I started writing the initial draft of this sandwich blog post about two years ago. At that point, I had never been to France and while Paris was on my list, I didn’t have any plans for it to happen at that point. Move forward just a couple of years and now I just recently returned from a trip to see the Eiffel Tower and eat baguettes.
Since I started baking I’ve been tweaking a baguette process in the attempt to bake pretty, but still crunchy on the outside and chewy on the inside skinny bread loaves. These baguettes are going to be a huge component of this sandwich blog post because I feel that the choice of bread is more than 60% of the enjoyment of this particular sandwich.
What is this sandwich?
A jambon-beurre is a ham and butter sandwich from France. How do we know it’s a ham and butter sandwich? Well, the French word jambon translates to ham in English and beurre means butter. So that means all we need is a few slices of ham and a bit of butter and we’re all good? Well, sort of. We need something else as well.
A jambon-beurre is also known as a parisien. And sometimes if you see a jambon-beurre with cheese on a menu it may be called a mixte which means mixed.
In my opinion, the component with the largest amount of weight both literally and figuratively in the enjoyment of a jambon-beurre is the third component which isn’t even mentioned in the name of the sandwich. This component is the bread. This sandwich is served on a French-style baguette which brings a ton of texture and chew to the tender ham and creamy butter. You can have a ham and butter sandwich on sliced white bread or sourdough. But you can only have a jambon-beurre on a French-style baguette.
Paris’ second favorite sandwich
According to the BBC, 1.22 billion jambon-beurre sandwiches were sold in France in 2017 and that year also happened to be the first year that the hamburger ascended to the top position as the most purchased sandwich in France.
While the hamburger has blasted its way from America throughout the rest of the world, including France, the jambon-beurre hasn’t had quite the same type of success outside of France. The baguette itself has expanded worldwide or at the very least, to most countries outside of France but the classic jambon-beurre seems to be less popular abroad. Where I live in Chicago there are only a handful of restaurants that I’m aware of that serve a variant of an authentic jambon-beurre.
I got a chance to try 3 different jambon-beurres on this trip because I also tried to eat regular meals and enjoy other types of food on this trip. I ordered all three sandwiches with cheese since it was always an option and it was easy to remove the cheese slice to sneak a bite and experience the sandwich cheese-less.
The best jambon-beurre I got a chance to try was at a very unassuming streetside cafe called Le Petit Vendôme. I learned about this restaurant from a few online blog posts including “The best sandwich in Paris, at Le Petit Vendome” written by professional chef and author, David Lebovitz. The bread on this sandwich was fresh and chewy throughout the center with an exterior crust that gave the whole experience a great texture. The butter was lightly spread on the baguette, but you could still taste the creaminess that contrasted with the sweet, tender ham.
Overall this was a fantastic sandwich and it showed me why people fall in love with it. I do not have a lot more experience with jambon-beurres in Paris so I can’t tell you for sure if this was the best one you could find, but it was the best one I tried and I would definitely go back if I had the opportunity.
Right around the corner from Le Petit Vendôme is Place Vendôme which is a famous city square in Paris with a whole bunch of really fancy jewelry shops and The Ritz Hotel. Just a short stroll away from Le Petit Vendome is Harry’s Bar Paris which is known for their classic cocktail menu and they are supposedly where the tomato-based cocktail known as the Bloody Mary was invented.
Let’s make some jambon-beurre
Sandwich disclaimer: please note that I’m not a professional baker and the baguettes I make and share recipes for are good but I’m not claiming that they’re as good as you might find in bakeries in France. I also am not making a 100% authentic jambon-beurre in this blog post because it might be hard to source some ingredients everywhere. This blog post is my attempt to show you how to make a great ham and butter sandwich inspired by the jambon-beurre in your own kitchen.
Chewy bread is the key
In my very limited experience in Paris eating jambon-beurres, the bread is the star of the show. You can’t just grab a bag of rolls off the shelf that has “French” on the branding and use that to replicate this sandwich. You can still make a good sandwich with rolls like that, just not this particular sandwich.
