Turned Fridge Leftovers into this Elegant 1900s French Dish (Oeufs Maillotés)

Welcome back everybody. So the egg adventure is coming to an end. This is the last recipe and to finish we're going to make something called les oeufs maillotés. These are eggs. That's all you're going to need that are wrapped up into puff pastry and then cooked in the oven. You can serve this with any sauce that you like. So super versatile, bechamel, Morne, hollandaise, whatever you want. But for the purpose of that video and because I keep on saying the importance of knowing your culinary basics, we're going to do an exercise. I'm going to go through my fridge, pick some random stuff. We're going to brainstorm and I'm going to show you that when you know your stuff, there's actually lots of things that can be made. So we're going to whip up a sauce at random right here and then. Okay, let's go. And now for the little sauce exercise. It is time to face your demon. The fridge has been opened and that is what you have. The horrible looking stuff that nobody wants to see. Some old mushrooms, the onions. They're not super fresh. A piece of parmesan. Doesn't look bad. We've got some butter, of course. We're doing eggs. We've got eggs. I've got a leftover chicken stock. There's a store-bought stuff, products. Of course, I got my parsley, my thyme and stuff. And some cream, as you do in French cooking. This is unopened yet as a kind of tomato that I've got here potentially if I want to use it. Some milk. How many sauce do you think we can make with that? This is the question I'm throwing you. Use the comments in the video immediately. Look at this and tell me. Think about it. How many sauce do you think? I'm thinking, looking at this, about seven to eight sauces. Right off the bat. Let's go for the list. The basic one, of course, I've got flour in my cupboard. We can make a bechamel. I can flavor the bechamel with a twist. I can make like a mushroom bechamel if I want. I can make a sauce creme by adding cream in there. I can turn the bechamel into a sauce mornay by using my cheese and my eggs. I can make a velouté, a chicken velouté with my stock on here. I can turn my velouté into a sauce suprême, or a mushroom suprême, or an aurore sauce, which is using the tomato afterward. Or perhaps I could even make a sous-vide. Maybe I can just make a bechamel and then with a puree of onion. That is the choice that I've got here. So you can see when you know your basic, just by looking at something like that, you would not imagine you can make seven to eight sauces. And they are classic sauces from French cooking. So what I'm going to do here, because I really need to use the old stuff. Mushroom, they have to go. I'm going to use that. I'm going to use my chicken here. So I'm starting to think this is going to be a velouté, because velouté on its own is not great. I'm going to add some cream. I'm going to make a suprême with some mushroom, use some, maybe some parsley in there. And if we want, maybe I could have added a touch of tomato, but I'm going to leave it as that. So we're going to go for a suprême sauce with mushroom. Let's begin the recipe. Of course, we always start with the eggs. I've got the boiling water like we've seen before. And a new thing you can do, you can put your eggs in a little sieve like that, because sometimes they break if you just put them in the pan, because they're bouncing around. So I'm doing this. It prevents the whole thing from moving everywhere. And I can count now five minutes top, five to six minutes maximum, but five minutes is the required time because they cook here and then they're going to cook in the oven after. The timer is going off. I'm going to take my egg and immediately put them into cold water. The eggs are in the water and they're going to sit there until they're totally cooled down. You can leave them there and forget about it until you're ready. For now, we're going to start making the sauce. So a sauce suprême is going to be a base of velouté. So it's not going to be a restaurant quality, obviously, because everything is a bit leftover. This is store-bought. The mushroom, I've peeled them. I peeled the skin. It should look a little bit better than they were. And for the rest, some simple flavorings. I've got some thyme, some bay leaves, salt, pepper. You can add nutmeg if you want. I've measured some cream, butter and flour. That's all we need. Let's go on the stove. Culinary basic number one, we make the roux. Equal amount of flour and butter. So first we melt the butter. As soon as the butter is melted, low heat, I'm adding all of the flour. Mix well. We've seen this before. This is called a roux. Very simple. This is the base to thicken béchamel, velouté and anything like that. I'm going to make here a blonde roux. We're going to leave this to cook for three minutes on low heat. While the roux is cooking, I'm going to bring my stock to a light boil, try to flavor it. So I'm going to add my one bay leaf in here, a piece of thyme and some of the worst looking mushrooms that I've got, that I've cut in little pieces, just to add some flavoring. That's it. Time is off. My roux has been cooking. It starts to smell a bit like a cake. It means it's ready. I'm going to put it on the side and let it cool down. My stock is simmering and I'm going to reduce the heat and leave this on a very low simmer, not to evaporate too much of it because I need about, you know, one cup of it. And the mushroom will really add a boost in flavor. So mushrooms, even old ones like that, absolutely great. My roux is now cold enough. I'm ready to continue