The Ultimate French Grilled Cheese (Croque Monsieur) | Fundamental French Cooking | Bon Appétit

Croque Monsieur is the ultimate French sandwich. It's special because it combines everything France loves, cheese, bread, and ham. There is an art in making the perfect sandwich. You know, it's much more complex than people think. The first step is going to be to make the roux. To begin, we need to warm some milk, and I love to bring a bit of aromatics to the milk, just with a touch of thyme to infuse and to bring a bit more complexity to the sauce. When you're cooking with milk, I would always go full fat. Honestly, when you don't have any fat in milk, it's basically water, so you might as well cook with water. It's important that all the elements, when you're cooking, are around the same temperature. So basically, adding cold milk to a bechamel, you might have lumps because you're not going fast enough and because the cold element is going to solidify the butter and therefore not have something that's super smooth. Bechamel is a preparation that we'll use in a lot of different preparations in France. It's basically warm milk that you incorporate into a mixture of equal parts flour and butter. It has been lightly cooked off to cook up the flour. It's going to bring this gravy texture quite silky and really bring this nice charred cheese feel. So to start the bechamel, you want to add your butter and the flour. The ratio of the butter and the flour is 50-50. You want equal parts. This is what the mixture is called, the roux. So you cook it off for like two, three minutes. People make mistakes when they're making roux because when you have too much butter, it actually separates and there's not enough flour to hold onto the butter. So you have like a split sauce. For the roux, in this instance, we're not looking for any color. The bechamel should be kind of white, light yellow. So here we have the roux that's cooked. It's starting to bind better than the first stages. We just need to add the milk. So the milk should be added in maybe three stages. The first stage is where you don't want to incorporate too much because the idea is to bind everything together. But you need to go bit by bit. Don't try and be a hero and put too much. Otherwise, you won't be able to rectify it. Even if you see lumps at the beginning, don't be scared to just whisk. It's going to go away. If the milk is at the right temperature, don't be afraid. You might think that you messed up, but look how it looked like a second ago and now how it's starting to look. It's all good. The pan you're looking for when making bechamel is something that doesn't have corners, but you don't want angles because these angles are not going to be easy to kind of reach with your spatula or whisk. Now we're just going to season the bechamel. Simple, salt, say two pinches. It's important to taste anyway. But because we're going to add cheese, you don't want to go crazy. A touch of nutmeg. I'm actually not a fan of nutmeg, but I feel like this is traditional. This is what French people put in every croque monsieur. So I'm just going to go and put a touch, not too much. I feel like nutmeg has been a bit overused in French cuisine and especially like at school lunches, we would have a lot of things that were quite heavy on nutmeg. So it's just like a childhood souvenir that I wasn't a big fan of. Perfect. So we have a great consistency. Seasoning is done. We just need to add the cheese. The sauce was made in three steps. So we started with the roux, which is the flour and the butter cooked off. We added milk. It became a bechamel. And now we're adding cheese and it's becoming a Mornay. Mornay is when you add cheese to the bechamel to have this kind of like cheesy sauce. You like, you would put on like nachos basically. So it's our nacho queso sauce in France. For the cheese inside the Mornay, I'm gonna use ponte, which is extremely traditional. It has really nice flavor, good balance. It's sharp. It's not too mild. It has good structure. So two different cheeses for this recipe. People typically go for Gruyère or even Emmental in their Croque Monsieur. The perfect blend for me is a cheese that has character, has complexity and intensity, but not too much that it takes away from the ham. So the cheese that I particularly love in a Croque Monsieur is raclette. It's not classic. It's also wintery, but I feel like with a nice salad, it'll balance it out. So I think having the nineness and the complexity of ponte, but the melting point and the very like gooey decadence of raclette is kind of the best of both worlds. The ponte needs to be grated with a box grater. The ratio for the Mornay is as much as you want it to be. I mean, we're not gonna lie. This is not a light sandwich. It's really all about more is more. So we will put quite a bit of it. When you have a bechamel that's like piping hot, the cheese might split because of the temperature. So you want something that's warm, warm enough that it melts, but not piping hot. So I'm just gonna whisk it again to make sure we have no lumps. And then we're just gonna add a big handful. This is like a great texture. You're looking for something that will be spoonable, will be easily spreadable on top of your