French cuisine
French cooking is technique: the same ingredients give a different result depending on how they were handled.
French cooking wrote down what other kitchens do by eye: sauces, knife cuts, the order things go in. Hence the reputation for difficulty, although home dishes like ratatouille or onion soup come from four ingredients.
Its main device is patience with onions and butter. Half the flavour appears during the stage that looks like nothing is happening.
2 dishes
- Ratatouille
A Provençal vegetable stew where each vegetable is cooked separately before they meet — otherwise it turns to mush.
65 min · Easy · Main course
- French onion soup
Soup from onions, stock and cheese-topped bread. All of the flavour comes from caramelisation, which takes forty minutes rather than twenty.
75 min · Easy · Soup