Crepes

Sweet wheat, savory buckwheat

In Brittany, the heartland of crepes, the rule is firm:

• Crepe — thin wheat-flour pancake, used for sweet preparations: butter and sugar, jam, Nutella, lemon and sugar, fruit and cream.
• Galette — buckwheat flour pancake, almost always savory: ham and cheese (galette complete with a sunny-side egg), mushroom, sausage, smoked salmon.

The two share a griddle and a technique but pair with different worlds of toppings.

The thin batter

A good crepe batter is thinner than pancake batter — pourable like cream, with no lumps. Resting it for at least an hour (sometimes overnight) hydrates the flour and softens the gluten, producing tender crepes that don’t tear when flipped. Many Breton recipes specify resting in the refrigerator for 12 hours.

The wooden spreader

Street-food crepe stalls cook on large flat griddles — typically 40 cm or wider — using a small wooden tool called a rateau to spread a ladle of batter into a perfectly thin disc. Home cooks use the swirl-and-tilt method on a pan instead. Either way, the goal is uniform thinness; thick crepes cease to be crepes.

Suzette and beyond

The most famous prepared crepe is Crêpes Suzette — flambéed with orange liqueur and butter sauce, supposedly created by accident at the Café de Paris in Monte Carlo in 1895. Other classics include crêpes Normandes (apples and Calvados) and the simplest of all, beurre-sucre — just butter and sugar inside a hot crepe.