You need to either make the bread or buy a good bakery-baked baguette that is slightly crusty on the outside but still has a tender chew on the inside. In a big city, these are not hard to find. Some grocery stores will even bake bread like this in-house.
When you start sharing videos of sandwich creation on Instagram and TikTok you end up with a lot of video and still frames of yourself biting into occasionally chewy ham and butter sandwiches. Go follow me if you use either of those platforms and want to see more sandwich content and my beautiful face.
Once you’re ready for this chewy and fantastic sandwich we have to start with the bread.
French-style baguettes
You can buy baguettes and that’s what I expect most people to do. But for those of you who are ready for the challenge, I have the recipe and a whole lot of baking strategies down below. If you want to skip the bread, you can go right to the meat of the matter and read about the other two ingredients or you can skip directly to the recipe.
This is the crustiest bread recipe that I know how to make. As I said earlier it’s not going to rival any fancy French bakery. It might not even rival your local bakery, but it produces a good crusty baguette that makes for a fantastic ham and butter sandwich if you nail the recipe properly.
This is a fun scrollable History of the Baguette on artsandculture.google.com. It covers quick bullet points of the evolution of the bread style over the past 250 years.
This is advanced breadmaking
I do not view baguettes as an easy-to-make style of bread. With as much bread as I make, you would think that I should be better at making baguettes but it’s mostly because I lack practice. Every time I make them for this blog I have to focus on the important steps to get a result that I think is good.
… baguettes are also one of the hardest breads for the home baker to learn to make, mostly thanks to the many complicated shaping steps involved. Practice makes perfect in all things, especially when it comes to baguettes, and it’s hard for a home baker to notch enough of them for the skill to become second nature.
Andrew Janjigian – Homemade French Baguettes
As Janjigian says in the quote above, the main reason that baguettes are advanced breadmaking is because there are several parts of the process that require a lot of attention. In my experience, the key to the recipe is the following major steps:
- Performing stretch and folds to build dough structure
- Shaping baguettes the tools used
- Moving the shaped baguette dough
- Adding steam to the oven/baking procedure
- Storing cooked baguettes
Stretch and folds
Stretch and folds is a commonly used phrase that you will hear home and professional bakers say. They are a process of building up structure in bread dough by stretching and folding the dough over on top of itself.
You do this after and sometimes during the first rise or primary fermentation period before you begin the baguette shaping process. In my recipe I have you knead the dough, move it to a bowl to rest/rise, and then 45 minutes later perform a stretch and fold. Then you come back in another 45 minutes and do it again, to shape the dough into a large ball just prior to when you would shape the baguettes.
I have added a short video here that is sped up 2 times, but it should give you the gist of what I am doing when I say “stretch and fold.” If you skip these steps your baguettes could fall flat and not hold their cylindrical shape.
Here’s another video describing the stretch and fold process.
For a quick tip, add a little water to a small bowl and dip your fingers in it if your dough is a little sticky. This will make your fingers a whole lot more resistant to sticky dough and it will allow you to perform stretch and folds without getting dough stuck to your hands.
Bakers couche and baguette transfer peel
You do not need either of these tools to make bread rolls that are similar to baguettes. These are both dedicated tools that are made and sold to be used for making baguettes but you could replace them with similar items.
The baker’s couche is a heavy cloth that is similar to burlap that is used to help a shaped baguette rise into a proper shape. The cloth is heavier than a blanket or kitchen towel so it keeps its folds and will stand up to pressure from the dough rising. Here’s the baker’s couche that I bought two years ago and still use when making baguettes.
The shaped dough sits between somewhat loose folds of the couche and this helps the baguettes to rise up instead of out. You should lightly flour the cloth just to make sure nothing sticks.
A baguette transfer peel is just a piece of plank or board that has a fairly thin edge which means you can carefully roll a shaped and proofed baguette dough onto and then use that peel to move the dough to another location without deflating and losing all of the gas that has built up. Here’s the baguette transfer peel that I bought a couple of years ago. You could use an extra stiff piece of cardboard if you didn’t want to buy a dedicated peel.
