Croque Madame with Puff Pastry
It’s fancy enough for a BFF brunch but easy enough for a weekday breakfast. Croque Madame with Puff Pastry is a savory morning dish that also happens to be oh so pretty! It is a riff on the popular French sandwich of the same name.
Croque Madame vs Croque Monsieur
Croque monsieur is certain type of grilled ham and cheese sandwich in France. The name literally means Mr. Crunchy.
Components include slices of ham and Gruyere placed between two pieces of bread. Sometimes bechamel sauce enters the chat. The outside of the bread is sprinkled with grated cheese then the sandwich is either baked or pan-fried until the inside cheese is melty and the outside cheese is crispy.
So, that all sounds incredibly delicious. How can it get any better? Top it with a fried egg and call it croque madame. That's Mrs. Crunchy to you.
Want to take it to another level? Use puff pastry.
Puff Pastry
What makes puff pastry so, well, puffy? Thanks to some kitchen science and magic, butter + water evaporation + dough somehow equals sky-high pastry that is golden, crisp, and delicious.
In French the dough is pâte feuilletée, meaning leaf-like pastry. It is leaf-thin layers and layers and layers of dough and solid fat pressed together. Typically butter is the fat of choice, but it can also be lard or vegetable shortening.
The dough and butter are rolled out and folded together in a process called lamination. If you watch the Great British Baking Show like I do, you have no doubt heard the term. The rolling and folding happen several times to yield a pastry with 80-plus layers.
Once those layers hit the hot oven, a transformation happens. The fat content in the butter melts into the dough while the water content in the butter evaporates into steam. This leaves a little gap between each of those 80-plus layers.
The result: shatteringly crisp and flaky pastry.
Puff pastry is the dough for croissants, palmiers, tarts, turnovers, and breakfast dishes like this one.
Lessons Learned
- Normally prosciutto sold in the grocery store comes in paper-thin slices that can be quite wide. I like to cut these in half lengthwise to make two long strips to place on each pastry piece.
- Not into everything bagel seasoning? No worries. Sprinkle on whatever you like. Some other ideas include sesame seeds, poppy seeds, celery seeds, or dried dill.
- You can partially make this a day ahead by par-baking the pieces up to Step 5 in the recipe. Finish the recipe the following day by adding the egg and baking.
Hat Tips
Many thanks to Dash of Savory for the puff pastry croque madame recipe inspiration.
Croque Madame with Puff Pastry
- Prep Time: 15 minutes
- Cook Time: 20 minutes
- Total Time: 35 minutes
- Yield: 4 servings 1x
Ingredients
- 1 sheet puff pastry, thawed
- 1 egg, beaten slightly
- 3 tsp Everything Bagel seasoning
- 4 slices thinly sliced prosciutto
- 4 Tbsp feta cheese, crumbled
- 2 or 3 mushrooms, sliced thinly
- 4 eggs
- Garnish: chopped parsley, basil, or other herbs
Instructions
- Preheat oven to 400 F/204 C. Line a rimmed baking sheet with parchment paper and set aside.
- Lightly flour a cutting board or flat surface. Lightly roll out the sheet of puff pastry, just until it is a square and the folds are smoothed out. Cut into 4 equal-sized pieces and place on the prepared baking sheet.
- Score each piece with a sharp knife about ¼ inch from the edge to make a frame-like border inside. Dock the pastry all over with the tines of a fork. Brush each piece with the beaten egg, then sprinkle everything bagel seasoning around the borders.
- Arrange the prosciutto just inside the border of each piece, then tuck in the mushroom slices. Spoon the feta into the blank area in the middle of the pastry and pat it into an even layer, leaving a small well in the middle.
- Place the baking sheet into the oven and par-bake for 10-ish minutes or just until the edges turn light brown. Remove from the oven. At this point, you can let it cool before covering and placing it in the fridge to finish baking at a later time.
- Crack an egg into the center well of each pastry. Return the pan to the oven and bake for another 10-ish minutes or until the whites are opaque (no longer clear) and the yolks are still runny. If you like jammy yolks like I do, cook for another minute or two.
- Remove from the oven and garnish with a heavy-handed shower of chopped herbs.
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