Savory dinner crepes are an underrated food. What I love about them is they seem fancy, but are actually rather simple to make.

The first time I had a savory chicken crepe was in college at the North Star Bar, in New Brunswick, New Jersey. It was one of the more upscale bars in the downtown intended for the business people and young professionals in the city rather than college students. At happy hour though the drinks were cheap enough and the bar menu discounted, so we could pretend we belonged.

The crepes were filled with chicken, an assortment of vegetables including asparagus and red peppers, and a creamy sauce. I’m sure the memory of these crepes were far better than they really were, or maybe just relative to the other types of things I was eating in college, they seemed especially good. I think about those crepes every time I make savory crepes for dinner. It is not that I am trying to to replicate the dish, nor would I be able to.

For the crepes, I started with a basic recipe. I don’t have a specific goto that I prefer for crepes and usually just pull the top listing off of Google. The essentials are Eggs, flour, milk, and melted butter. Some recipes suggest adding sugar, but I avoid these recipes even if I’m making sweet crepes. I also like recipes that suggesting thinning out the batter with water.

The most important step in making crepes is allowing the batter to sit. Some recipes will insist the batter needs to sit overnight in the refrigerator. Generally I think a thirty minute rest period is enough. That is enough time for thin batter to spread easily across the pan. Mixing in a bit of water at this point can help thin the batter out too.

The longest part of the whole process is cooking the crepes. Each crepe will cook relatively quickly but the time adds up when it comes to the volume of crepes. And a smaller pan means smaller crepes, and ultimately more crepes to make.

Sometimes I wish I had a crepe specific pan or even a professional grade crepe hotplate. Both tools create extremely thin crepes. On the other hand, I don’t need the extra equipment clogging up the kitchen.

I could have started the filling while the batter was resting, but I wanted to finish watching the last twenty minutes of Sideways. The film mostly holds up, although the portrait of a man willing to bang his way through Napa Valley three days before his wedding seems tired and outdated. Anyway, I waited until the crepes were cooking to get to work on the filling.

The filling started with olive oil and onions. Once they were translucent, I added in slices of a chicken breast. You can argue about how much more flavorful dark meat is, but béchamel is a rich and fatty sauce anyway. After lightly browning the chicken, I tossed in some mushrooms and simmered those for a few minutes. I continued flipping out crepes.

A good crepe maker can flip a crepe with a simple flick of the wrist. I’m not good enough to do this perfectly every time and so I use the assistance of a spatula.

One the meat arrived at a stable place in the cooking process, I could start on the white sauce. I would love to pretend like I’ve memorized the béchamel ratios, but I’m not a French trained chef, and the internet is in my pocket. In addition to the butter, flour, and milk, I also added some garlic powder. Once the sauce was thickened, I added about half of it to the chicken and mushrooms, reserving the rest for the top of the crepe.

To assemble them, I laid a crepe out flat, added some filling, and rolled it over on itself. I plated two each and then drizzled some sauce over each one. One recipe online suggested topping the crepes with gruyere and then baking them briefly. I had forgotten to get gruyere and the cheddar I had in the refrigerator just didn’t seem a good match. Instead, I shaved some Parmigiano-Reggiano over the crepes.

As you can see in the above cross section, the sauce inside the crepe was gooey and creamy.

I debated stuffing in some green beans that I had prepared as side dish, but thought the texture would not be quite right. I also think a roasted sweet potato would make an excellent substitute for the chicken for vegetarians, but then that’s probably a different post altogether.

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