and transform this into a velouté. What we're going to do, off the heat, of course, I'm going to take some of my warm stock. So warm stock on a cold roux. And off the heat, like you would do with a béchamel or white sauce, I'm going to start to dilute that roux in a little bit of stock. And that avoids any clumps. So I'm going around, catching everything and then I'm going to put the rest of the stock. So you can see that kind of mushroomy color. You can see my stock. So I've really got all the roux there. You see, as much as I could. And now I can just add the rest. I'm not keeping the horrible mushrooms. Up, up they go. Put some things in between the compost. And that's it. Heat on. Medium. And we're going to thicken this. So within one or two minutes, you whisk constantly. You can see it starts to thicken big time. And the color, you see the power of mushroom, especially the old one because it's a bit dark. I immediately have now a chicken velouté flavored with mushroom. We want to have the boil to start and you want that simmering, boiling, the bubbling away for at least two minutes when you make a velouté. Make sure it re-thickens properly. So as I just said, we want this bubbling. This is the consistency of my velouté right now. See, it's very thick. It can coat a spoon very, very easily. I'm going to leave this to cook on a very low heat for two minutes. After two minutes, we are done. We've made a velouté. So when you mix a stock with roux, you get a velouté. This is the base. It's a mother sauce. It's a chicken velouté. Usually it's a veal, a veal stock you have to use. But the problem with the velouté, it's never super appetizing. Okay, so this is why you go forward by transforming this into another sauce. So the sauce suprême is not much. It is simply adding some cream and I'm going to add some mushroom. So the color is a bit mushroomy, but I want something a bit better. So one or two tablespoons of cream. And we're going to dilute and get a better color. And we keep on cooking this slowly. So for a good five minutes or something until we got the right taste, the right consistency. If you want more cream, you can. You want something more pale. You add more cream or something more dark. You add less cream. We don't touch the seasoning right now, but we still need something a bit more appetizing in there. So what I'm going to do, I'm going to pan fry the mushroom that I've got. So there we have it. My mushrooms are ready. I cleaned my pan to show something a bit nice. You see my suprême here is quite thick. I want something quite thick for our preparation. But now, what can we do? We can add some flavoring. So I'm adding some parsley. You could use tarragon if you want. If you don't use mushroom, so you get some texture. And of course, I've got my mushrooms. So even though we're working with leftovers and all the stuff from the fridge, we're trying to get as close to the original as possible to still get something decent. Okay, so I'm going to mix that in. And that's it. We've got our sauce. I'm going to taste, adjust the seasoning, and we're good to go. So as I said, we're trying to stick to the tradition. So be careful seasoning at the end. Yeah, so you see there's enough salt already. That is a store-bought stock. Maybe a hint of black pepper. And if you want to be traditional, the grating of nutmeg. Taking a clean spoon. I'm going to turn my heat off, I think. And now this is the thickness. So I've got some mushroom with my egg. It's going to be great. I've got some sautéed mushroom in here. I've got a nice color. There's some flavor with the fresh parsley flavor. It's mushroomy. It's going to go perfectly with what I've got. So just to show you a few things from the fridge, what can be done. And now, let's make the egg. The egg part is very simple. But before you start, you need to be prepared. So first thing, preheat your oven at 200 degrees Celsius. What we're going to do here is we're going to have our eggs. So these are eggs. They're medium, medium boil. So soft inside. And we have to wrap them into the puff pastry. So make sure the puff pastry is defrosted. It's in your fridge. You want it still firm. We want a bit of flour. We're going to put some egg wash on top. So make sure you got like a pastry brush. Some egg yolk with a bit of water in there. The eggs, a little knife for the top for the decoration. We're also going to be using, of course, a, you know, a baking sheet or anything like this. Or a cookie sheet with a piece of parchment paper. We're going to put the eggs when they are done. All right, so let's do this. The first thing is the puff pastry. You can make a large sheet or whatever. I'm adding a little bit of flour in there. Because again, talking about leftover. That was the one piece that I have left in my fridge. I want to make sure. See, look at this. It's a bit dry. So I'm just applying some little flour to make sure there's no part that is too wet or anything like that. Okay, and I think I may use actually this section. So what we need to do, we need to roll kind of the eggs. So that's going to be too much, obviously. But it's just for the demonstration, roughly speaking, how much we're going to need. We're going to need to put this over. So I don't need the whole thing. Okay, so I could go maybe a bit here because this is not super good looking. I'm going to get rid of that. And all what we do, we take this. I'm going to try to encase the egg. I can see we encase the egg into the puff pastry in here. And then slowly we're going to seal everything around. So wait for the pastry. Don't force it. Don't