at Thu, 01 Sep 2005 12:48:10 GMT in
<[email hidden]>,
[email hidden] (Sheldon) wrote :
Quoted message said:
Alex Rast said:
Quoted message said:The biggest mistake people make when making pancakes is to overmix
the batter. ...
[censored]
Quoted message said:Quoted message said:Also make sure that you use buttermilk...
[censored]
Actually, I didn't make these suggestions. These were the suggestions of
the poster who I was responding to. Both of the ideas the poster I was
responding to I thought would be factors very much dependent on recipe -
i.e. sometimes they would work and sometimes they would not.
Quoted message said:Quoted message said:...Then there are yeasted pancake batters -
e.g. blini - which don't use anything acidic, or for that matter,
baking powder.
[censored]
You haven't even a tiny clue, what a friggin' VERBOSE BSer...
blini/crepes contain NO yeast...
Blini and crepes are different. Crepes don't have yeast. But blini do, and
in fact it's absolutely *central* to them. The whole point of blini is in
fact that they're raised with yeast.
Quoted message said:they're simply made with thinner
pancake batter. The one MOST BASIC thing that makes pancakes tough
that *EVERYONE* responding to this thread has failed to mention is that
pancake batter NEEDS to REST,
I agree that this is preferable. It does help in reducing toughness to a
degree. However IME the difference isn't so great as to suggest the fairly
clear differences in toughness and texture the OP was implying. My
experience with resting batters is that there is a difference that you can
notice if you compare a rested batter next to an unrested one side-by-side,
but that generally, it's not night-and-day, so that, with only an unrested
batter, you wouldn't feel as though the result had been unacceptably tough.
Quoted message said:'specially you Rast... you talk too much, know NOTHING, and say zero.
My style is verbose, agreed, as opposed to the colloquial style you prefer
to use. However, I don't believe that a person's writing style is an
indication of the likelihood of truth in what they're saying, nor do I
believe you can automatically discount what someone says based on whether
their style is colloquial, formal, wordy, or terse.
Quoted message said:Quoted message said:But, whatever the situation, if your pancakes are too tough, the
problem is most likely too high of a milk (or buttermilk or whatever
dairy liquid) proportion. The more dairy liquid you use, the rubberier
the final result is. However, go too low and the pancakes start to
become too fluffy. Meanwhile, if you want a tender pancake, increase
the proportion of eggs. The more eggs you have, the more tender it
will become.
<REDUNDANT *[censored]* VERBOSITY>
I've actually experimented with these adjustments and found this to be
true. More milk = closer to rubbery. More eggs = fluffier and more tender.
For my purposes, I find that if I want a pancake that can be rolled around
a filling (say, a crepe) I want a relatively high milk ratio. By contrast
if I want a fluffy pancake that will form a tall stack with only a few
pancakes, good for absorbing things such as maple syrup (e.g. a classic
buckwheat breakfast pancake) I want a relatively low milk ratio and high
egg ratio.
at Fri, 02 Sep 2005 01:39:17 GMT in
<[email hidden]>, [email hidden]
(Curly Sue) wrote :
Quoted message said:On Thu, 01 Sep 2005 07:04:21 -0000, [email hidden]
(Alex Rast) said:As for the golden-brown problem, there are 2 concerns. First, you will
get the best browning by using butter in the batter. Shortenings and
oils don't work as well. Second and probably more important, for full
browning you need a *very hot* pan. When the pan is at the right
temperature the oil will form a small circular pool in the middle,
surrounded by a rim of streaky rays extending out from the center, and
then a heavy ring of oil at the rim of the pan. You need to draw the
spatula across the pan in a scraping motion to pull the oil around
immediately before pouring the batter in.
I disagree with this. First, that's too much oil. After spreading
oil around on a non-stick griddle or a seasoned cast iron griddle, the
excess should be wiped up. There is no need to have any pools of oil.
Second, the pan should be hot enough that a drop of water sputters
(and maybe dances a bit) but not so hot that it vaporizes right away.
I suspected how I worded it would be misinterpreted. When I said "pool" I
didn't mean a large disc of oil, big enough that, for instance, if you
tipped the pan, the "pool" would roll around. I meant something very small,
probably about dime-size or less, and very thin - thin enough that tipping
the pan won't make the "pool" move from where it is. Same thing with the
ring of oil described. It's "heavy" in the sense that it's definitely
thicker than the ring in between the rim and that little center "pool", but
still not a lot of oil. I don't think most people would call what I'm
thinking about a "pool" of oil at all, but I can't think of a better word
for it because that's, technically, what it is - a round area where the oil
has concentrated. I think people were visualising an amount of oil that
would correspond much more to pan-frying a pancake, as though it were a
piece of fried chicken. That's certainly not what I meant at all. The
visual appearance is simply an indicator of the temperature, which if you
were to drop water into it, would react very much as you describe. I don't
like the water test for oily pans, however, because the sputtering throws
hot oil droplets around and means you have to wait a couple of seconds
before adding batter. So I prefer the visual-appearance test.
As a curiosity, how might you have described the visual appearance I'm
trying to get at? I'd love to know how I could have worded it better
because I struggled over the description, never feeling it was really
right, and would have loved a better, less confusing way to describe it.
--
Alex Rast
[email hidden]
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