Recipe: Quenelles a la Semoule / Semolina Quenelles

Quenelles? What are quenelles? You ask.

Quenelles are delicious little fluffy poached balls (actually more like roll-shaped) of a flour or semolina based dough. Makes sense yet?

Anyway, back home in France, we buy flour quenelles at the grocery store. Here. I cannot find them at my local Shaw’s. So I asked my mother how to make them, and she gave me a recipe my great uncle Henry had written in one of his decades old recipe notebook.

Ingredients:

• 3/4 cup milk
• 1 oz. butter
• 1/3 cup semolina
• 1/8 cup of shredded swiss cheese
• 1 egg
• salt, pepper

Directions:

Boil the milk and put the butter then the semolina. Cook for 10 minute, stirring constantly. Take off of the heat and add the swiss cheese, salt, pepper and the egg. Let it cool.

Boil salted water in a saucepan.

Form the quenelles by rolling the dough in your hand. Giving it a rolled shape. Drop them in the boiling water. The quenelles are ready when they pop at the surface.

Put in a loaf dish or a rectangular oven dish. Spread bechamel sauce. If you do not know what is or how to make bechamel sauce, let me know. I will post directions anyway later on. But if I get requests, I might do it a little faster.

Spread some more cheese on the top and pop the dish in the oven at 375 degres for about 20 minutes.

This is a recipe for plain quenelles. You may want to experiment a little once you’ve mastered those. You can add little cut up mushroom, some meat or fish. And have as much fun with the sauce.

For a photo , please check SUIKSUIK Cuisine’s Quenelles “express” à la semoule’s post. Suiksuik used made a salad with ricotta cheese. Nice variation.

And be sure to let me know how it turned out.