Thursday 7 August 2008

Pancrepe scramble





You know, it all started off with one substitution too many. I decided to make crepes. I didn't have enough wheat flour, so I used rice flour. There may have also been some creativity with soy and coconut milk. It should have worked. I mean, I've made rice flour crepes before, but this time it didn't. They just lost structural integrity. Then I thought...these look....scrambled. It is one of the better kitchen rescues that I've done. I may never make unscrambled pancakes or crepes again. You see, if you accept that the purpose of pancakes is to be coated in stuff (maple syrup, usually), then it becomes obvious that scrambling them a) increases the surface to volume ratio of the pancake bits, allowing more stuff to adhere to each bit and b) introduces more nooks and crannies where sauce can get into the pancake, or bits of fruit can hold on to it. The word "velcro" springs to mind. Also, it's wonderfully satisfyingly messy-looking. The basic method is: pretend you are making pancakes, pouring out one giant pancake on your pan (my pancake recipe makes 3 giant pancakes, so I repeat this three times) but when it gets to the bit where you flip it over, just scramble it instead. There's a photo of a real live nude pancrepe being scrambled in a cast iron pan. Yum. Put all the scrambled pancake aside, and throw piles of chopped fruit or veg into the pan and heat through. Add scrambled pancake. Place mess in bowl. Douse with sauce. Eat.

Combo 1: rice-flour coconut/soy milk "crepe" with bananas, kiwis, cashews, pistachios, coco nibs. Sauce: soy milk, cardamom, cinnamon, sugar.

Combo 2: wheat flour/ almond milk pancakes with strawberries, blueberries, mango, kiwi, plum, fresh figs, nuts, ground green cardamom, sea salt. Sauce: fresh mint leaves, pomegranate molasses, lemon juice, maple syrup.

Combo 3: buckwheat/chocolate stout (spanky's homemade chocolate stout, no less)/flax seed crepe with onions,apples, capers, green pepper and smoked okara and almond cheese (okara, ground almonds, nutritional yeast, tahini, garlic powder, grated onion, dijon mustard, sweet/light miso, lemon juice, smoked salt, smoked paprika, thickened with kuzu)

I think I might try a vaguely mexican combo next...I'm thinking a cornmeal scrambled pancake with yellow squash, beans, smoked chilis and cacao nibs. ....

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

that looks like something that would be really fun to make when I'm in one of my delighted-five-year-old moods, and just want to make a big, exciting, mess of everything. Plus, it just sounds tasty.

And I like the cast iron pan- it looks like it could double as a weapon. I have one of those somewhere.

Liz Ranger (Bubble Tea for Dinner) said...

brilliance! especially for immature/non-pancake-ability-having-people like me. especially love the mad combos, too.

Jake said...

Excellent. You've reinvented Kaiserschmarrn. I lurrrrrve Kaiserschmarrn. You need a berry compote to put on it.

sinead said...

Well...I've had Kaiserschmarn (which I don't really like), which I found to be more like scrambled overly-sweet eggy cake with fruit syrup/compote than scrambled pancakes....The things I made are sooo not desserts. But yeah, same idea. Only quite different.

medici said...

Yay! I can post again!

After eating these luscious panscrambles, I can't see myself opting for conventional pancakes again when I am standing behind the griddle. Oh they are soooooo good! I especially loved the fruit panscramble. Buck Mulligan would go green with envy at the contents of Kitchen Dancer's fry pan.