soft, salty jambon blanc and crisp, buttery bread can give any speck and Taleggio panino or cheddar and baked ham toastie a run for its money. Ignore the sad, limp imitations on sale at French petrol stations (I can't speak for this McDo version , however) and make your own instead: it's hardly complicated. The bread Raymond Blanc recipe croque monsieur. Photograph: Felicity Cloake As this is a sandwich, it makes sense to start with bread. Despite its status as a bona fide French cliche, the croque monsieur is made with a distinctly British-looking tin-baked loaf -- in my experience, soft, sweet pain de mie is the most usual choice in the sandwich's home country. The sugary flavour and cotton wool-like texture have never seemed a happy choice to me however, so I'm open to suggestions. Raymond Blanc comes up with the idea of using wholemeal bread , which I've never seen in France, but I think it makes the croque taste depressingly worthy -- this should be white bread territory. In Jamie magazine, meanwhile, Rebecca Rauter specifies crusty bread which, although it would be my preference for any other toasted cheese sandwich, seems in direct contradiction of the spirit of this particular version: Larousse is very clear that crusts must be cut off, which implies, to me at least, that the bread shouldn't be too chewy. That said, it needs to be strong enough to stand up to the weight of melted cheese, so no cheap stuff here. A