French Cuisine and Desserts

This chapter is totally dedicated to the French cuisine. Even if I am going to focus more on desserts I am starting briefly describing French cuisine. French food and beverages stand worldwide as delicacies. Most of the recipes France is famous for today, were developed during the Absolutism (more about history). But what makes French cuisine so special? Well, the answer is their sauces. None of the other European countries has developed that much different sauce.  Following is a little list with the most important ones plus a little description:

·         hollandaise Sauce (recipe) is an egg based sauce, mostly with butter, lemon and cayenne pepper.

·         roux sauce (recipe) is a mixture of fat and flour (1:1), which exists in tree different variants: light, medium, dark.

·         bechamel sauce (recipe) is white and creamy sauce made out of butter, flour, milk and salt and is one of the basic sauces from which many others could be produced.

·         demi-glaze sauce (recipe) is a brown sauce made out of Espagnole and a beef or veal stock.

·         vinaigrette sauce (recipe) is basically an oil and vinegar dressing.

Before I start with the French dessert, I want shortly write about the probably most famous French food next to French wine, cheese and baguette. I want to explain how to make a perfect croissant. Actually it’s easier than I thought, so don’t panic if you try cook some. The only two disadvantages of this dish are, you need a long time to make it and it’s not that healthy. You only have to keep in mind three tricks (recipe):

1.      If you have the dough ball roll it out to a cross with a thicker middle.

2.      Make sure that your butter is soft, so that you can easily form it.

3.      Give all the butter in the middle of the cross and fold the ends over the middle. Stretch the dough a little bit, if needed. Make sure that there are no holes, where you can see the butter.

4.      After that you have to let the dough rest for aprox. 2h, before you fold it the same way again except that you don’t add again butter.

5.      A god croissant has got over 1500 layers and with each folding you take the amount of layers by the power of three. That means you should fold it 5-6 times (but you can also eat it after the second fold)

6.      When you done with the folding roll the dough into a rectangle and cut out triangle. Then you just take the shortest side and roll it to a croissant.

this was my result. Your croissants should be bigger then my, to not burn that quick as my one in the middle.

So lets start with the desserts. One very famous French one is the Tarte Tatin (an upside-down French apple tart) originated by the by the elder of  two unmarried sisters who took over the running of their deceased father's hotel in the rural town of Lamotte-Beuvron (more about tarte tartin, more about tarts ). I didn’t make a Tarte tatin, but therefore I did a easy and very tasty one:

Recipe dough     recipe pestry cream

The only two thing you have to be careful with by making this tart, are firtstly that you use rubbed dough method, which basically means that you want some butter crumbs in your dough. And secondly that you have to be pretty careful, when you let your pastry cream become thicker, because you don’t want it burn on the ground and too thick. Everything else is actually very easy and god described in the recipe.
 By the way, talking about dessert pestry, one French one is Choux paste. if you like to try something diffrent with it click here.