Recipe: Croque Madame Muffins

After letting my favorite knife store sharpen my knives there’s just one problem. Just across the street there is a bookstore with a wide variety of cookbooks and somehow I always get dragged into that  store, no idea why.. Last time I saw a book by Rachel Khoo, Chez Rachel or in English “The Little Paris Kitchen”. I saw some of her episodes on YouTube recently and with my interest lately for the French cuisine I knew I had to get this book.

I was home on a Saturday and needed to lunch, why not try out this cookbook? And there I saw the recipe for Croque Madame Muffins. Went to the store for some white bread, ham and Gruyere and off we go.

Ingredients:

• White Bread
• Ham
• Eggs
• 1 tbsp of Flour
• Butter
• Milk
• 1 tsp Mustard
• Some ground pepper and nutmeg
• Cheese (I used Gruyere, you could also use Comté or any other cheese you like)
• Muffin tray

Steps

1. Make your white bread nice and square and trim of the crust, use a brush to cover the bread with molten butter on both sides.
2. Make your Bechamel sause. 1 tbsp of butter, 1 tbsp of flour, 200 ml of milk. Make a roux, slowly ad the milk, add some nutmeg, pepper and 1 tsp of mustard. There you have your Bechamel sause.
3. Put your bread, covered with butter on both sides in the muffin tray. Add some ham or in case you are a vegetarian just skip the ham. Then you put in 1 egg, in my case I removed some of the egg white from the egg. The muffin would’ve gotten too full. On top of the egg put 1 tbsp of the Bechamel sause. On top of that put some of the cheese.
4. Pre-heat your oven on 180 degrees Celcius. Rachel recommends to put them in for 15 to 20 minutes. I like my eggs runny, after 17 minutes the egg was all hard. I believe in my case, with my oven, 10-12 minutes was enough. Just try out what you like best, every oven works different.
5. And there you have your Croque Madame Muffins.

How was it?

Well, it’s like a croque madame, in muffin shape, crispy, tasty, just how I like it. A creative way to cook a French classic. This is one to recommend.