Crepes Filled with Cheese and Ham

It's quite common to have crepes for lunch in France, maybe in a little bistro with a small glass of wine and a salad on the side. Now, these are not sweet crepes. These are savoury crepes. And I'm going to make my version with some conté cheese, some ham and some beautiful seeded mustard. So we'll start with our crepe batter, some plain flour, pinch of salt. If you were doing sweet crepes, you would add the sugar at this stage. But because I'm keeping mine savoury, there is no sugar. Make a well in the centre. And then I'm going to crack in two eggs. And this part can be done ahead of time. In fact, the crepes, I find, hold much better if they have some time to rest in the fridge. But it is not essential. You don't have to do that if you don't want to. You can cook this batter straight away, which is what I'm going to be doing. So I'm just going to start whisking in the eggs. And the last ingredient we're adding to this is some milk. So easy to make crepes at home. I remember coming home from school and having these for afternoon tea, maybe with a bit of lemon, a bit of sugar. They're so versatile, just as good savoury as they are sweet. So you'll see that this is looking quite thick. That's OK. We're going to little by little add some more milk. And instead of adding all the milk at once, I tend to add it in small portions just so I don't get too many lumps. So once it's starting to get thick like that, you can work it a bit more and really whisk out those lumps. That's quite nice. And then we can add some more milk. Now, every flour is different, so you may need a little more or a little less milk. What we're looking for is a batter that resembles pouring cream. That's the perfect consistency for our crepes. You don't want to be too thick because these are not pancakes. We want these to be handkerchief thin. So keep whisking. Still a little bit thick. We'll add some more milk. And if you were to make this ahead of time, one, two hours, even a day ahead of time, you'll see that your batter thickens up. So you just need to loosen it up with some extra milk until you have the consistency like this. That's just right. Let's start cooking our crepes. We need to preheat our pan. So I'm going to turn that on a medium heat. You don't want it to be too hot. You also don't want it to be too cold. So medium is just right. While that's warming up, I'm going to melt some butter. So, number one, I want some butter for my actual pan, but I also want it for the bechamel that I'm going to cook later on. So for this, I'm just going to measure out about 30 grams of butter. Just cut that off, actually. So we'll just take that off and we'll break up our butter into the pot and just let that melt. And I only need a little bit of this to grease the pan. So I'll just use my brush. Just take some of that butter and we'll grease it. This, in fact, is a nonstick pan, so we don't need too much butter. It's just a thin coating. It also tastes delicious. Right. Now I'll grab my ladle. And I want about three quarters of this ladle full. And we're going to pour it onto our pan and just swirl it around. So just leave your ladle in the centre and actually move the pan around. And that means that we're getting a lovely, even distribution of our crepe batter. Back onto the heat. You'll see there's little bubbles there. It sets quite quickly. All right, look at that. See how that's detached? And a big flip. Oh, that one didn't work. Second one. Yeah, look at that. Fantastic. Now I want this to be a light colour, not too cooked, because I am going to toast them again once I've filled it with our bechamel sauce. So I'll just turn that now to a low heat. Now for our bechamel. So I'll just turn the heat back on this butter. So we've got about 30g of butter in there that I've melted. To that, I'm going to add some flour. And this is a standard white sauce. So we want to cook off that flour. This combination of flour and butter is called a roux. And you want to cook off that flour for about a minute or so before you start adding your milk. So once that's cooked down, we can add our milk. And we're going to just allow that to thicken. When you're making a white sauce like this, don't add all of your milk at once. You want to add it little by little again, just so we get this to be silky, velvety and smooth. So I've got a bit of work to do here. I'm going to make a few more crepes, get this sauce thick, and then we're ready to start filling our crepes. Alright, our crepes are ready to go. I've got a lovely thick bechamel. And I'm just grating my cheese here. Now, this is a content cheese, which is nutty and it's sweet. You can find it at selected supermarkets. Also, it's found at all the delis. If you can't find it, Gruyere cheese works well. Even cheddar is fine too. So we're going to add all of this to our crepes. We've got our white sauce, so sprinkle that in. And I'll add some nutmeg, a pinch of nutmeg. A tiny pinch of salt, but not too much salt because I am adding some ham. So I'm using some double-smoked ham. You want about four or five slices. And I'm going to roughly chop it. So just pile it on each other. Little pieces for this. And just run your knife through it a few times. So in with our ham. And to make it extra French, of course, some mustard. So some seeded mustard. Could use Dijon too. And then we're just going to fold this in to our luscious white sauce. I love the speckles of the mustard in this. Delicious. Great. Now time to fill our crepes. So we're going to make little crepe parcels. I'll work with one crepe at a time. And we'll place that down. On the more cooked side, I'm going to add our cheesy sauce to the centre. You can see how thick it is. It's holding its shape. Don't overfill it. And then I'm going to bring in the sides. And fold it over so it looks like a cute little parcel. And that's our first one done. So I'll make another one of these. And then I'm just going to toast them very lightly on each side until it's golden. Alright, these are looking good. I'm going to take one out. Place it onto a plate. And I am going to serve it with a salad. A simple mesclun salad. You can mix the dressing through it if you like. I'm just going to do it as a garnish. So some lettuce leaves on the side. And always it needs a little bit of acid. So some lemon juice. Some good quality extra virgin olive oil. And a pinch of salt and pepper. What a simple lunch. Very, very French indeed. I want to cut into this because it's all about that creamy interior with the mustard, the ham and the cheese. Cut that open. And it's that goo factor that we're really after. Crepes, yep. Delicious, sweet. But they're also exceptional when they're gooey and cheesy just like this. Delicious.