T*asty Dutch Pancakes

Recipe:  Dutch Pancakes
Video:  Link
Recipe Number:  5
Week:  0

Y*mmy and w*rm

Last night I decided that I needed something tasty and warm after a long day of work.  Something that would not be too messy or hard to make and something that I had everything on hand for.  Dutch pancakes fit the bill perfectly.  Titli's recipe is, like always, easy to follow and fun to watch (How do you make everything so entertaining?).  Anyways, before reading my experience with the recipe, go read how to make it and watch her video (links at the top of the page!).

All necessary ingredients plus the optional ones

First things first for this recipe: go place whatever you are using to bake your Dutch Pancakes into the over and pre-heat it.  This is the first step as the pan is supposed to be hot when you ladle in the batter!  Now Titli says to use a cast iron skillet or a pizza tray if you do not have a cast iron skillet.  Now, if you are like me, and do not have either (clearly I need to start considering about investing in some quality utensils!) then you can use a cake tin.  My cake tin is 9" in diameter, so the pancakes were slightly smaller than what Titli made and my batter made about four of them.

After getting the pre-heat all taken care of, mix together the flour, salt, eggs, and milk to form the base of the batter.  Now add the melted butter.  Be careful during this step as you might be adding hot butter to a cold batter which is going to make it clump if you do not beat and mix it properly!  Mine clumped at first, though, and for the first pancake it was clumped and I can honestly say that it did not effect teh taste.  I managed to beat out the clumps by the second pancake, however.

Ladle in your batter

Once your batter is ready, check your oven again to see if it is the correct heat.  If it is, take out the tin (or try or skillet) and melt some butter in it to prevent the pancake from sticking.  When ladling in the batter, be sure to keep the layer thin (just 2 to 3 millimeters) as it will fluff up and cook quite nicely.  After ladling, add your selected ingredients on top.  This is a personal decision and go with what you think is tasty!  I had never had Dutch Pancakes before so I added tomatoes, cheddar cheese, and mushrooms to two of mine and potato and cheddar cheese to the others.  Both combinations were delicious.

Cheddar, tomato, and mushroom!

Now, the most important thing, cooking it!  But before you do, there is something I think is very important to learn and that is how your oven runs.  Someone could tell you to cook or bake something at a certain temperature for a given period of time, but it might not work for you even though it worked for them!  You need to play and constantly check your food to see the variations.  As you have probably seen with my carrot cake and brownies, I was running my oven much hotter than Titli.  The dutch pancakes were no different.

For my first one, I had it at 395F and it took well over 20 minutes to cook and the top was still not golden brown.  But it did cook.  So for the second one, I raised the temperature to 420F and cooked for 15 minutes.  This one, while done, was the least cooked.  For the third, I let it in for 20 minutes at 420F.  Perfection!  So while for Titli it was 10-15 minutes at 395F for me it was 420F for 20+ minutes.  Clearly mine runs colder than standard.  But learn your oven, folks, and focus more on the signs of completion (i.e. golden brown and fluffy) than on the measurements of time until you know what works!

Pop it out of the oven and use a spatula to transport it to a plate and, voila!  You have beautiful, tasty Dutch Pancakes with no fl*pping involved!  I ate mine with syrup.  They were delicious.

S*rupy and G*!d

Happy B*king!

Zielony Pie