Pancakes and Crepes (a round, flat Sunday)

From Foodsies!

Ah, nothing quite like breakfast for breakfast, lunch, and dinner on a nice Sunday!

I started off the day by making Sourdough Pancakes. It's a great use of extra sourdough starter, and makes pancakes that are not only egg free (duh) but don't even require soy milk! Craziness!

And yet they turned out really great - maybe not the poofiest/fluffiest pancakes ever, but had a light and fluffy texture nonetheless (if that makes sense). And the sourdough really did add a pleasant (though subtle) yeasty flavor. Mmm.
And cold, they were much better than a normal cold pancake.

I ate leftover pancakes for lunch during a short hike with Oscar and some friends.

And for dinner, keeping with the flat and round theme, I made savory crepes. I prepared a Duxelle (fined chopped mushrooms and shallots) for the filling and made the crepes with buckwheat flour. Of course for the last crepe I filled it with marmalade and soy yogurt for dessert :)

Recipes after the jump:


Sourdough Pancakes (recipe adapted from Wild Fermentation)

You can make this a few different ways. This is what I tried on Sunday.

Ingredients

1/2 Cup Sourdough Starter
1 1/4 Cups Whole Wheat Flour (or half and half whole wheat and all-purpose)
1 Cup Warm Water
1 TBSP Sugar
1 TBSP Vegetable Oil
1/4 tsp Salt
1 tsp Baking Soda

Instructions

Mix the Starter, Flour, Warm Water and Sugar together in a mixing bowl. Cover with a slightly damp towel and set in a warm space for a few hours to ferment.* You can do this overnight (so set it up the night before) to have breakfast the next day. I just put it near our best radiator for an hour. It worked, but I think the flavor is better if you let it sit longer.

*Have you noticed that you're basically just feeding your starter here? I mean, you add in more flour and water than for a normal feeding, but in a ratio such that you're still maintaining the consistency of the original starter. I therefore believe that if you had an over-abundance of recently-fed starter lying around, you could just warm it up to a little past room temperature and then proceed with the following steps as if you had done the first step.

Once you're sick of waiting, take the bowl from above and whisk in the oil and salt.

Mix the baking soda into about 1 TBSP of warm water and then add that mixture to the bowl as well. Fold it gently in to evenly distribute.

Heat a cast iron skillet and coat with a bit of oil. Once it's hot (water sizzles when flicked on it), ladle about 1/3 cup of batter on it.

Once lots of bubbles have formed in the middle and aren't re-closing, and the edges look a little firm, you can flip the pancake. You only get one flip! This is key to making good pancakes. Flip once. Don't get excited and flip too early, but of course waiting too long isn't good either. Plan to mess up the first pancake and that should help you establish your timing :)

Once you've flipped the pancake, the 2nd side should only take about 1/3 of the time to cook as the first side did. You can also peek to see if it looks done (nice golden to golden-brown color). Toss onto a plate and pour the batter for your next pancake.

Serve and enjoy.

You can even freeze these for microwaving later.


Buckwheat Crepes (recipe from Veganomicon)

Ingredients:

1/2 Cup Buckwheat Flour*
1/4 Cup All Purpose Flour
1/4 Cup Chickpea Flour**
1 3/4 Cup Soy Milk
1/4 Cup Water
1 TBSP Arrowroot Powder or Flour***
1/2 tsp Salt
1-2 TBSP Sugar (optional)
1 tsp Vanilla (optional)

* If you don't like buckwheat or don't have any, you can use any other kind of flour or just use All Purpose flour instead.

** I believe this provides some additional binding, but I think it's ok to just use a little more All Purpose Flour instead.

*** If you do not have Arrowroot, try about 2 TBSP of oil or melted Earth Balance in its place. You could try 1 TBSP of cornstarch as well, but the flavor is more likely to come through and be unpleasant.

Instructions

Combine all of the ingredients in a blender and blend. Pour into a container, cover, and refrigerate for somewhere between 4 hours and overnight. This chilling process will making the crepes much easier to flip.

Once chilled, heat a griddle on medium heat and coat lightly with oil, and some Earth Balance as well if you like. With one hand, scoop 1/3 cup of the batter onto the griddle, and with your other hand, tilt the griddle in a circle so that the batter spreads out thinly and (more or less) evenly in a large circle.

Wait about a minute and a half until the top is fairly dry and bubbling in the center, and the edges are crisping and browning a little. Carefully scootch your spatula around the edge of the crepe until it is removed from the skillet. Flip!
Just like pancakes, the 2nd side should only take about 1/3rd of the cooking time as the first side did. Slide the finished crepe onto a waiting plate, brush a bit more Earth Balance onto the griddle, and pour out your next crepe.

Odds are that your first crepe will be a total disaster. Oscar loves this, because he usually gets some of the first crepe/pancake/tortilla/etc. because my first one is always to horrible for human consumption.

I think Veganomicon says these can be wrapped up and refrigerated, and i'm sure that like pancakes, they can be frozen as well.


Duxelle

I have been following this blog for a while, and i've been inspired to start at the beginning and teach myself to veganize all of his recipes (well, the ones I am interested in making at least). It's like a DIY vegan french cooking class ;)

At the very least, it gets me thinking about vegetables, seasonings, and cooking methods that I might not have considered before.

This is a great example. I love mushrooms, and I cook them a lot, but it never really occurred to me to make a garnish/filling like this. Maybe it was too simple for me to think of. Anyway, it makes a great filling for savory crepes!

(Also, I plan to combine the leftover Duxelle with another early recipe of the whiskblog, Portugaise (a tomato-based sauce with a base of concassées (fresh crushed tomatoes, basically)), to make a tasty pizza sauce for pizza later this week. So many snobby sounding French words, just to make a pizza to have with some beer).

Anyway, back to the Duxelle. I used 3 different kinds of mushrooms to keep things interesting: Baby Bella, some kind of asian mushroom whose name I forget right now, and regular button mushrooms. And I got to justify my purchase of cooking wines recently (a red and white)! The original recipe calls for a Medeira wine, but mine is a Marsala and it did just fine. In fact, I probably could have used a touch more :) Also, I love shallots. They're like the love child of onion and garlic.

Ingredients

2-3 Cups Mushrooms, finely diced/minced
2-4 Shallots (1/4-1/2 cup), finely diced/minced
2 TBSP Earth Balance
1 TBSP Olive Oil
1/3 Cup Madeira or other red wine
Pinch Salt and Pepper

Instructions

Easy peasy. Dice/mince your mushrooms and shallots.

Melt Earth Balance in a skillet along with the oil.

Add the shallots and cook for a minute or two to allow the flavors to sweat out.

Add the mushrooms. Cook until the mushrooms darken and get tender (this took about 5 minutes for me).

Add in the wine and allow the wine to boil away pretty quickly (ie, don't turn the heat way down - you want it to simmer heartily).

When most of the wine has cooked away, add a pinch of salt and pepper and you're done!

It can be refrigerated or even frozen for future use in crepes, sauces, whatever.

Here is a buckwheat crepe stuffed with Duxelle. You can also see some of the Duxelle garnished on the top.

From Foodsies!

I apologize for the shoddy picture. The crepes are brownish/greyish because of the buckwheat, and the Duxelle is by nature brown. Not wonderfully photogenic, but tasty to eat.