Cooking Around the World Part 2: Belgium
Self-Care and Creativity Through Cooking: B is for Belgium.
Happy Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
I hope this day finds you in a peaceful place despite what else is going on in the world.
For the letter B, I had planned on making a Brazilian recipe because there is a Brazilian grocery store not too far from me that I’ve wanted to visit and I thought it would be the perfect time to visit. But then I starting looking through my list of B countries and for some reason Belgium called out to me. Other than moules frites, chocolate, and beer, I really didn’t have a good sense of what Belgian cuisine was, so I did a little searching for recipes. I came across a couple of websites that focused on Belgian food and found one that seemed right up my alley: Belgian endive gratin.
Otherwise known as chicon gratin, this recipe called to me because of its ease to pull together and its homey, comfort food appeal. Belgian endive, sometimes known as chicory, is part of the bitter greens family, which includes frisée, escarole, dandelion, kale broccoli rabe, radicchio, escarole, and more. I must really like them because this is my second post featuring them.
The ingredients list on both sites were similar, but there was one major difference in cooking method. Endive is essentially a small, yellow and white, leafy green that is tightly packed, cylindrical in shape, sometime mistaken for a type of lettuce. It’s fairly easy to find, but my guess is that it is not the most popular produce item because I had to go to three stores to find heads that looked fresh and decently sized.
Because it grows into a tightly packed head, it needs to be cooked in advance of the final prep of wrapping it with the ham and baking it in its cheesy white sauce to make sure it cooks all the way through. That’s where the two recipes differed: one called for boiling the endive until it’s soft but still intact, the other called for braising the endive in a lightly oiled pan until soft. Since I had two heads, I decided to boil one and braise one.
The ingredients I used for two servings are:
Two heads of Belgian endive
Four slices of ham
Grated Gruyere, Cheddar, or Emmental cheese - I used Gruyère
One cup whole milk
Three tablespoons flour
Three tablespoons butter
Dash of nutmeg
Dash of salt and pepper
The recipe is pretty easy, but does have a couple of extra steps: pre-cooking the endive and making the béchamel sauce.
Pre-cook the endive by boiling it or braising it. Set it aside to cool.
While the water is boiling or the endive is braising, make the béchamel by melting the butter, then adding the flour until the butter is absorbed and then whisking in the milk. You can also add some cheese to the sauce if you’d like. Set the sauces aside. Here is an easy béchamel recipe.
Once the endive is cooled, carefully squeeze out the excess water without damaging the leaves - I made a mistake that I mention below and didn’t cook and squeeze out enough water.
Wrap the cooked endives in the ham slices.
Place the wrapped endives in a casserole dish.
Pour the béchamel sauce over the endives. Depending on how long it has cooled, you might need to warm and whisk again.
Sprinkle the top with some of the grated cheese.
Bake at 350° F until the sauce is bubbly and the cheese is browned.
Serve warm as a side dish or a main.
I am pretty used to being happy with what I cook. This one threw me a little because I didn’t think the finished product matched how good some of the recipe photos looked. I think I made a big mistake and didn’t pre-cook - by either method - the endive long enough. What I think happened is that there was too much water left in the endive when I baked it. The extra water that released during the baking process caused the béchamel sauce to break and it lost its creamy consistency and became clumpy. I should have both cooked them longer and squeezed the water out better.
It tasted pretty good, but the texture was off because of the clumpy sauce. I also think cooking them longer - I would choose braising over boiling next time - would ensure a more consistent flavor in the endive. Some bites were sweeter like a cooked cabbage, some had retained their bitterness. It just didn’t eat right in my opinion…
I’m definitely interested in trying this one again to see if I can get it to come out better. Maybe next time I’ll blanch the endive leaves separately and layer then with the ham instead of wrapping it around the boiled/braised heads. There’s always room for improvement and adaptation after all.
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The recipe sources I used include Leeks and High Heels and Allrecipes.
© 2025 Kim Selby & Storm Your Brain, LLC. All rights reserved. All photography © Kim Selby unless otherwise credited.