The best of our canapé recipes (2024)

FAQs

What is the tip to making the best canapés? ›

Balancing colour, flavour, and texture

These three elements are paramount to creating canapés that are memorable and look inviting. Texture is an important one to think about – a successful canapé is one that contrasts several different textures to create an enjoyable eating experience.

There are 4 distinctive elements of a canapé – the base, spread, a topping & a garnish. Canape base ingredients are usually bread, puff pastry or crackers, allowing a solid foundation for the rest of the canapé. Then there is spread followed by the topping.

Canapés consist of three parts the base, spread/toppings and garnish. The Base holds the spread and garnish. Like biscuit, bread, toast or puff pastry as the base of the canapes. The biscuit, bread or crackers are firmer and give a pleasing texture and crispness to the canapés.

Size: Make sure your canapés are easy for your guests to eat by serving in mouth-sized portions. Taste: Since it's only a mouthful, it needs to be full of flavour and well-seasoned. Many of our recipes are served with an accompanying dipping sauce for extra hosting points.

Canapé is from the French work meaning sofa or bed. Any small culinary presentation on a piece of bread, puff pastry, short crust or similar (which is the bed) can be called a 'canapé'. These bread bases can be prepared in three simple ways: toasted, with butter or fried in oil.

For a one-hour drinks reception, order four to six canapés per person. If it's before a grand dinner, four should be plenty. For longer events, add another two to four pieces per hour. Savoury canapés are always more popular; if you're serving savoury and sweet, aim for a ratio of around 4:1.

The composition of a canapé consists of a base (e.g., the bread or pancake), a spread, a main item, and a garnish. The spread is traditionally either a compound butter, made by creaming butter with other ingredients such as ham or lobster, or a flavored cream cheese. Mayonnaise salads can also be prepared as spreads.

Canapés are typically made with an edible base – crackers, blinis, bread or pastry, and served cold. Hors d'oeuvres are small bites of something tasty and can be both savoury or sweet, and served hot or cold.

What is a fun fact about canapé? ›

The name comes from the French word for sofa, drawing on the analogy that the garnish sits atop the bread as people do on a couch.

Crackers and toasts are firmer and give a pleasing texture and crispness to the canapé.

“Kalm Kitchen would suggest selecting two meat, two fish, one vegetarian and one vegan canapé choice. This should ensure all your guests are satisfied for the duration of the canapé reception. However, it is completely up to you how you want to split the selection”.

Lunch or dinner event

When catering a meal time event, where finger food will constitute the entire meal, we recommend serving 8-12 savoury canapés per person. Ideally this selection will include 2-4 of the larger finger food options - such as bao buns, roast beef dinner rolls or fish tacos.

If you're creating your own canapés, then the most important things to remember are taste, colour and texture. Obviously they have to taste good, but don't forget that each one has to look inviting as well.

Answer: Spread something on the bases to protect them from a topping if it is on the 'damp' side. A pretty obvious thing anyway - we all spread butter or marg (or cream cheese, or mayo) on our bread to prevent it getting soggy from a damp filling. So the same approach works just as well with canape-toast bases.