burst the egg open. I'm going to wait it to get a bit softer and then start to work it. Now one thing I found as well is that I'm using a little bit of water on the edges to really help the whole thing to stick because you see I put some water in there. So just around the edges, I'm placing some water. And I think my pastry is going to start to come to the right temperature. You can see what I'm going to do. I'm going to start to really encase that egg in there. And I'm going to start to seal the whole thing. And I'm using a knife or anything like that. We're going to cut the excess. Now, let's trim the whole thing. So if you got too much, you know what? We can just cut the excess on here. I'm going to be cutting a little bit. Try to make it neater. A little bit on here. Okay, see it starts to get soft and this is a store-bought pastry that I've got. And here it's not too bad. So I'm going to use my knife. You can leave it like this. You can make it round if you want around the edges. But I'm not too fast. I'm going to be using my knife, not on the sharp side, just to make this little sealing point. I'm going to seal everything on the side here. Just to make a parcel and that's about it. Nothing complex. As soon as this is done, I'm transferring this immediately to my baking sheet here. And I'm going to use my egg wash. Very important to give some nice color to brush the whole thing off. Okay, a good layer of egg. Always add a nice color to the whole thing. Okay, so this is the parcel. You can repeat the same process. And if you want, you can make these kind of little marks or whatever. You know, I'm not always a pro at decorating, but you know, just a few little marks. Like it's just a little bit of flair, nothing special. If you want, you can decorate. You make some kind of a leaf or shape or anything, but just have something nice. And then straight into the oven about 15 minutes and that's it. 15 minutes have passed and my parcel is out of the oven. So you can see it's puffed nicely. You could put it maybe for 13 minutes. As soon as basically the puff pastry is puffed and colored, it's enough. Okay, so I'm going to leave it to cool down a little bit. And what we're going to do then, I'm going to cut it open. You don't have to. You can serve it like this on the plate as a bit of a surprise, a surprise parcel. But I want to show you how it looks inside. Then we're going to plate, put the sauce and dig in. Moment of truth, the cutting. I hope I'm cutting the right way here and I want to show you the inside. As I said, you don't have to do this. I've tested it before. It worked and we should have some kind of a hard-boiled egg in case in the puff pastry. So let me try to very, very gently go through this. Wow, there we go. Look, it's not overcooked. So these are called les oeufs maillotés, so the encased eggs. And all that's left to do now is the plating. So I'm going to grab a plate. I'm going to pour some sauce, put this on, some decoration and then time for the tasting. So here we are. Just put some sauce in there, a good dollop of sauce, a bit of decoration and you stack the eggs. But how do we approach this? And I'm starving. Remove the decoration, put this on the side. And go away parsley. And yeah, we've got a choice. I guess you could go with your hands and get, I want you to go like it's going to be sticky because it took some time to put a piece of puff pastry on here. So piece of egg, puff pastry, supreme sauce. Whoa, this is going to be indulgent. Mm-hmm. The egg. Again, that sauce is going to be a little bit coarse, it's going to be a bit thick. And you can add more cream when you warm it up. But the puff pastry with the mushroom, that kind of creamy sauce already is divine. It's simply, I'm always stunned by this cuisine from, that's from the 1900s. Can you imagine? That's what we were eating. Needless to tell you, this is tasty. But I love the combination where you get the sauce, you know, the puff pastry with the eggs. You've got different type of texture, of taste, and it all combines together. And of course, you know, buttery puff pastry rolled into a sauce. And this is like a chicken supreme sauce. You get mushroom taste, the chicken stock, the cream, all the flavors in there. It's an explosion of flavor. Beautiful. I am so happy to really end up this egg adventure series with that recipe. Really an old one, actually, really from the 1900s, because I absolutely love to revive this old classic. And when I looked at this on paper, I thought, well, I'm not sure about that, you know. But then you make it, and it's insane. So the sauce, as I said, can be anything you want. It doesn't have to be a supreme sauce. It can be a simple bechamel, can be a mornay. Imagine a way to read your breakfast, a coupon de hollandaise sauce, for instance, with your eggs in the puff pastry. And you can make this for one, two, three, four, five. It's actually quite easy. Once you've got the sauce, you have your eggs, you encase everything, put this in the oven. 15 minutes is spot on. And it looks, honestly, so different than I've never been served anything like this. I've never seen anything like this. But that completes our series on the egg. I hope you enjoyed. We're going to resume the normal filming that you usually do with recipes, with technique. And I hope you're going to join me again for all this thing. Now, please use the comment section to tell me what you thought about that series, about the recipes, what were your favorite, that sort of thing, because I always like to hear about it. Okay, I'll see you all next time. Take care all. Bye-bye.