan of hot water and serve as soon as each crepe is done.
Buckwheat crepe recipe:
- 300 grams (10 oz) of buckwheat flour
- One large beaten egg
- 75 cl (1.3 pint) of cold water
- A large pinch of sea salt to taste
Slowly mix the water into the flour and salt, then add in the beaten egg.
- You can use a normal frying pan with edges for this second cooking, to contain the filling, but spilling is rarely a problem even in flat pans.
- Stove temperature shouldn't be as hot as for the pre-cooking of the crepes, so the filling has time to cook.
- Put the lightest side of the already cooked crepe in the lightly buttered hot pan.
- Add the filling on top of one half of the crepe.
- Fold the uncovered side on top of the filling.
- Since half of the pan is now empty, you can start preparing a second filled crepe alongside.
- Check the underside of the crepes regularly for color, until dark golden brown.
- Flip the crepe delicately with a long and thin wooden spatula over its whole length.
- Fillings such as egg and cheese will have coagulated and glued the two sides together already, so the filling will not spill.
- Check the underside of the second half of the crepe.
- Once it is also dark golden brown, drop immediately on a warm plate and serve.
- Instead of folding the whole crepe in half, you can also fold only the 4 sides a bit, to make a square crepe and leave the filling visible, especially if it's an egg.
With both the crepes pre-cooked and the bowls of filling prepared in advance, actual cooking of the savory stuffed crepes takes very little time.
With 2 pans, you can serve 4 crepes at the same time.
Traditional stuffing is:
- Bits of fried bacon
- Lightly fried onions
- Cooked ham
- Shredded cheese, slices of goat cheese or brie
- Fried chopped mushrooms (fresh, not tinned)
- Béchamel sauce
- Diced mixed vegetables
- Smoked salmon, capers and sour cream
- Have some chopped fresh chives, parsley and nutmeg on the ready.
Galettes are also great plainly served with salted butter.
The drink of choice in Brittany is cider, which goes well with both savory galettes or sweet crepes.
There are many great ciders in Britain and Ireland; In the U.S., hard cider is rather bad.
But there are imports, like a fantastic French "cidre bouché" I found at WholeFoods.
Buckwheat crepes are also great as sweet crepes, and make a great delicacy biscuit too:
Small buckwheat crepes with butter, sugar and maybe orange peel in the batter are cooked paper-thin and rolled over the handle of a wooden spoon.
They will dry rapidly and make cigarette-like biscuits to eat with coffee or tea.
Or flatten them after they have been rolled, before drying. Keep in a tin box. | |
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Crepes
