What if we revisited traditional French recipes?

Homemade beef bourguignon, sausage and lentils, Bourdaloue tart… We know the classics, and we love them. But in cooking, we also like to stray from the beaten track, innovate, and bring a touch of creativity… A Saint-Honoré can thus be adorned with seasonal flavors with chestnut cream and a pot-au-feu available in a vegetable version.

How to revisit a traditional recipe?

Destructuring a classic

Which could also be defined as the art of taking the opposite approach by giving a presentation to a dish or dessert completely different from the original. In idea, the proposed recipe must be unrecognizable to sight, while remaining similar in taste. In practice, it involves taking all the elements of a recipe, assembling them differently to surprise the eye.
Paris-Brest, for example, is easily presented in a glass, while raclette can be transformed into a tart, croquettes or omelette, depending on your mood. Same tastes, same textures, but in a completely new form.

Swap salty and sweet

How about surprising your guests by offering them a crème brûlée as a starter and a terrine as a dessert? No, we are not suggesting that you reverse the order of dishes – even if that is an excellent idea for a themed dinner – but rather transform sweet recipes into savory ones, and vice versa. We think in particular of the crème brûlée with button mushrooms, with its creamy mixture of eggs and mushrooms, and its caramelized crust with sugar and porcini mushroom powder. A surprising revisit which always produces its small effect.
Another option, less radical, consists of integrating a salty touch into a sweet recipe or a sweet note into a dish like in vanilla blanquette and black olive muffins.

Play with ingredients

The subtlety when revisiting a specialty is to preserve its essence, while adding something new. This is why we can afford to add, substitute or remove one or even several ingredients from a recipe. The best examples are seasonal classics. In winter, we abandon the zucchini, tomatoes and eggplants that make up the tian, in favor of celery root, carrots and broccoli. As for the pound cake, we allow ourselves to enrich it with candied apples, to give it a comforting seasonal touch.
We can also breathe new life into the original recipe. In this case, the change is lighter, because it is mainly a matter of enhancing the ingredients already present. Which you can do by adding a few black sesame seeds to a pear tart, or by incorporating a touch of wasabi into the mayonnaise for deviled eggs. The possibilities are numerous, just let your creativity flow.

It’s up to you now, taking inspiration from our revisited classic recipes.