Simple French crêpes for sweet and savory fillings
Bring Paris to your kitchen by making these mouthwatering crêpes. It looks fancy but it's simple and easy. You'll love them with classic fillings like Nutella or honey and nuts. You can double the recipe and freeze the leftover crêpes.
In a mixing bowl, sift the flour using a fine-mesh sieve.
Make a well in the flour. Crack and add the eggs into the flour well.
Slowly add the milk while mixing the eggs, flour, and milk with a fork. You can also use a whisk if you have one instead of a fork. If you have a blender, you can pour these ingredients into the blender and blend until the mixture is smooth (a blender is the easiest way to mix without clumps if you have one). TIP: Avoid mixing the flour and eggs before adding the milk because this will create a paste with a lot of clumps.
Pour the crêpe batter through the fine-mesh sieve again. Melt half of the butter (2 tablespoons/25g) in the microwave. You can zap it for 15 seconds on high (but watch it to avoid it boiling over). Add the melted butter, sugar, and vanilla sugar into the crêpe batter. Mix well with the fork until combined. (I used to add the melted butter before running the batter through the sieve but I found that if the batter is cold from milk straight from the fridge, the butter coated the sieve, which made it really hard to push the batter through. Pouring the melted butter into the milk-egg-flour batter makes it easier to stir the butter through. If your ingredients are room temperature to begin with, waiting to add the butter to the batter might not make a difference.)
Push the clumps through the sieve using a spoon or a spatula. If you have the luxury of time, allow the batter to rest for an hour in the fridge. Overnight if you can is better. If you're in a rush to make crêpes, don’t worry about resting. Dive into the next step: Cooking!
Cook the crêpes
Heat your nonstick pan over medium-high heat. Once the pan is ready, add a quarter-sized pat of butter to test the pan. If the butter sizzles, the pan is hot enough. If it doesn't, give the pan another minute to warm up. Swirl the butter around the pan.Add a ladle of batter into the pan in a circular shape. Tilt and swirl the pan to evenly spread the crêpe batter. Your first crêpe will look ugly so don't worry too much about how the first few turn out. You're learning how to control the heat and the motion of spreading the batter.
If you have extra batter, pour the excess back into your mixing bowl. If you have holes or areas of missing batter, you can pour in a tablespoon of extra batter to patch it up, using your spatula to smooth out the surface.Your crêpe will cook for about 3 to 5 minutes on the first side. Once the edges of the crêpe appear to be pulling away from your pan and the middle of the crêpe is bubbling, it is ready to flip. Slide your spatula between the crêpe and the pan. Gently lift the crêpe from the pan. Flip it over. It's ok if it tears. You'll get better as you make more.
Once the crêpe has flipped over, it takes about 2 minutes to cook the other side. Lift the underside to check if it's brown. If so, it's ready to remove from the pan and serve. If it's still looking pale, give it 30 seconds more to cook.
This is what the underside of the crêpe should look like when it's done.
Follow the "Cook the crêpes" step to repeat for the remaining batter.