Published May 1, 2011. From Cook's Illustrated.
We determined that the success of our crêpe recipe relied on some crucial crêpe-cooking tricks. Heating the pan properly was essential to our recipe. If too hot, the batter set up before it evenly coated the surface. If too cool, the crêpe was pale (read: bland) and too flimsy to flip without tearing. Using just enough of our crêpe recipe’s batter to coat the bottom of the pan was also important, as was the tilt-and-shake method that we employed to distribute it. To avoid singed fingertips, we loosened the crêpe with a rubber spatula before grasping its edge and nimbly turning it to the flip side to cook until spotty brown.
Crêpes will give off steam as they cook, but if at any point the skillet begins to smoke, remove it from the heat immediately and turn down the heat. Stacking the crêpes on a wire rack allows excess steam to escape so they won’t stick together. To allow for practice, the recipe yields 10 crêpes; only eight are needed for the filling.
Dear Friend,
These days, it’s pretty easy to get free recipes on the Internet. I’m sure a search for “roast chicken recipe” will turn up thousands and thousands. But, as with so much on the web, you should tread lightly if you don’t know the source.
In America’s Test Kitchen, our motto is, “Recipes that Work,” and our mission is to be your trusted source for recipes that work every time you use them. Our test cooks spend their days obsessively testing recipes until they offer consistently great results. As we like to say here, “We make the mistakes so you don’t have to.”
CooksIllustrated.com is the only place you can find not only 20 years' worth of our foolproof recipes, but also objective ratings of cookware, and blind taste tests for hundreds of everyday supermarket ingredients (hey, without the proper ingredients and equipment you can still run into problems — no matter how good the recipe).
Let me make a simple, no-nonsense offer. Try out our website FREE for a 14-Day, No-Hassle Trial Offer. I’m pretty confident that CooksIllustrated.com will quickly become an invaluable resource for everything from quick, weeknight suppers to huge, holiday feasts for family and friends.
Thanks for your consideration,
Christopher Kimball
Founder and Publisher
