Thin, frying-pan baked pancakes, that can be made either sweet or savory.
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Pancakes. The children’s treat in the Netherlands, and the cornerstone of a good Sunday breakfast in the U.S. of A. It is technically not baking, but it involves a doughy batter, and it has cake in the name. Good enough for me. This blog will contain one of the two recipes: Dutch style flat pancakes.
Cart-wheel sized pancakes
The Dutch pancakes are big and flat: use a large frying pan. The batter is very, very runny and neither sweet nor savory. You dress it up with the ingredients. You can go sweet: after the bake, dress on the plate using powder sugar and/or thick syrup (‘stroop’, a sweet tasting molasses), go fruity with baking in apples, raisins, pineapple, or go savory with cheese, bacon, ham, spring onions or a combination. A pretty cool combination is cheese and bacon baked into it, and then dress it with syrup. You can put everything on a pancake. Go bananas – and that is meant literally. And a pancake with Nutella is pure heaven.
Dutch Pancakes
Ingredients
- 500 milliliter Milk
- 250 grams All-purpose flour
- 2 Eggs
- Pinch of salt
- Butter or oil for frying
Instructions
Utensils
- Large bowl
- Hand mixer or whisk
- Soup ladle
- Large frying pan
- Thin, large spatula
Preparation
- Put the flour in the bowl, and add the eggs. Pour in the milk, and whisk away. The batter needs to be very runny, add milk if you think it is not runny enough.
- You will not quickly over-process this batter: you can make it airy by whisking ferociously, or use the mixer. Whisk until all the lumps in the batter are gone. Note: this is different compared to American-style pancakes, where you only whisk a bit.
- Heat a large frying pan on the stove and grease it with a knob of butter or dash of oil. Turn down the heat to medium, at max.
Baking
- Pour a soup ladle of batter in the pan, starting in the middle. Tilt and turn the pan to make sure the pan is covered by the batter.
- If you add ingredients that you want incorporate into the pancakes, to it now. If you add cheese, you can choose to just add flakes and allow them to bake. If you add slices, you can go two ways: just put them in with the cheese uncovered, they will bake into a crunchy crust when you turn them over. If you first slide the cheese over the batter on the top, and turn it, there will be a thin layer of batter.
- When the top has become dry, turn the pancake with the spatula and bake the other side: be careful, as this will go quickly. When the pancakes turns too dark, lower the heat and/or flip sooner.
- You will impress guests, friends, children and other family by flipping the pancake in the air. You can more easily do this with pancakes with a ‘naturel’ pancake, or thin slices of ingredients. If you have a heavy pancake, chances are they will break and crumble.
- It is normal the first pancake becomes a mess. If you are practiced at making pancakes Dutch style, you will see that the success rates of the first pancakes will go up. Do not worry, after the crumbly first one, the next ones will turn out better.
- Repeat until all the batter is gone. Remember to grease the pan every now and then. Serve the pancakes as you go. However, if you want to create a stack of pancakes to enjoy together with your guests, put a pan of water on the stove and boil water. Place a place on top, and layer that plate with pancakes. Careful: the plate will turn hot.