The Traditional Way To Serve France's Crozets Pasta

Italy may immediately come to mind when we think about pasta, but there are variations all around the world, including in neighboring France, where a small, square type called crozets is traditional in the southeastern Savoy region. The name is said to come from the local dialect word "croé," which means little. However, other sources say it's a word for an indention the cook used to make in the dough when crozets were originally round.

The dough for the little pasta squares is made from durum wheat, buckwheat (which is a gluten-free flour), or a mix of both, with eggs, salt, and water. The pasta will be heartier if buckwheat is used — a sensible choice in the mountainous French Alps region — and will cook longer in boiling water than crozets from durum wheat. In the traditional way to serve crozets, the cooked pasta is mixed with savory onions sauteed in butter and meltingly delicious grated cheese, like a creamy, buttery tomme or rich, nutty Beaufort, which are both from the Savoy area.

Unlike in Italy where pasta is served as a first course, or in the U.S. where it can be the main meal, crozets are often served as a side dish. They commonly accompany the local diot pork sausage, which is made in varieties including plain, smoked, and with cabbage blended in the ground meat, as well as ham and other meat or fish. The square pasta can also be served in a salad. 

Crozets are also used in a spin on tartiflette, a well-known gratin from the region, called croziflette. The potatoes in tartiflette are replaced with crozets for a baked pasta take on the Alpine dish, while the other ingredients remain essentially the same.

To make croziflette, onions and lardons — slab bacon cut into cubes — are sauteed, and cooked crozets and crème fraiche (which is not the same as sour cream) are then stirred in. The mixture is put in a baking dish and slices of creamy reblochon cheese are lined up across the top before it goes in the oven. The velvety cheese melts into the savory-sweet blend filled out by the rustic crozets to create a rich, decadent dish.

Crozets can be bought from French grocers online if you want to try making croziflette, but because reblochon is a raw milk cheese, many countries, including the U.S., don't allow it to be imported. Use another kind of soft cow's milk cheese instead, like Taleggio or Camembert — and you can do the same to make tartiflette!