120 French recipes. Page 5 of 5. Compare ingredients and cooking times. Lemon Curd Tart, Tartiflette (French Potato Bacon Reblochon Gratin).
Lemon juice, egg yolks, and sugar are stirred over low heat into a curd, poured into a baked shortcrust shell, and chilled until set. The curd comes off the heat before it boils, once a line drawn through the thin coat on the spatula holds, and cream stirred in afterward, then a pass through a sieve, leaves it silky. Only the yellow outer peel is zested; the white pith underneath tastes bitter.
Reblochon halved and laid cut-side down melts straight into the layers of potato, smoked bacon, and onion below. This winter dish from the Savoie region of France depends on parboiled potatoes: cooked only halfway, they soak up cream in the oven and still hold their shape.
Browning the butter until it foams and smells toasty gives these madeleines a hazelnut-like depth that plain melted butter cannot. The hump on the back comes from resting the batter in the fridge for at least 1 hour: cold batter meeting a hot mold sets at the edges first while the center surges up. The crisp edges go soft within a few hours.
Made from nothing but egg whites and sugar whipped to a stiff gloss, with no flour or butter, these shatter into light, dry crumbs. The oven is kept low because the goal is to dry them out rather than bake them, and a pale, nearly white finish is what you are after. Folding cocoa powder into part of the meringue gives a second flavor from the same batch. Humidity is their weak point: left out in the air, the shells soften and turn sticky.
Puff pastry normally balloons in the oven; here it bakes under parchment and a heavy tray so it comes out as three flat, brittle sheets that can carry a filling. Between them goes a vanilla pastry cream thickened with egg yolks and cornstarch, cooked on the stove until it holds a line. A fork pressed through the stack breaks the flaky layers first and then meets smooth, cool custard.
Cut into with a spoon, the thin cake wall gives way and warm chocolate runs onto the plate. That molten center is not a hidden filling but the same dark chocolate batter, baked hot and fast so only the outside sets. Timing does most of the work. Residual heat keeps cooking the middle after the ramekins leave the oven, and the cakes are turned out right away to stop it.
Slice an opera cake and you see thin, level stripes: almond sponge, espresso buttercream, dark chocolate, repeated. The sponge uses only almond flour, eggs, and powdered sugar, with no wheat flour at all. Coffee leads the flavor, the chocolate adds bitterness underneath, and the overall result is far less sweet than it looks.
Pain au chocolat uses the same laminated, buttery dough as a croissant, rolled around two batons of dark chocolate instead of shaped into a crescent. Pulled open after a short rest, the crisp outer shell flakes away and the inside separates into thin layers with two soft lines of chocolate running through.
Rolled in from both long edges and sliced, sugared puff pastry opens as it bakes into the symmetrical butterfly shape that gives palmiers their look. The sugar melts and caramelizes to amber, soft while hot and shatter-crisp once cool, around light, flaky layers inside.
Sliced almonds bake onto a ring of choux, and the split ring is filled with whipped cream folded with hazelnut praline paste. Using whipped cream instead of a butter-based mousseline keeps the nut flavour while making each bite lighter. Eggs go into the choux only until it falls from the spatula in a slow V, and finishing with some beaten egg left in the bowl is common.
Folded up at the edges with no tart pan, this free-form galette layers thin slices of Asian pear with ginger juice, brown sugar and cinnamon. Ginger brings warmth and a little heat behind the pear's clean sweetness without taking over.
Chopped dried persimmon (gotgam) studs this buttery loaf, and most bites catch a chewy piece of fruit; cinnamon is the only spice. The fruit is sweet enough that the sugar stays modest. It is moister the day after baking, once it has spent a night wrapped in plastic.
Half a kilo of onions, cooked over low heat for more than 40 minutes until jammy, is spread thickly over thin dough and crossed with a lattice of anchovies and black olives for this Provençal tart. Tomato sauce and cheese stay out of it, and the anchovies bring enough salt that the topping hardly needs more.
Crisp bacon and Gruyère go under a soft egg custard, and the quiche comes out of the oven while the middle still trembles a little. It finishes setting from its own heat as it rests in the tin, so a slice holds its shape without the filling going dry.
Almond shells sandwich a cream of red bean paste, butter and a spoonful of milk. Once filled, the macarons spend a day in the fridge, where the shells take up moisture from the cream and soften, and they are served cold. On humid days, give the piped batter an extra 10 minutes to dry before baking.
A whole salmon fillet goes into puff pastry with a filling of cream cheese, spinach, dill and lemon zest, and comes to the table in thick slices. The Dijon-laced cream cheese seasons the fish and also keeps its juices from soaking into the pastry. Ten minutes in the fridge before baking firms the butter again, and the layers separate more clearly in the oven.
Chickpea flour whisked thin with water rests for 10 minutes, then is poured into a pan heated hard with oil, scattered with red onion and cherry tomatoes, and baked into the flatbread of Nice. It comes out crisp at the rim and soft and chewy in the middle.
No tart pan is used: the dough is rolled into a round, topped with the filling, and its bare 4 cm border folded up over the edge. The filling combines steamed sweet potato, cream cheese, honey and cinnamon. A drier, chestnut-type sweet potato keeps the base from going soggy and bakes up crisper.
Frozen croissant dough is spread thinly with a paste of glutinous rice flour, milk and sugar, folded and pressed in a waffle iron. The flattened butter layers go crisp, and the rice paste makes the inside stickier and chewier than a plain croffle. Honey and a dusting of cinnamon finish it.
Pears fanned over almond frangipane, with small gaps left so the cream puffs up between the slices, make up this French tart. Fresh pears need slicing thin enough to cook through in the oven, while canned or poached ones must be drained of their syrup first.
Apples cook first in a butter-and-sugar caramel in an ovenproof pan, then bake under a sheet of pastry before the whole thing is flipped onto a plate, caramelized fruit on top. The apples are peeled, cut into thick pieces and packed upright in the pan with no gaps. After only 3 to 5 minutes out of the oven, a plate wider than the pan goes on top and both are turned over in one motion.
Swiss chard in a sweet pie sounds unlikely, but the leaves are mixed with apple, rum-soaked raisins, pine nuts, and brown sugar under a double crust. A dusting of powdered sugar once the pie has cooled through makes it read as a dessert from the first look.
Honey gives these madeleines a slightly deeper color and keeps them moist for longer after they cool. The little hump on the back forms when well-chilled batter goes straight into a hot oven.
The cream cheese filling over a digestive biscuit base is flavored with yuja-cheong (Korean citron preserve) and lemon juice. A few hours in the fridge sets it enough to slice, but the yuja only really comes through after a day, so make it the day before.