Plenty: Yotam Ottolenghi's Green Pancakes

Get Out of my Dreams, Get onto my Plate!

YOTAM OTTOLENGHI’S PLENTY came out earlier this year and blew the world of vegetarian cuisine out of its familiar territory. The joy of his book is how he marries a meat-driven culture with vegetarian food. He is Middle-eastern focused and teaches you how to enjoy vegetarian foods by adding in sauces and sides and elegant touches like Yoghourt dips, and he uses pomegranate seeds the way the rest of us sprinkle parsley over a finished dish.

Who can't love very idea of creating Lime Butter?

His green pancakes with lime butter are terrific. After having read the way he makes these, I feel as if I have a couple of quick fixes that make

1. Be sure to sift your flour

2. Consider making these with a whole wheat flour with a couple of tablespoon full of oat flour or ground oats.

Making Your Self-Rising Flour

3. Make your own “self-rising” flour. The very idea that anyone would purchase “self-rising” flour once you know that it’s one cup of flour with a large pinch of salt and a teaspoon and a 1/4 of baking soda, it seems nuts to purchase separately.

4. I also feel that you need to make these pancakes particularly small. Don’t make pancake-sized pancakes. Aim to make them no more than large silver dollars (about 2″-3″ in circumference).

The Makings of a Perfect Tzatziki

5. Consider adding my tzatziki as an accompaniment–1 c Greek yoghourt with a finely diced small red onion with a tablespoon of finely minced cilantro, 2 teaspoons of finely minced mint, and a squeeze of a half of a garlic clove. Pinch of salt and pepper, and then let it sit. If it’s hot out, then refrigerate. If cool, place on the table until dinner.

So, these green pancakes are a treat, like I was saying–fun food for fun meals. I think the challenge is amalgamating Ottolenghi’s recipe with your own flair–making it your own. My suggestion would be to experiment a bit with these before you make them for others.

They will fry up nicely the next day if you use my recommendations above. I’m not sure why; however, I’d guess it’s all the baking powder that fluffs it up too much if you use the batter right away. I am concerned about all the rising agents in the flour failing after sitting for an evening–it suggests that Ottolenghi’s recipe is really made for a European kitchen and doesn’t take into consideration the limitations we have on the quality of flour we have in the states.

At any rate, the upshot is that it’s super classy! Chopped spinach and cilantro with green onions turns into a really filling starter when you fold in one well-beaten egg and a meringue of an egg white. I think folding in the egg white meringue is a big part of creating the texture.

What a fun surprise. The appearance is arresting and causes everyone to say, “Oooh, I want to try a bit of that. No one thinks, “Ooh, I want a dinner made of that.” So it’s a perfect starter. Although, home, alone, I found myself eating three pancakes like they were spinach latkes.

"Fry 'em up in a pan, and never, ever let you forget you're..."

Still, I also think that if you could just make these more crepe like and less American pancake like. These should be more thin and savory. I found that my guests found them totally delightful, so I’m just being a bit overly critical here perhaps.

The recipe is fool proof, but could do with amalgamating as I say. How could you take this recipe and remove the extra steps? I found chopping the spinach first, meant that you had no need to sweat the spinach in water and then squeeze the water back out of it. Just chop it finely and fry on a non-stick surface. No oil added, no water. It was easy to use. Add in the chopped green onions and cilantro and you have a tasty filling. The flour, milk and egg need to be perfected. My gut tells me you don’t really need an entire 1/2 pound of spinach. I think it could benefit from more garlic and more onion. Perhaps 6 green onion finely chopped and 1 small (1.5″ in circumference) red onion. Then with a couple of garlic cloves, you would end up creating a savory crepey treat.

Funny, how messing with original recipes can give you a better sense of how to cook. I learned a lot by playing with this recipe: (1) Is English flour so different that it would create a different meal? (2) Are European temperatures so different that they cook up differently on our stoves? All very interesting for my money. In the end, it kind of doesn’t matter. It tastes delicious, so play away. This is fun food for friends and family.

Plenty

Up next…summer? Ottolenghi has a recipe for something he calls “Tomato Party.” This sounds right up my alley…maybe this time I’ll organize a couple of tests before I actually put it in my blog. (Insert shameful face emoticon here).

It involves fregola sarda, so that will definitely be in an upcoming post soon.

- See more at: http://www.alunchboxblog.com/plenty-the-very-definition-of/?preview=true&preview_id=655&preview_nonce=d374a2730a#sthash.P290HL3W.dpuf