Easy recipe: French crepes

Even though I learned to make crepes at a very early age, I have also taught it to several people and they said it was easy too. Much easier than it looks.

First you need your ingredients. Out of laziness I put it all in a blender so my recipe fills a blender but you can scale up or down if you have a larger blender or want to mix by hand. My recipe makes around 20 crepes.

You need 2 cups of milk, half a can of beer (optional, otherwise replace with water, but the yeast helps make the crepes lighter), 2 cups of flour, 2 eggs and a big spoon of vegetable oil.

Put that all in your blender

or blend by hand until you get a smooth batter, runnier than pancake batter, but not as liquid as milk. It should stick a little if you dip a finger.

Then heat up a pan with a little vegetable oil. You want to oil the pan after each crepe so it doesn’t stick, you can do so with a napkin dipped in oil so you don’t use too much each time. I use gas so I put the pan to heat on full gas. You know if it hot enough when you drip a little dough and it makes bubbles like it is boiling.

Now the tricky part, with your big spoon, you want to pour enough dough to cover the bottom of the pan with just a thin layer. So one hand pours and the other moves the pan in order to spread the dough as soon as possible.

The crepe will look like this

Lower the fire and let it cook for a couple of minutes, until you can move the crepe just by shaking the pan

If you are up for it, a brisk wrist movement will flip the crepe to the other side, otherwise just use a spatula and flip your crepe. The flipped side should be golden, not too brown.

Now it is time to add the fillings you want. You can use anything salty (sliced meat, diced chicken, an egg, cheese, vegetables, …) or sweet (chocolate, whipped cream, a scoop of ice cream on the side, fruit,…). Put first what needs to melt, like cheese or chocolate, then what just needs to be heated a little.

My crepe has a layer of shredded mozzarella, goat cheese, tomato, garlic, onion and basil. A common recipe is to put an egg in a salty crepe, if you do so the egg goes first, on a very low heat so it has time to cook before the other side of the crepe burns.

You only want to fill up half of the crepe, as the other half will be folded on top, like a taco. Once your ingredients are ready, you can fold, and leave on the heat a minute or two longer.

That’s it, bon appétit!

 

We often have crepes for breakfast with egg, cheese and tomato, however if there is more than two of you, waiting until you bake 4 crepes will result in all the others eating cold crepes. You can make just the crepe ahead of time, pile them up in a plate, then everyone can heat up his in a few minutes with fillings of his choice.

For sweet crepes, say honey, Nutella, sugar, etc you can also make them in advance and serve them cold, however salty crepes are better hot.

Crepes are a perfect way to reuse leftover ground meat, chicken, pasta sauce, and use up any vegetable that is about to go bad. However, if the stuffing needs more cooking, you may want to precook and then just pour on the crepe. For example I did this garlic, onion and tomato mix, cooked it and poured it on my crepe.