French cuisine is well known and loved throughout the world. It is from here that many of the gourmet dishes that are served today at ceremonial receptions come from. But you can cook most of these dishes at home, using ingredients that can be bought at almost any store or market.
Individual characteristics
Classical French cuisine is divided into three main categories. This is a peasant regional, national common and refined, which is based on the royal royal dining room.
Regional cuisine is fundamentally distinguished by a large amount of spicy food, the use of spices and wines, especially onions and garlic. Here you can note the Alsatian tradition, characterized by addiction in fatty pork and cabbage. While in the other French provinces they prefer veal, lamb and chicken.
The Burgundy region also clearly stands out, in which there has always been a lot of meat and sea dishes and a lot of wine.
A feature of French cuisine is the almost complete absence of dairy products. An exception is made only for cheeses. The French also prefer vegetables to cereals. Well, the main difference is the incredible amount of sauces that are served with almost every dish. Thus, even the most ordinary food can sparkle with new colors.
French cuisine is rightly compared by many with real art.
Kish
One of the classic dishes of French cuisine is quiche. This is a classic open pie, which is prepared in various ways, it all depends entirely on your culinary imagination. They serve it both hot and cold.
To prepare a traditional quiche, you will need:
- 175 grams of flour;
- 75 grams of butter;
- 250 grams of cheddar cheese;
- 4 tomatoes;
- 200 grams of bacon;
- 5 chicken eggs;
- 100 ml of milk;
- 200 ml cream;
- salt, black pepper and thyme to taste.
Cooking method
To begin implementing this recipe for French cuisine, you need to mix salt with flour in a bowl. Add softened butter, a couple of spoons of cold water. The dough should turn out soft, wrap it and put it in the refrigerator for half an hour.
Then we roll it into a thin layer, put it in a baking dish and return it to a cold place. The oven at this time is heated to a temperature of 190 degrees. Sprinkle the dough with beans, bake it for 20 minutes, and then remove the beans, which serves as a press, and leave for another 5 minutes to bake. The temperature is reduced to 160 degrees.
At the same time, we rub the cheddar cheese, laying it on the very bottom of the mold. Then sliced tomatoes and slices of bacon. In a separate bowl, mix the eggs, milk and cream. Pour it with a mixture of bacon and cheese, sprinkle abundantly with pepper and thyme. According to the recipe of French cuisine, the quiche is baked for about forty minutes, until the edges are browned.
Onion soup
Onion soup is an equally popular recipe for French cuisine. In the home kitchen, you can cook it easily if you follow the recommendations.
To do this, you will need to take the following ingredients:
- 6 large onions;
- half a pack of butter;
- a tablespoon of flour;
- one and a half liters of beef broth;
- baguette;
- 350 grams of gruyere cheese.
The perfect first course
Onion soup is a classic of French home cooking. Its recipe is not at all complicated. Melt butter in a frying pan and fry finely chopped onions in it until golden. Pour the flour and cook for another three minutes.
Gradually pour in the broth, wait until it boils, cook another 20 minutes after that. Pepper and salt. Cut the baguette into portioned pieces, sprinkling each of them with a good portion of grated cheese. It is better to take a hard variety without holes, for example, a gruyere. Pour into plates and serve with bread.
Ratatouille
For a long time, the recipe for the ratatouille vegetable dish, which belongs to French cuisine, has become a part of world culinary. His story is amazing. In ancient times, ratatouille was prepared exclusively by peasants from everything that came to hand. Today it is served in the most sophisticated and fashionable restaurants.
The composition of the components on the ratatouille is as follows:
- 200 grams of tomato paste;
- half of the bulb;
- 4 cloves of garlic;
- 4 tablespoons of olive oil;
- 3/4 cup of water;
- eggplant;
- zucchini;
- zucchini;
- red and yellow bell peppers;
- pepper, thyme, salt and cheese to taste.
If you do it right, this will be one of your favorite French dishes. The recipe for the photo in this article will help you. So, preheat the oven to a temperature of 190 degrees. Peeled vegetables are cut into circles or small slices.
The bottom of the pan must be covered with special baking paper, such as parchment. Grease it with tomato paste on top. Pour finely chopped onions, garlic, add a little olive oil and a small amount of water. Spread the remaining vegetables on top, pour the remaining olive oil, sprinkle all with thyme. Pepper and salt.
Covering the dish with paper, put in the oven for 45 minutes. It is recommended that guests serve hot on the table, if desired, sprinkled with grated cheese.
Kasule
A sample of French cuisine in the photo below is called Casule. His recipe came from the south of the country, it is immediately worth noting that cooking takes a lot of time. Kasule is ideal for a festive table to decorate any celebration.
To prepare it, you must have at hand:
- 300 grams of white beans;
- 4 pork sausages;
- 250 grams of bacon;
- 3 liters of meat broth;
- a can of duck confit (these are duck legs cooked in a special way);
- dry rosemary, pepper and salt to taste.
Beans need to be soaked for several hours in water, it is best to leave it for the whole night. In the morning you need to drain the water and cook for five minutes. In parallel, we heat the broth and cook the beans in it until almost ready. Fry the duck thighs cooked using the confit method until all the fat in them is melted. We send sausages and bacon to the same pan. They must be fried until they begin to crunch.
