John Locke's recipe for Pancakes (2021)
rarecooking.com
rarecooking.com
That said, it seems this recipe results in a Dutch style pancake, so I would like to try to prepare it sometime.
When I make pancakes, I usually just use:
- eggs
- flour
- whole milk + water in equal amounts
- cinnamon to taste
- little bit of vanilla extract
- some sugar and salt
The resulting mixture should be slightly thick.
Using whole butter to prevent the mixture from sticking to the pan.
When smoke starts appearing around the pancake, it’s time to turn the pancake around in the pan. Should be baked on medium size fire.
For every pancake add a little butter to the pan, wait for it to melt. For first pancake use more butter.
I love this simple recipe.
Cast iron into a 425° oven as it preheats.
While you're waiting: -whisk 4 eggs. -Add half cup of flour. -Half cup of milk (almond, oat, whole milk all work), warmed up to room temp. -Dash of salt
Whisk until smooth. When oven is ready, pull out cast iron, add 2 tbls of butter and make sure it gets all the sides. Pour in mixture and bake 12 minutes. Turns into a billowy beautiful eggy pancake. Good with maple syrup or savory with cheese and ham.
The recipe is:
- 1 cup of plain flour
- 1 large egg
- 1 1/3 cup milk (half milk half water usually too!)
- 2 tblspoons of melted butter
The first 3 are combined the night before and whizzed up, then left in the fridge. The melted butter you do on the morning of -- melt it in the pan then tip it into the other mixture and stir it a little. Having made it the night before is ideal if you're visiting a friend in the morning, too.
Your pan technique sounds identical to us : ) ... enjoy!
Always wondering if you could just stick it in a vacuum pump...
I don’t know the details, but there’s an ongoing reaction involving the gluten in the dough that leads to smoother surfaced, thinner pancakes.
I recall this is done for galettes which uses buckwheat flour and is typically savoury.
Keeping it longer develops gluten which would make it more gummy I suppose? This is when making tempura you wanna use cold water and minimal mixing so it's crunchier.
except i eventually discovered that it doesn't really matter if i use milk or water. since it is less common where i live i simply stopped using milk entirely.
also my mother puts in sugar in the dough. i don't remember if my grandmother did that, but why bother. you can put enough sugar as topping to compensate.
i had a batch of dough overnight just thus weekend. i could not tell the difference.
i make the dough as thin as possible, unless i include a filling that needs to be baked, like cheese, banana or apple
Me too! I have a hard time finding a good crepe anywhere, even NYC.
Try telling someone in the US how good an onion and cheese pancake with mayo is for breakfast!
Thank you for the recipe!
Waffles are the more complex product. Someone realized that the best part of a pancake is the crispy edges, so they invented the waffle iron to radically increase the surface area of each pancake.
https://www.seriouseats.com/savory-buckwheat-crepes-galettes...
If you want it on the cheap, go purchase Atta at your local Indian convinence store. Similar for stone milled cornflour (I've found Hispanic store prices have been going up lately compared to Asian stores)
As mentioned in another reply, this is indeed a Dutch pancake recipe. And the recipe does contain an 85 (or is 86?) in the top right corner. The addition of nutmeg, while very decadent, would have made sense when considering that Locke traveled between the cities of Holland, at that time the heart of the Dutch overseas trading empire. It spanned to such places as the island of Java, where you could pick the nutmeg right off of the tree.
On the other hand you may be right about the rest of what you write.
'Heavy cream' I think is a mistranslation in the reformulated recipe, that's a modern American higher fat (a bit less than double cream, but roughly substitutable) cream; I expect at that time it was a cruder process & product, more literally creamed off raw milk, resulting in something unhomogenised probably on the milky side of single cream. Which would make sense, since it's typically milk one makes pancakes with anyway, not any sort of standardised modern cream.
> Also, and it was covered by other commenters, but that amount of nutmeg, wow.
I don't follow you there though, I think that description ('exceptional, expensive amount') in OP meant for Locke at the time. These days it's (probably top-25 percentile of spices but) relatively cheap, half a nutmeg for 10 pancakes doesn't seem remarkably excessive to me? I mean, assuming it's 'nutmeg and orange blossom pancakes' that you're going for anyway.
The only thing I add nutmeg to on a regular basis is mashed potatoes, and then it's just a few swipes of the grater -- can't be more than 1/3 tsp -- for a family-sized portion, and the aroma is still very distinct. A single nut lasts me year or so.
On the other hand the butter content in this recipe is bonkers. The only way that makes sense to me is if you lose a lot of butter in the process of clarifying it, which is a step in the original recipe which isn't mentioned in the translated version in the article.
Some historical context seems to be missing here, or Locke must have been an Epicurean.
The colonial history of the Banda Islands is fascinating and terrible:
Edit: So I looked into this. A single nutmeg is 5-10 grams. That means the pancakes will have 2.5-5g between all of them. According to a reddit post (https://www.reddit.com/r/nutmeg/comments/nd5d9q/nutmeg_effec...), it seems like 5g of nutmeg could be enough for a trip, but it won't come even close to killing you.
So if you make this recipe and eat _all_ the pancakes yourself, you might go on a trip.
Also, I just want to mention that tripping on nutmeg is not something I'd recommend to anyone. It may not kill you outright, but it will make you delirious enough that you're no longer aware of your surroundings, what you're doing, and you may end up harming or even killing yourself. It's a deliriant, not a psychedelic. You're also likely to get intense muscle aches that will make it thoroughly unenjoyable even in sub-hallucinogenic doses.
then you don't really trip, you just kinda hallucinate, something closer to extreme sleep deprivation hallucinations than talking to Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.
Although there are cases of much much more nutmeg being consumed that were not lethal. There is one case in historical literature where a pregnant woman consumed 10-12 nutmegs (70-84g) to induce intoxication.
This leads me to hypothesise that perhaps historical nutmegs were smaller, or that they were grown in unoptimal conditions so produced less myristicin.
If you solo these I think the nutmeg is going to be the least of your worries.
LD50 seems to be on the order of grams per kg. Wild that 5g are enough for a psychoactive effect and that this recipe might in some cases be enough.
John Locke’s recipe for Pancakes (2021) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30132612 - Jan 2022 (155 comments)
Locke's original is more precise.
- you need to add in the flower gradually, sifting it through a sieve while stirring the milk.
- it helps to grate an apple and add that to the mixture, very recommended.
This sounds like equal wealth distribution by the state. John would not approve
My way of making soft pancakes is to mix the dry and dry wet ingredients quickly but gently, stirring as little as possible. I leave the batter it a little chunky even.
With these types of pancake you want to promote strong gluten development.
As wonky as English orthography is, I'm still very glad it has been largely standardized.
This is Richard Alpert’s recipe.
But it is still a LOT of butter, cream and eggs.
https://www.youtube.com/@CowboyKentRollins/videos
Its really fn great.
The video on how to stock a chuck wagon was great. Its all outdoor cooking over fire - and there is so much great knowledge in these vids.
Didn't know "skum" used to be an English word, or that its meaning changed to what is scum today. In nordic languages it still just means foam.