hello this is chef john from food wishes comm with the madame Cristo that's right
this started out as an attempt to do a little bit of a twist on the croque
madame but upon completion I realized that basically I'd made a Monte Cristo
sandwich with a poached egg on top so with the help of a new friend on Twitter
who goes by the name of zap Shakur who came up with a much better name for sure
we're actually gonna call this a Madame Cristo but mashed up names aside this
really was extraordinarily delicious and here's how you put one together and
first up we'll make the batter in which we're gonna dip our bread and that's
gonna start with one large egg to which we will add a splash of heavy cream and
yes if you want you could probably go with milk here which won't be quite as
rich and then we'll also want to toss in a big pinch of salt as well as a little
shake of cayenne and then we'll follow that up with a little bit of nutmeg
which as usual we will freshly grate in and then because I do want some lemon
flavor but don't want the acidity I'm gonna go ahead and grate in about a
teaspoon of zest and believe it or not that's gonna be it for this very very
simple batter all we have left to do is take a fork and give this a mix until
two things happen first all of our ingredients get mixed up thoroughly but
also we want to keep forking this until the mixture goes from kind of thick and
viscous to something a little thinner and more runny okay something just about
like this and once that's been accomplished what we'll do is simply set
that aside and move on to talk bread and for this I'm suggesting we'd go with
something white tasteless and devoid of any nutritional content and while yes
you can make this with whole-grain bread you never should and then one little
trip we're gonna do before we build our sandwich and dip it in the egg we are
actually gonna give it a light toasting first all right not too dark be careful
and what that's gonna do besides obviously adding some toasty flavor
notes it's also going to dry out the bread a little bit which is gonna help
it soak in the batter so just a little trick I came up with back in the 80s I
think it was eighties and then once our toast is done we'll go ahead and add our
ham and cheese or in this case cheese and ham and traditionally we would use
Greer but because this sandwich is going to be pretty decadent and Greer has such
a rich buttery nutty flavor I decided to go with some
milder and used Havarti but literally any melty cheese would work and then
once ass down will place on our ham except we have a major problem our bread
is square but our ham is round a problem that stop mathematicians for centuries
but eventually a famous ham geometries discovered the solution which was just
simply cutting the ham in half thereby creating straight edges which allows us
to perfectly align our meat up to the edge so it really was quite a
breakthrough and way easier than inventing round bread and then what
we'll do for those shorter sides is simply cut those last pieces in half and
we'll finish that off as shown and by the way since we're gonna press this
together we could have just done that on 1/2 but it really doesn't matter as long
as we eventually and carefully press these two halves together at which point
we're gonna dip it into our egg mixture and I say dip but I really mean soak
since we want our bread to absorb the maximum amount possible so take your
time flip it back and forth until you're sure can't take any more oh and I should
mention I'm doing a totally savory version here but if you wanted you could
use our regular french toast batter which has a little bit of a sweeter
flavor profile and includes things like a little bit of cinnamon and vanilla so
if you want to switch that up go ahead I mean you guys are after all the San
Francisco's of your madam Christos and speaking of friars once we've reached
full saturation let's head to the stove so we can pan fry this in some butter
over medium heat until golden brown and crispy on the outside but also until the
inside heated through and our cheese is nice and gooey and other than just
keeping an eye on it the only tip here would be not to use too high of a heat
all right I said medium but you might need to adjust since we don't want the
outside cooking too fast and possibly burning before that cheese inside gets
all nice and melty and then besides pan frying this we will also want to fry or
poach an egg to put on top and if you're just doing one or two of these you could
probably do it at the same time but if you're doing these for a large group I'm
gonna put a link in the blog post that explains how to do that completely
stress free as well as it will show our complete poached egg technique since I'm
not showing that here but anyway the point is we're going to need to cook an
egg and while that finishes up we'll go back and check
kirpan where as you can see everything's looking quite nice and I really should
have thought to do a fork scrape here so you could hear just how crispy this was
but it didn't occur to me so I apologise but anyway once we're
confident our crust if ocation is complete we'll transfer that onto a
plates and possibly garnish it with some greens and once our prop salad is set
we'll go ahead and top with our poached egg which of course we've gone ahead and
pulled off any of the ugly stringy white parts and we will finish that off with a
little shake of cayenne as well as some strategically placed sliced chives and
while ultimately this didn't turn out to be the thing I plan to turn out to be it
was still absolutely magnificent and would have been amazing even without the
egg but with the egg well just watch
oh yeah that's the stuff and I'm actually getting smarter in my old age
as I cut a piece from the back so as not to wreck that full frontal view and if
you're thinking that hot honey ham with melted Havarti sandwiched between crispy
fried french toast top of the poached egg would be delicious you could not be
more correct this really was phenomenal and even though I did go 100% savory
here is that was eating this I was thinking this would be really good
using a sweeter batter for the French toast which in that case I might top it
with some maple syrup or not depends on my mood so whether you're planning on
making this for some fancy brunch or for just some casual weeknight dinner or you
simply can't decide between having a croque madame and a Monte Cristo
sandwich I really do hope you give this incredible concoction to try soon so
head over to food wishes calm for all the ingredient amounts and wonderful as
usual and as always enjoy
you