We put bacon, duck and sausages on a baking sheet, fill everything with broth, pepper, salt and sprinkle with herbs on top. Preheat the oven to a temperature of 160 degrees. Baked in a kasul oven for three hours. If necessary, you can add broth.
Tartiflet
This dish is also known as potato gratin. Unlike the previous one, cooking it is much simpler and not so long. Everything is based on potatoes, as you already understood from the name, and bacon. It is very satisfying and tasty, friends and family are guaranteed to be satisfied, they will ask you to cook the tartiflet again and again.
We will need to take:
- 2 potatoes;
- 3 tablespoons of butter;
- 250 grams of bacon;
- bulb;
- chilli;
- half a glass of dry white wine;
- salt, pepper and cheese to taste.
Preheat the oven to 190 degrees. Lubricate the baking dish with two tablespoons of butter, and fry the bacon in the remaining oil for ten to twelve minutes until a crisp appears. We spread the bacon on a paper towel, let the excess fat drain.
In the same pan in which you just cooked bacon, you need to caramelize the onions, pour in white wine, and then evaporate about half.
At the same time, we cut the potatoes into small and neat slices, pour them into a skillet, pepper, salt, cook for about ten minutes.
In a baking dish, lay the potatoes in layers, after - bacon and cheese sliced into thin slices. Put in the oven for half an hour. Serving tartiflet is recommended with various sauces. French cuisine attaches great importance to this.
Rooster in wine
Perhaps the most extravagant dish that this country of the world has presented is a rooster in wine. To touch the culinary classics of the wine regions of France, take the following ingredients:
- a whole rooster or farm chicken;
- a bottle of red dry wine;
- 200 grams of celery;
- 3 onions;
- 300 grams of carrots;
- head of garlic;
- 50 grams of butter;
- thyme, pepper, salt, olive oil - to taste.
Preheat the oven to a temperature of 180 degrees. We spread celery stalks, carrots, onions in a baking dish, cut into 2 parts. Bake for a quarter of an hour, sprinkled with olive oil.
Divide into 4 parts of the rooster and fry in vegetable oil until a golden crust appears. From above we spread on the meat baked vegetables, herbs and garlic crushed in advance. Pepper, salt, pour wine. Stew for half an hour, covering it with a lid.
Preheat the oven again, but already to a temperature of 100 degrees. We put a pan with a rooster there for another 40 minutes. We spread the bird on a dish, filter the liquid through a sieve. She will approach the cock as a sauce.
Nicoise
Nicoise is a traditional salad of French cuisine. It has a large number of different ingredients that blend well with each other. The name of the salad came from the city of Nice, because it is as light, healthy and nutritious as the sunny weather, which is there almost all year round.
For salad, you need to take the following components:
- feathers of salad;
- 4 tomatoes;
- 3 onions;
- bell pepper;
- 3 hard boiled eggs;
- clove of garlic;
- a can of anchovies;
- a can of canned tuna;
- lemon juice to taste.
Separately, prepare the sauce. To do this, you need the following ingredients:
- a tablespoon of olive oil;
- a tablespoon of wine vinegar;
- a pinch of salt and pepper;
- basil and garlic to taste.
First, mix all the ingredients that go into the sauce. Simultaneously boil green beans. After 5 minutes, we take it out of the pan and sprinkle it with cold water.
In a pan in olive oil, fry the garlic and beans, cool and pour plenty of lemon juice. Put lettuce, chopped tomatoes, bell peppers, anchovies, tuna, beans and eggs in a bowl. Dress with pre-prepared sauce, serve.
Clafouti
Of the desserts of French cuisine, most know clafoutis. This dish is very similar to a well-known casserole or pie. It is not complete without cherries, which gives the dessert immediately and sour, and sweet aftertaste.
For klafuti you will need to take:
- 300 grams of pitted cherries;
- a tablespoon of sugar;
- icing sugar - to taste;
- butter - it will be required to lubricate the mold.
Separately, prepare the dough from the following ingredients:
- half a teaspoon of baking powder;
- 3 eggs;
- 60 grams of sugar;
- 300 ml of milk;
- half a teaspoon of vanilla;
- 60 grams of flour.
Preheat the oven to a temperature of 180 degrees. Mix all the components for the test. Until they reach a homogeneous state, leave for half an hour in a warm place.
We grease the baking sheet with butter, spread the whole circle of cherries and put in the oven for 5 minutes. After pour in the dough and cook for another half hour, until the cake rises. Sprinkle ready-made klafuti with powdered sugar.
French pancakes
The French have their own recipe for making pancakes. For him, you will need to take:
- half a liter of milk;
- 250 grams of flour;
- 4 eggs;
- 2 pinches of vanilla sugar;
- a pinch of salt;
- butter - to taste.
Pancakes are served with a sauce made from lemon, orange, 100 grams of butter and 50 grams of sugar.
Mix the flour with eggs, sprinkle with sugar, and then gradually pour the milk. You can add a couple of tablespoons of butter, which you must first melt.
We take on the filling. Peel the orange and squeeze the juice, melt the butter, add sugar, zest and orange juice. Mix thoroughly. Fry pancakes in butter in a hot pan.
In a separate frying pan, heat the orange sauce as much as possible, fry the pancakes. For flavor, add a teaspoon of orange liquor. To give them a caramel flavor, you can set them on fire and then serve.