Moving the shaped dough
I use two peels to move the baguette dough from place to place—a baguette transfer peel and a pizza peel. I tried to warn you that this wasn’t beginner bread-making. The pizza peel has a sheet of parchment paper on top and that is what I put the shaped baguette dough on top of and slide that into the oven onto a pizza stone or steel. You need to be very careful during the transfer process so that you do not push any gas out of the dough. When moving the dough from the couche to the peel, use the couche to help roll the dough over on top of the peel and then you can slowly flip the dough onto the pizza peel.
Scoring slashes into the dough is traditional in French baguettes. In theory, these slashes will give the dough room to expand so that when it rises in the oven your baguette won’t burst and expand in random places.
Make it steamy
French bakeries (or bakeries from pretty much any other country) that are making crusty baguettes are using some sort of steam in their ovens. We do not have that option in the typical home kitchen in the United States. But we can bring our own steam.
Steam requires heat and water and the oven provides heat so we just need to figure out some way to get water into the mix. I use a large oven-safe pot that I position out of the way at the bottom of the oven. Right before I put the baguette dough into the oven I will spray each one with a heavy misting of water. Then I will quickly use the pizza peel to move the wet baguette dough onto the pizza stone.
I will then pour two or three cups of hot water into the preheated oven-safe pot which should create a bit of a steamy environment inside the oven. You should try to do all of this quickly because you do not want to let the heat or the steam you’ve created escape very easily.
Storing baguettes
First off: do not slice or bag any baguette until they have fully cooled. I usually wait more than two hours to ensure that buns or white bread loaves are cooled, but I wait even longer for baguettes since you want them to stay as crunchy as possible.
The best thing you can do is to try to bake the number of baguettes that you will need in the next day or so. Once they are bagged up or packaged, they will soften. After they soften, you can bring them back by spraying the exterior of the baguette with water and baking for 5 to 10 minutes in a 350 F (175 C) oven.
You can also freeze baguettes (or any bread really). If you are freezing, I would do so immediately if possible, and then when you need the bread you can thaw it and then reheat it the same way (5 to 10 minutes 350 F/175 C).
French-style baguettes
A crispy, crusted bread roll that is still soft and chewy in the middle. Perfect for a sub-style sandwich where you need big bread crunch or even sliced thinly and served toasted with olive oil alongside meat and cheese on a charcuterie board.
Get RecipeJambon or ham
First off we need to get something out of the way. I did not use the right type of ham for this sandwich. But it still turned out great.
I used a 6-pound smoked ham on the bone from the butt portion of the pig that I bought at the grocery store and then sliced it into fairly thin, but not sandwich-thin slices. This isn’t the same ham you’d find in this sandwich if you bought it in France, but it’s likely going to be the type of ham you might be able to find in the United States (where most of my readers live).
Jambon de Paris is traditionally what is found in a jambon-beurre in France. Jambon de Paris or “ham from Paris” is very much not smoked but instead, it is based on a traditional French preparation of cooking ham where the meat is slow-cooked in a seasoned vegetable broth. After the cooking process is complete, the meat is sweet, fairly lean, and very lightly spiced.
In the United States, it’s not common to see ham that is prepared like this but I did find a company named Three Little Pigs that makes a version of Jambon De Paris, and if you are lucky you can find this at a nearby Whole Foods (it’s not available at my normal Whole Foods). You could also buy ham from the deli but that also will be a different experience from what you will see in France because that sort of meat is usually processed and pressed and sliced very thin. If you were to use deli-sliced ham, I would suggest you ask the slicer to slice the meat double the thickness of their normal sandwich slice for cold cuts.
Beurre or butter
For this sandwich, I made my own butter which is a heck of a lot easier than you might initially think. Homemade butter requires one (1) ingredient. Yes, you read that correctly. That ingredient is a cow.
Just kidding, the single ingredient is cream from a cow. For this particular recipe that’s all you need, but I do add some salt to create salted butter, but that part is optional here. A jambon-beurre might be made with salted or unsalted butter. King Arthur Baking wrote a great blog post about the different ways you can make butter in your own home and I chose to use the stand mixer option.
