Light Up Your Life (Literally!) With This Delightful French Dessert

I am a sucker for anything presented tableside, be it Caesar salad tossed in a large wooden bowl or carbonara served from a giant wheel of Parmigiano-Reggiano. Even more impressive is when a dish involves pyrotechnics, which means that if I see crepes Suzette on a menu, I’m ordering it. Consisting of crepes in a sauce of orange juice, butter, sugar, and orange liqueur, crepes Suzette traditionally arrives at your table via trolley, where a suit-clad waiter simmers the crepes in the sauce, adds a dash of liqueur, then sets the entire thing ablaze. It’s a dessert that elicits “oohs” and “ahhs” from other diners, and one that’s as delicious as it is impressive.

There are many stories about the supposed origins of the crepes Suzette, but among the most popular is one told by the chef Henri Charpentier. He claims to have first made the dessert when cooking for King Edward VII, then the Prince of Wales, at the Café de Paris in Monte Carlo in 1895. In his memoir Life à Henri, Charpentier recalls that cordials of liqueur accidentally caught on fire when he was preparing the dish tableside for the royal. “I thought I was ruined,” he writes. “I tasted it. It was, I thought, the most delicious melody of sweet flavors I had ever tasted…That accident of the flame was precisely what was needed to bring all those various instruments into one harmony of taste.” According to Charpentier, the Prince of Wales had a guest with him whose name was Suzette, who Charpentier chose to name the dessert after, though other accounts of the dessert's origins that predate this one make his claim questionable at best.

For example, in an 1892 issue of Les Annales Pôlitiques et Litteréraires, a weekly magazine, both l’oeuf Suzette (eggs Suzette) and crepes Suzette are mentioned along with the claim that both recipes can be attributed to the premiere of the operetta Voyage de Suzette, which opened at the Paris Théâtre de la Gaîté in January 1890. According to the magazine, the crepes were prepared with fresh butter, vanilla sugar, orange zest, and champagne, with no mention of flambéeing. Charpentier may not have come up with the original idea, but it’s possible that he added his own flair with the accidental flame.

As fancy and intimidating as crepes Suzette sounds, the dessert is actually remarkably easy to prepare at home. Like Kenji, I use a blender to whip up the crepe batter quickly, then I cook the crepes in a nonstick pan (though you can also use a crepe pan, if you have one). As tempting as it is to make the sauce in the same pan you use to make the crepes, flambéeing may damage the nonstick coating. I recommend using a nonreactive pan like a stainless steel skillet for preparing the sauce and flambéeing it.

After I make the crepes, I fold them up and set them aside, making them easier to slip into the sauce and serve afterwards. The sauce itself is the star of the dish: To make it, I melt butter, then whisk in freshly squeezed orange juice, salt, and a flavorful orange sugar I make by quickly macerating orange zest with granulated sugar (more on that below). I bring the sauce to a simmer, cook it until it’s slightly thickened and reduced, then add the folded crepes, making sure to evenly coat them in the sauce. All that’s left to do is to set it all on fire—which is as cathartic and satisfying as it sounds.

Below, I'll explain the main techniques to help you make superb crepes Suzette at home.

Is It Necessary to Rest Your Crepe Batter?

In culinary school, my French instructors insisted it was absolutely necessary to rest your crepe batter for at least an hour or, preferably, overnight, as they believed it would give the gluten a chance to rest. In his basic crepes recipe, Kenji noted that resting the crepe batter did not produce more flavorful crepes—however, he didn’t address the question of texture. To see if resting made a difference, I prepared two batters. I whizzed up one batch of batter the night before, which rested for about 12 hours, and another right before cooking.

While Kenji is correct that the overnight rest does little for flavor, I found that resting did, indeed, produce more tender crepes. The difference, however, is marginal enough that I don’t think it’s absolutely necessary to rest your batter. The fresh batter still made delicious crepes, they were just ever so slightly more rubbery. While I’ve included resting as an option, it certainly isn’t a must.

The Simple Upgrade for More Flavorful Crepes Suzette

Traditional crepe Suzette recipes call for both orange zest and sugar. Adding zest to the sauce makes sense—it contains fragrant oils that deliver much of an orange's signature scent and flavor, enhancing the overall oranginess of the sauce beyond what the juice and orange liqueur can offer. Still, the sauce is cooked quickly enough that just adding zest to the sauce doesn't take full advantage of all the fragrance it can impart. By taking just a few extra minutes to rub the zest into the sugar, I'm able to draw out the peel’s potent oils, giving the dessert an even more intense burst of citrus flavor.

While orange zest doesn’t typically show up in the crepe batter itself, it felt like a lost opportunity to not include the orange-scented macerated sugar in the crepes, too. To see if it really made a difference, I prepared two batches of crepes suzette: one with macerated sugar, and one with sugar and orange zest added separately. While both versions were delicious, the batch made with the macerated sugar had much bolder citrus flavor than the batch made without the macerated sugar. It's one of those small but impactful techniques that takes a classic recipe and makes it even better.

How to Safely Flambé With Confidence

I like to flambé the traditional way: by tilting the pan slightly so the flame ignites the alcohol in the pan. But if that feels too intimidating or you aren’t working over a gas flame, you can use a match, long-handled lighter or kitchen blowtorch to ignite the sauce instead. A word of caution: Always use a measured amount of alcohol and never pour alcohol directly from the bottle into the pan. As Daniel touched on in his cherries jubilee recipe, the flames can jump up, lighting up the entire bottle in your hand. And if you don’t feel like lighting your food on fire, simply add the alcohol and simmer the sauce for several minutes until the alcohol has cooked off and the sauce has reduced.

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