Rourke's Random Musings

I found another recipe for buckwheat crepes at Chocolate and Zucchini, an excellent food blog. This recipe calls for four parts buckwheat flour for every one part all purpose flour. That seemed more promising, so I gave it a try over the course of two nights last week.

To make batter for six crepes, use:

• 100g buckwheat flour
• 25g all-purpose flour
• 1 egg
• 25cl milk
• 25cl water

I followed the below instructions to prepare the batter, substituting my blender for the author’s food processor. I made twice as much batter and used the first half three hours later and the second half the next day. The batter did hold together much better the second day.

Step 1 : Prepare the dough batter.

If you have a food processor , break the eggs in the bowl of the food processor. Add the flours, and mix until well blended. Add as much of the milk as your food processor allows and mix again. Transfer to a large mixing bowl, and add the remaining milk and the water. Whisk until thoroughly blended.

In both cases, cover the mixing bowl with plastic wrap, and store in the fridge for at least two hours, overnight is best.

Step 2 : Make the galettes crepes.

Take the bowl of dough out of the fridge and prepare all the fillings beforehand. Whisk the galette dough again, as some of the flour will have settled at the bottom of the bowl.

If you’re making several galettes in a row, preheat the oven to 180?C (360?F). This is where you’ll keep the galettes warm while you make the others.

Heat up a large non-stick skillet over high heat. When it is very hot, put in a sliver of salted butter. When it is melted, but before it browns, use a paper towel to (cautiously) spread the butter evenly on the surface of the skillet. Pour a ladleful of dough in the skillet, and swoop the skillet around so that the dough spreads out in a nice even circle. Let cook on medium-high heat for a few minutes, peeking underneath with a spatula from time to time to check on the cooking.

These crepes are not nearly as easy to handle as earlier recipes; I now understand why there are specialized crepe tools. Adding the crepes to the pan only after the pan was very hot helped. Leaving the crepes completely alone until at least two minutes had passed helped. Using tongs to lift up the edges before using a wide spatula to flip the crepe also helped.

For crepes made with 1/3 of a cup of batter, three minutes per side seems right. For crepes made with 1/4 of a cup of batter, two minutes per side is more appropriate. Any more than 1/3 of a cup of batter is obviously too much. The inside of the crepe never cooks completely.

After watching a few other people make crepes, thinner seems to be the way to go. 1/4 cup of batter is probably the right amount. The challenge is keeping the crepe from getting too crispy.

Flip the galette when it’s nicely golden underneath, cautiously or brazenly depending on your self-assurance. Put the fillings of your choice in the center of the galette. … When the other side of the galette is nice and golden too, fold it as best you can: the traditional way is to fold the four sides in and make a square galette, but when there’s a lot of filling and the galette isn’t very big that’s a little difficult, so just fold two sides in.

I fold my crepes in half, as you need a very large (think 14″ or larger) pan in order to get a square crepe of reasonable size. For filling, I made the first batch of crepes with lamb sausage and gruyere cheese. The second half were filled with scrambled eggs, cheese, ground black pepper, and cherry tomato halves. Both were excellent, but next time I’d like to try the traditional egg, ham, and cheese. I watched the owner of the Crepe Maker make such a crepe: he cracked the egg directly onto the crepes, scrambled it around the crepe with a fork, and then added cheese and a single slice of ham. I’d also like to try making smoked salmon, sauteed onions, and creme fraise crepes.

If you’re stuck with an electric oven, lowering the heat to medium or medium-high isn’t going to do much as the temperature won’t change quickly enough. The chef at the Crepe Maker in Los Altos uses two crepe stoves. I’m guessing one of them is set to a lower heat, as he moves the crepe from one stove to the other after the crepe itself has set. It seems you should be able to do the same thing with two frying pans on an electric stove.

I burnt the butter every time, as you can see from the dark color on the inside of the crepe above. I don’t know how to fix that.

Put the galette in a large baking dish or on a cookie sheet and into the oven to keep warm while you make the others. Serve with a green salad and liberal amounts of Cidre Brut, an alcoholic apple cider from Brittany.

In my experience, crepes placed in the oven on a cookie sheet get soggy very quickly. A wire rack works better, but even better still is to eat the crepes right off the pan. If that isn’t possible, putting the crepes back on a hot pan for 30 seconds on each side before eating them also helps.

These crepes looked right. The color was perfect. The taste was good. The texture was close. I need to work on the level of crispness. Jen’s single complaint was that these waffles were a little too crispy. Perhaps moving them to medium heat before they crisp will do the trick.

If you’re not sure what to put into your crepes, check out Williams-Sonoma’s catalog of crepe recipes. Better yes, have dinner at Ti Couz or Beau Monde.