Note: the King Arthur Baking blog post warns that making butter in a stand mixer can get messy and they are correct. Be prepared for this, if you forget, you will get milk splattered all over your kitchen and yourself.
If you don’t want to make your own butter, I would suggest that you buy nice butter since the sandwich is made up of just butter and ham and you don’t want to mess up. If your store has “European style butter” that will probably be more similar to the butter that is used in France to make this sandwich. European-style butter will typically have higher butterfat than American butter, leading to a more rich and creamy butter experience.
Buttermilk
The liquid that separates from the butter during the “churning” process when you use heavy cream or whipping cream is called buttermilk but it’s not really buttermilk like you buy at the store. It’s more akin to reduced fat or skim milk because it will not have any of the tartness that you expect from store-bought buttermilk. You can still use it and cook with it though, just as you would skim milk.
Butter temperature
It is very important to bring your butter to room temperature so that it will be soft enough to spread on the bread. You will not be able to spread butter that came straight from the fridge, so bring it out about 30 or 45 minutes before you want to make your sandwich and it should be softened enough.
Extras
There are a couple of extra items that you might see on some jambon-beurre sandwiches on deli or restaurant menus in France or in other countries.
Cheese
Comte and Emmental seem to be popular options if the cheese gets involved as an addition to a jambon-beurre. The sandwiches I tried in Paris all had slices of Comte that were just a bit thicker than a slice of cheddar that you might get at a deli in the United States.
Way up at the top of this post in a short article from chef and author, David Lebovitz, he mentions having a jambon-beurre with brie, and I think that would be great, but it seems like you’re changing up the sandwich at this point. I know there are several French triple creme brie cheeses that I have tried in the past that taste almost like butter so they would be a good replacement if you didn’t have fancy or spreadable butter.
Pickles
Cornichons are a type of cucumber that is native to India but was spread throughout Europe and Africa in the 1700s. In France, they’re also known as gherkins. Occasionally you will find pickles as an option to add to a jambon-beurre. I didn’t see any menus that had this as an option, but the internet has led me to believe it happens. I can see how pickles would contrast the creamy butter with tart acidity but I personally would prefer them served on the side rather than sliced and layered inside of the sandwich.
A bunch of jambon-beurre photos and then a very simple recipe
This recipe is super short and easy. I have it in printable form down below, but it’s just: spread butter on both sides of a split baguette and then add slices of ham. You’re done. That’s it. It’s so easy but the finished sandwich is surprisingly deep in flavor and texture.
Keep scrolling and look at all the ham and butter sandwiches I made, ate, and took photos of!
This is an amazingly simple recipe for a sandwich with surprisingly complex flavors and textures.
Jambon-beurre
This ham and butter sandwich on a crusty baguette is one of the most popular sandwiches in France. It's creamy from the butter, sweet and savory from the ham with a chewy bread roll to bring everything together. Check the notes below the instructions for baguette and butter recipes.
Ingredients:
- 1 six to eight-inch piece of crusty baguette
- softened butter (salted or unsalted is up to you)
- slices of thick cut ham
- slices of Comte cheese (optional - Emmental or gruyere would work fine too)
Directions:
If your baguette is not fresh you might want to warm it up to recrisp it. Toasting process: spray baguette with water and place in a 350 F oven for 5 minutes to recrisp the crust.
Slice the baguette and spread butter on both interior sides. Layer on the ham.
Add slices of cheese if using and then close the sandwich. Serve and enjoy.
Notes:
Jambon-beurre blog post: go read this jambon-beurre blog post if you want to learn more about the parts of this sandwich or read more about baguettes.
Baguettes: If you would like to make your own bread for this sandwich, I have a good baguette recipe.
Butter: if you would like to make your own butter, please go read this King Arthur Baking blog post about the best ways to make butter in your kitchen.
Narrator: no it doesn’t.
Check back next week
Next week I’ll be tackling the sandwich blogger’s yearly tradition of turning Thanksgiving leftovers into something that’s even better than the meal that you might be enjoying with your rude relatives.
I’m planning to be serving turkey and gravy without the politics.
