Rourke's Random Musings

I’m on a quest to reproduce the Breton-style savory crepes they serve at Ti Couz in San Francisco and Beau Monde in Philly. The first time I tried this I made Alton Brown’s crepes and substituted half whole wheat flower, but I wasn’t too satisfied with the result. AB’s crepes are a great place to start because they handle really well and are easy to work with, but they definitely don’t stack up to what Ti Couz is serving.

I found another recipe online and decided to give it a shot. I started by mixing the crepe batter together in my blender and setting it aside overnight. I made the batter by combining the following and pulsing the blender for around ten seconds.

• 1/2 cup all-purpose flour
• 1/2 cup whole wheat flour
• 1/4 cup buckwheat flour
• Pinch salt
• 1/2 cup milk
• 4 eggs

The next evening I started out by preparing the filling.?I coarsely grated about 0.40 lbs of Gruyere cheese and put it aside in a?bowl.?I sauteed half?a large onion and put it aside in a bowl.

For the lamb sausage, I started by?taking the meat from?two Moroccan lamb sausages I’d purchased?from Prather Ranch out of their casings and chopping them up with a fork.??I put my 8″ frying pan over medium heat (6 on our electric range) and added a splash of olive oil and two cloves of garlic that had been?crushed with a chef’s knife. After the garlic became fragrant I added the sausage meat and used a spatula to continue to mince it up?until?it looked like ground beef. I cooked the sausage until it looked done (about six minutes) and put it aside in a bowl.

At this point I pre-heated?my oven to 350 degrees. It takes a while.

Now for the crepes: I prepared the crepes by heating an eight inch frying pan over medium heat (6 on my electric range) and putting a thin sliver over butter into the pan. If the pan is truly hot enough you’ll hear popping and sizzling as the butter hits the pan. I moved the butter around with my spatula until it was coated. I then lifted the frying pan and held it at a 45 degree angle before pouring?1/4 of a cup of the batter into the frying pan and moving the pan around so the batter spread evenly. This takes a little practice, so your first couple of crepes might not come out. Cook the crepes for about 2 minutes before flipping them. With this?batter I found it was easiest to flip the crepes with a wide spatula, using tongs to pick up the edge of the crepe.

Once the crepes were finished, I filled them with cheese, then lamb sausage and onions, and then more cheese, and folded them over. I tried to get them to seal around the outside by putting a thin layer of just cheese around the edge and then?pressing the edges down. These are supposed to be crepes, after all, and not tacos. Once the crepes were all ready, I placed them on cookie sheets and placed them in the oven for about five minutes, and then they were ready to eat.

The crepes turned out well. The lamb sausage was excellent and?the crepes tasted better than the all AP flour crepes I made before. Still, these crepes are a long way from what I’m trying to make. There’s definitely more work to be done in this area.

A few days after finishing this batch of crepes I saw a New York Times article on “Buckwheat Crepes” and was hopeful, but the recipe they were pushing turned out to be pretty much the same as this one.