After reading my entry about Baked Brie, Monique from France wrote me…
We bake Camembert in embers or hot ashes, but we don’t bake Brie this way.
To bake a Camembert, you’d want to chose one that’s not too soft, yet not too hard (we say “plaster-like”) with a wooden box. One for 4 or 5 people who are not too hungry.
You open the box, unwrap it and put a little thyme, rosemary or savory between the paper and the cheese. Then wrap it up again and put the wooden box under the hot ashes. Or else you can wrap it up with tinfoil and put it in the embers.
You leave it in till you think the inside’s melted, depending on the heat. Then you unwrap it, cut the top off and everybody dips in a piece of bread (French bread with hard crust, for sure) in the melted cheese, eats it, takes another piece of bread, etc… You generally run short of cheese first!
I know there are more “civilized” recipes with each person served some grilled camembert with salad and baked potatoes. But I like this one better cause everybody helps him/herself from the same box. It’s more fun!
Many thanks to Monique of Mama Lisa’s World en français for this recipe.
This article was posted on Thursday, December 29th, 2005 at 10:09 pm and is filed under Appetizers, Baked Camembert, Baked Camembert, Countries & Cultures, France, Main Course, Recipes of the World. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
7 Responses to “Recipe for Baked Camembert from France”
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January 21st, 2006 at 10:50 pm
Monique later wrote again…
Regarding Baked Camembert:
My brother said it has to be left about 10 minutes in the embers, that’s the way he does it. He was very sceptical about cooking the Camembert in hot ashes even without tinfoil. Though I remember that the first time I ate it, the boys hadn’t pused tinfoil and hadn’t baked it in the glowing embers. If you ever try it, do the way my brother says, cos he’s the one who deals with it when we have some.
January 22nd, 2006 at 11:42 am
I asked Monique about Where you Bake the Camembert… in a Fireplace? Or would you go camping and build a fire and cook it there? Could you cook it on a Barbeque Grill?
Here’s Monique’s answer…
You can cook camembert anywhere as far as there are embers. Barbeque grill: if you mean the one with charcoal, you can, if you mean an electric one, I don’t know. What I also know is that they cook it in the oven in pizzerias. I suppose you can bake it in a regular oven, but that’d be much less fun.
The ideal camping meal: start a fire long in advance to have hot ashes to bake potatoes wrapped in tinfoil (1 1/2 to 2 hours); some time before they’re done, add some wood to have glowing embers and grill sausages, lamb chops, or pork chops, or whatever meat you like. I love grilled mutton meat, but not everybody likes the strong taste of it. People not from around the Mediterranean Sea generally find it too strong (we’ve been used to it since childhood!).
Meanwhile, you get the camembert(s) ready to bake and put them in the embers when nearly everybody’s done with the meat. You could add grilled bananas in tinfoil to take advantage of the fire but I think it’d be better to have fresh juicy fruit as a dessert! You can grill fish instead of meat but as I’m not a “fish person”, it just doesn’t come to my mind.
I’ll tell you that what we most eat when having a picnic is a big salad (a variation of salade niçoise) with boiled potatoes (big diced) + tomatoes (big diced) + boiled eggs (big diced) + sweet onions (sliced) + olives + canned tuna (optional) + boiled/canned French beans (optional) + olive oil + vinegar + salt. Some put anchovies instead of tuna. Then grilled sausage, either warm if we’ve built a fire or cold if we’ve grilled it at home.
Then cheese, then fruit, then coffee. We often start the meal with dry sausage, some raw ham or/and pâté as an appetizer.
After all that, you can go lie under a tree and have a good nap!
December 24th, 2007 at 7:20 am
my misses bought me a ready to bake camembert because i`m a big fan of trying different cheeses,i have never tryed baking a cheese.. i don`t know what to do with it how to cook it at home, on electric.
December 24th, 2007 at 12:57 pm
I only saw regular camemberts in my life, so I don’t know what a ready to bake camembert is. Usually, camemberts come wrapped in a sort of plastic sheet within the wooden box. You’ll want to unwrap the cheese and put it back in the wooden box, cut the crust drawing a cross in it, then bake it about 20 mn. You can also take off the top and sprinkle with salt and pepper. You can dip French bread in it, or toasts, or small slices of apples (Granny Smith type), or slices of baked or boiled potatoes. And you have some salad with it. If you put “baked camembert” into Google, you’ll find a lot of recipes, and if you know French and type “cambembert au four” or “camembert grillé”, you’ll find a lot more of them.
December 24th, 2007 at 1:05 pm
Usually when Brie or Camembert is ready to bake they give you instructions about how to cook it. I believe you normally take it out of its wrappers and bake it on a cookie sheet for about 15 minutes. In the US it would be in an oven set to about 350 F.
February 8th, 2008 at 5:05 pm
We tried this for the first time. 20 minutes in oven at 190 C.
Took it out the wrapperfirst then baked in the box.
Delicious. Even son who is not a cheese fan thought it was fabulous.
April 6th, 2008 at 6:36 pm
Hi,
I have just returned from France where amongst other things I enjoyed a baked cheese, possibly cammembert. The difference in this case was that the cheese was served cold but had been baked long enough to form a firm, light brown crust on the top while still having a soft core.The flavour of the baked crust was out of this world, I am just waiting for an excuse to try it out.