Saturday, December 29, 2018

Swedish Pancakes, Revisited

     For years, I've made non-rising Swedish pancakes using a simple recipe: a couple of eggs, a cup of flour, a cup of milk.  They're delicious!

     This is the base recipe for a lot of baked and fried breads,* so there's a lot of room for experiment -- add melted butter and bake in well-greased custard cups at 450°F, and you'll get popovers, which balloon up, leaving huge hollow interiors to be filled with anything from butter and jam to scrambled eggs and bacon.  Make the batter thinner, and you'll get crepes.  A few weeks ago, I happened on a pancake recipe that used melted butter and much less flour.  Tam had a breakfast meeting this morning, so I decided to give it a try.

     The pancakes are remarkable!  The batter's so thin that it spreads out to cover the 10-inch square, flat griddle I usually use, but tough enough to lift and flip with a normal flat spatula once the bottom is cooked.  To serve, I folded them twice to make plate-sized squares; halving the recipe produced enough batter to make two of them, eight layers of wonderfulness with a little butter and sugar between each one.  You can use jelly or jam instead (h'mm, there's still sweet orange marmalade in the fridge...).  Either way, be sparing, it adds up quickly.  I'll be making these again.

     Thinking in terms of what can be done with popovers and flatbread, I'm pondering what a savory version might be like -- leave out the bit of sugar, maybe add a little pepper and parsley (etc.) to the batter and layer with scrambled egg, bacon or crumbled sausage to serve.
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* Using the term in a very broad sense.

2 comments:

Ken said...

Never made actual crepes, but I have made palacszinta, which is a Hungarian near-enough equivalent. Love 'em.

honey said...

Can we make this recipe without egg?