Crêpes

My second food project of the weekend was to make the crêpe recipe out of my "Breton Cuisine" cookbook.  These are dessert crêpes, and have a notably sweet taste.  (In Brittany savory crêpes are made with a  hig percentage of buckwheat flour.)  This is 1/3 of the listed recipe and made 5 crêpes, but one was small.

• 1 egg
• 165g pastry flour (whole wheat was what I had)
• 1 tbspn buckwheat flour
• 80g sugar
• 20g butter
• 400ml milk

According to the recipe, you mix every ingredient except the flour together, and then gradually add this mix to the flour.  On Food and Cooking says that with thin batters you want to minimize gluten formation and thus minimize mixing, so I am guessing that is why.  You then let it sit over night to allow the water to be properly absorbed.  I noticed that come morning I needed to re-stir everything for 2-3minutes because it had separated out into a glooey bottom layer and a wattery top layer, but then the mix stayed emulsified.

I served this with thawed frozen fruit and poached pears (taken from this recipe--must remember that 1 quart water to 1.3c sugar ratio), and though the photo looks hideous, it was quite yummy.  Previously I have made crêpes by over-diluting pancake mix (I use Red Mill buckwheat pancake mix for savory versions), and I will say that these were definitely finer and more delicate, which also made them harder to cook.

A final note on the actual cooking:

1. grease your pan liberally with butter and heat it until there is ample smoke over medium heat
2. Ladle on 1/2-1c batter and immediately spread this around to make an even thin layer.  (It should look as if the batter is floating on the butter.)
3. Flip as soon as you can do so without tearing the crêpe.