sandwich. One thing I love about this sandwich is that you can actually like kind of meal prep it. You can do a bunch of them, put the bechamel that's cold on top and just like put them in the freezer and defrost it whenever you want it. So it's great for, you know, weeknight, last minute dinner. Bechamel is not as unstable as people might think. It's actually super easy to warm back up. You just have to make sure that you're not warming it on too high heat. Putting a bit of plastic wrap on the contact directly on the bechamel, just so it doesn't dry out and create lumps. Now onto the fridge for half an hour. So the construction of the sandwich, you have two slices of bread, a thin layer of mustard. That's not necessarily conventional. In the middle, you have some ham and some cheese, bread. And then on top, you have the bechamel, which will completely coat the sandwich and really like bring this nice like charred cheese. Now it's time to talk bread. There are two different teams in France, at least. It's either sourdough bread or the pain de mie. I chose pain de mie, so let's cut it. Pain de mie is basically French milk bread. I feel like compared to the Japanese milk bread, it's a lot denser. You know, it doesn't like squish as much. Like I'm pressing quite hard here and you see that there's nothing going on. So I feel like it's the perfect toasted sandwich bread for me. What I love about a sourdough croque monsieur is obviously taste, this like tanginess. The cons of using sourdough is like all the different holes from the sourdough, which when you put mustard, when you put bechamel, creates a very uneven sandwich. Pre-sliced white bread will honestly do the trick. What you're looking for, if you're looking for something in the supermarket, is something that doesn't have too much sugar in it. I feel like the sugar and like typical supermarket white bread will kind of bring a lot of imbalance in the taste. I love slicing my own bread because I could choose the thickness. Something that's not too thin, not too thick. Roughly, I would say 1.5 centimeters. Ham. I feel like there are many ways that you can mess up the sandwich if you don't have the right ham. My preference is either jamon de Paris, which is like the typical French ham, but it's a ham that has very little intervention. You're not looking for too many spices, too many aromatics, no sugar. It's quite dry when you look at it. It's not like, you know, when you buy ham at the supermarket, there's this like layer of like moisture. If you can find French ham, I love the Italian hams that you get at delis. The grand biscotto, prosciutto cotto. For thickness though, I like to go quite thin and to put a lot of it. I think it brings more layers than to go for something a bit thicker. But then again, that's my personal preference. Some people like to keep the fat on the ham. I personally do not. I will trim the fat just because I feel like, I don't think it's very enjoyable like chewing on a piece of warm ham fat in a croque monsieur, but that's really my thing. Just gonna put it in little bunches like that. Perfect. Whenever you're ordering croque monsieur, you will always get a salad. It's also a good balance. The croque monsieur is extremely rich and you want something that cuts through the fat. So before building the sandwich, I'm gonna take care of the vinaigrette. What I'm gonna do with the vinaigrette is have a balance of heat with the mustard, sweetness with honey and acidity with vinegar, which will cut through the fat. I like the quite like strong mustard. One spoon of that. Salt, two pinches. Some fresh cracked black pepper. My favorite, Sarawak. I think it has this intensity and this like toasty, meaty notes. I think that grinding fresh spices in general is extremely different than having something that's like already grind like months ago. I like a mortar and pestle just because of the visual aspect. I feel like sometimes with a pepper grinder, I'm not looking exactly at what I want and here I can just like, I don't know. It's also like romantic in a way, you know? It's like the old way, you wanna do it. It's like the crafts. So we're looking for something that has a bit of texture, but not too much. When you're building a vinaigrette, it's extremely important to start with mustard if you're putting any, and then acid, salt. The salt will dissolve in the vinegar. If you start with oil, you will not be able to have something that emulsifies. I like honey in vinaigrettes. I think it brings this nice sweetness that makes you kind of crave salad. And the idea is to just go bit by bit, very gentle in your olive oil. Emulsifying is basically binding two things that should not be together, together. We have a good amount of vinaigrette. Also, I like to loosen it up a bit with water just because I hate a thick salad vinaigrette. The only thing that will add to the salad is some raw shallots, just for tang, texture. This sharpness is gonna cut through the fat. Okay, the vinaigrette is done. Now it's time to build the croque monsieur. So we have two slices of bread. I like to put a touch of mustard just for a little kick on one side. Dijon mustard is the best mustard. It's not sweet. It's really strong. You want that really, really strong