Croque Monsieur, Croque Madame, and how to make a béchamel sauce

Hey guys we're going to go over a couple of great sandwiches. We'll do a croque madame and a croque monsieur. We've got some beautiful breads here. We've got a sourdough loaf and we've got some asiago cheese bread. I've got some ham, some swiss, we've got an egg, we've got some grated gouda. We've got the stuff we need to make our bechamel sauce. We've got about a cup and a half of milk. We've got a couple tablespoons of flour and some butter, a little bit of salt, and we'll add some nutmeg in there as well. I'm excited to show you guys these sandwiches. They are some of my favorite. All right guys so the most difficult part of this process is making the bechamel sauce. I got a couple of pans here and we've got some milk and some butter. I want to warm the milk. We want to warm the milk because if you wait for the milk to warm in your pan you're probably going to burn it. We've got our butter here and we just want to melt it. You don't want to get any color on it. When you're making a roux you usually want to use equal parts fat and flour. So we'll add in some of this first and we'll stir it until it's smooth. We just don't want it to be like soupy. Throw a little bit thicker. All right so now we can start adding in our warm milk and we'll add it in a little bit at a time and every time we add milk we're going to stir it because we don't want any lumps in this sauce. The thing about a roux, using a roux, a thickener, is it won't thicken whatever you're trying to thicken until it boils. So if you can see now that it's boiling I'm getting some nice streaks in there. Same process stir stir stir so it's silky smooth. I'm going to add a pinch of salt and I'll add some nutmeg. We can see the bubble starting to form. That tells me that the milk is getting nice and hot and then we'll turn down the heat and let that simmer for just a couple of minutes. We don't want it to get any darker. Bechamel is one of the mother sauces. It's a white sauce. It's used as the base for your macaroni and cheese sauce. So into this bechamel you can add some shredded cheddar or something like that. Pour it over some pasta and then you've got a delicious mac and cheese. It's also great for in between layers of a lasagna. Like a veggie lasagna is really good with the bechamel sauce in between the layers of pasta and cheese. We'll give that a stir and we'll lower the heat one more time. Okay let's begin to work on our sandwich. We'll take two pieces of bread. Now what I like to do with these is I like to cut the crust off. Now the reason I'll cut the crust off is so that the bread here will get a nice contact with the pan and you can save these pieces of bread and make some croutons with them. Okay let's check our bechamel. It has come together really nicely. Okay for our sandwich we've got our two slices of bread. We want to take a little bit of mustard. You can use a whole grain or a Dijon and spread it very thinly. Okay you don't want a lot of sauce on there. We just want to take that and spread a very thin layer and we'll go edge to edge. Now you want to take your cheese. You want to go cheese and ham. I think if I fold it like that and then again like this we'll have nice coverage. We'll take a second piece of cheese and then our bread. So that's what your sandwich is going to look like at this point. We'll warm our pan. We're doing a medium kind of heat here. We want to take butter. We'll take our butter and then our bread and we'll use that bread to kind of soak up that butter because that's what's going to create that crust. Okay now we're going to put a lid on this. We're going to put a lid on our pan. We've got it set to like a medium low type of temperature and we're going to Okay guys let's check this sandwich. We're going to see if it's golden brown. Oh yeah that's beautiful. Look at that. All right so in the same pan we're going to add some more butter. Add some more butter. We'll set that sandwich down and it's okay. Press it down. You want good contact. Let that bread soak that butter up. That's what's going to give you that golden brown. We'll put the lid on there another four minutes. Also right now guys while this sandwich is toasting I've got the oven set to 425 and we're going to take some of that shredded cheese. We're going to take our sandwich, bechamel, shredded cheese and then we're going to melt the cheese in the oven. All right guys let's take a look at that sandwich. We'll see if the bottom side is nice and toasty like the top side. Oh yeah that's beautiful. So now what we're going to do is we're going to place that on a baking sheet. We've got our bechamel. When a sauce is thick enough to coat the back of a spoon and you can run your finger through it that texture is called nappe. We'll take some of that sauce, layer it on the sandwich, take it to the edge. We'll take our gouda cheese. That's a pretty big thick layer there guys. Now we're going to take this into the oven and we'll see you back in a minute. Oh look at that guys. So right out of the oven we've got our sandwich. We're going to top that sandwich with an egg. We've got a pan here. This is on pretty low heat. We'll take our egg, crack it. Now we'll season our egg with that Chef's Backyard flavor formula seasoning. Great on everything. We'll take that sandwich up a notch and we're going to go ahead and broil that cheese. See how the fire, the flame gives it that nice golden toasty color. Oh man that's beautiful. So that's what in a restaurant you have something called a salamander or a broiler. That's what broiling your cheese does and that brown equals flavor guys. Oh that's beautiful. With your egg cook it as cook it done to your liking. All right guys looks like we're ready to plate this sandwich up. Got my spatula. We'll take our sandwich put it on the plate. Now we'll take our egg, slide that on the sandwich and there you have it guys. Okay guys another way that you can do this without having to start your oven is you can use that lid on your pan. We'll go ahead and top this with that bechamel sauce. Take it to the edge right take it to the edge and then we'll take our cheese and since you're putting the lid on this guy you can go ahead and put that lid on there and let that cheese let the steam from your sandwich kind of melt that. Oh look look at that you can see that cheese starting to melt. It looks good. So now while it's while that cheese is melting we can go ahead and take it to that next step and use our torch to broil it. Remove the lid to broil that cheese. It's toasted. Oh yeah it sure is. There you have it guys. There is our beautiful sandwich. Take a look at that guys. You got two layers of cheese inside, two layers of ham, beautiful broiled cheese on top. Top it with an egg. Oh man and here we have it guys the croque madame. So the croque madame is the croque monsieur with an egg on top of it. Here we've taken our egg we seasoned it with some of our chef's backyard flavor formula seasoning and we fried it in a pan put it on top of the sandwich for the ultimate hot ham and cheese sandwich. It just doesn't get any better than this. Okay guys let's cut into this sandwich. Here's that shot right. You can hear the bread is still crunchy. Oh man doesn't that look lovely. So let's take a bite. Let's see how good this sandwich is. You've got that golden crust, two layers of cheese, two layers of ham, more cheese broiled on top. You've got an egg that we fried. This sandwich is extremely decadent and well worth a try. I hope you get a chance to try it. I hope you can make it for your friends, your family, your loved ones. Thanks for stopping by to visit me here at the chef's backyard and we'll see you real soon. Oh I love this sandwich and it's so good. Delicioso. So good.