Pancakes 2: The Middle Period

To be an educated Zimbabwean is to leave the country. Almost. Almost everyone in my class at school left and that includes the Shona ones - it wasn't just the palefaces like me.

So I took my choice - the UK instead of the US (mistake?) and got a job in a computer company and wrote software till 2am in the morning and got generally burned out on purpose. I lived in a flat-share in Putney with a couple of wonderful Italians and another South-African-Japanese couple. Normal for London and absolutely excellent :-)

My mum was gone beyond all returning so if I wanted to ever eat another pancake I had to make them. Everything was, of course, different - flour, eggs, pans and so on and my mum's high-tech pancakes were very sensitive - change anything and you'd get a change in the outcome.

This is the period where I really wrote Part 1 of this series (These are not Pancakes!?). It was the time I re-learned how to make the thinnest most elegant type. I ate a lot of horrible ones on the way but didn't give up and finally cracked it. Burp.

The effort and forethought were a pain, however. Saturday was a wipe-out - it was recovery day and I usually felt too shattered to do anything least of all prepare batter for the next day. Then on Sunday I'd be bright-eyed and bushy tailed again and batter-less.

Innovation comes from Mischance

One Sunday I woke up with a hunger for the thin discs and no batter and the words "oh bugger it" just came to mind. "So what, I'll do imperfect ones today and even if they're not going to be super thin...well..too bad.

I pulled open the cupboard and discovered another complete disaster. All I had was self-raising flour. For the Americans and others who have never heard of this, self-raising flour is a low protein flour that has an optimal amount of baking powder (baking soda+cream of tartar) added to it for making things such as cakes soft. It saves you from measuring baking powder with a spoon and getting it wildly wrong.

To use self-raising flour in a pancake was to me then a kind of sacrilege. It wasn't stretchy and it would bubble up. In any case needs must when the devil drives and I had the devil of a hunger.

The perfection of simplicity

The short story is that I got slightly thicker pancakes but I noticed that a lot of problems just disappeared. The worst issue with the unleavened pancakces is that if you got the mixture a little bit wrong and the batter a little too thick (very easy to do) then you never managed to cook them in the middle. If you got the middle cooked it was by burning the outside. With self-raising flour it almost didn't matter what you did - the result would always cook properly without any burning.

Once I got used to this I realised that other bits of the equation could be simplified too - with no impact. You could use less eggs and all measurements became trivially easy because there was a simple rule:

1 egg to 100g self-raising flour to 100ml of milk.

In practise one usually has to add a bit more milk but this gets you close. This rule needs a bit of sugar - whatever you prefer - and a bit of oil - a spoon or two - and some flavoring whether it's vanilla or rum or brandy or whiskey. With this you have incredibly easy pancakes that are reliable.

The Death of Skill

For many years after this through all kinds of hell and happiness I stuck with the simplified recipe that was good enough. I add 30% oat-flour or pronutro to make it more nutritious for my daughter but it's essentially the same and nothing changed for years until I discovered the great power of that magic cooking chemical: cream of tartar....