taste that kind of takes you up in the nose and you're not sure if you're enjoying it or if it's the worst moment of your life. It's been named after the city of Dijon, which originally made it. What makes it special is basically the seeds, which are much stronger than the American ones we find here. I'm just gonna put a very thin layer on one side of the sandwich. You wanna make sure you're putting cheese on every side of the sandwich. Otherwise, you're gonna have one side that's stuck to the bread and the other one will not be. We're gonna use a raclette. Put the bread on the side and take a little peeler. Just like slice some very thin raclette. You don't wanna go crazy on the cheese. More is not always better. It's all about balance. Here, we're pretty good. Then we'll go in with the ham. I like when there's a pretty decent layer of ham because don't forget that the Mornay on top will be extremely rich. When you put the croque monsieur, like a lot of people just will put this in the broiler with the bechamel on top. Why I don't like this, you're gonna have a top layer that's quite mushy. I think that's a bit sad. Hot pan, drizzle of oil. Using some sort of weight will give you a really nice, even toastiness. If you don't have a weight, you can use another pan. You can use your hands. Honestly, just also pressing it, especially at the beginning when it's not too hot, you're just giving this even layer and then you can start letting go. A spoon of butter. A lot of mistakes people make when they make a croque monsieur, but even a grilled cheese, I think, is coloring the bread too fast and then the cheese is unmelted. So you wanna take your time. You wanna make sure that both of these things come together and don't be afraid of flipping it regularly instead of just doing everything on one side and then the other. That's what you're looking for. Nice, brown, not burnt. The second layer is sometimes a bit trickier because you have a bit of browning in the butter, so it can burn a bit more. So just add a touch of butter to kind of let it cool off and stop the heavy browning. Now that we have the color that we're looking for, we're not looking for more browning. It's just about this constant flipping every minute or two just to make sure that the heat that's in the bottom, we flip it, it goes back to the bottom, and then we flip it again, then kind of like play this game of rising to the center. You know, a lot of croque monsieur, if they're not done properly, you'll have cold ham in the center, and that's not really nice. For me, I would rather it being a 10-minute cooking time and having something that is the best thing I've ever had than trying to rushing it and maybe cooking it in two, three minutes and having something that's kind of like, you can see that the cheese is melting and sticking to the bread. So I'm gonna leave that here for a sec. Final part of the sandwich, putting the Mornay back on the croque monsieur and then onto a sheet tray and in the oven. So the Mornay is cold. Why it's a good thing? It's gonna be easy to spread. Pretty decent amount. You want this kind of like gooey feel. Onto a tray, then onto the oven. If you don't have a tray, you can use the pan that you use for cooking. While the croque monsieur is in the oven, I'm gonna season my salad. So here I have a mix. There's some mustard, sorrel, amaranth, bunch of different nice greens from the market. I like to use my fingers instead of like a spoon just because I feel like I can actually work that salad. I can get all the dressing incorporated instead of just like coating it. We have the shallots here. They're marinated. Looks so good. I think that dressing should always be mixed in instead of like just put on top or on the side. Having that dressing mix perfectly with whatever you're putting in your salad is what makes the salad magical. You know, when you go to a restaurant and you're like, that salad is so good. I will never be able to make it at home. This is exactly what we do. So we have our salad ready for when the croque is out of the oven. Also in France, we don't say croque monsieur. We say croque. It's like just the first word, you know? If you want to be a real French, you just say, I'm going to make myself a croque. A croque is a bite. So it's even like Mr. Bite, basically. I'm really looking for a certain color, like this perfect golden brown. And I just don't want to miss the mark. So I'm just going to watch it for the whole time. It's like my favorite show, you know? So we have the perfect croque monsieur. Perfect char on top. This pellicule comes from the bechamel. I cut it in half. This is exactly what you're looking for. The nice ratio of ham and cheese in the mornay. That's really like, you can feel like nice and gooey, but kind of holds its shape as well. Nice dose of greens. You can want to taste the croque monsieur while it's still like hot. I use fork and knife. And I use my fingers. I feel like croque monsieur is always too messy to eat with just your fingers. It's so good. The nutmeg just hits right. And the thyme that I infuse in the milk comes out. I mean, this is honestly like grilled cheese on steroids. Then a bit of salad for good measure. Yeah. This is a full meal right here. Bon appetit.