Crêpes

Crêpes, crêpes, crêpes - the accent will hypnotize you into believing that I write French proficiently.

Here's one of my crepe memories for you (and who doesn't have many of them?), one day six years ago, J. and I were standing near a crepe vendor at the Louvre. The Loo-vrah in PARIS, no less.

We were just getting to know each other, I was nervous. We had a conversation that J. will not let me live down. It went something like this:

E.: Shall we have a chocolate crepe for dinner?
J.: Uh, sure. Sounds good.
E.: Because a chocolate crepe is delicious, portable, and a quick little bite, we can keep walking with it.
J.: Ok, that's fine.
E: The chocolate makes it delicious, and the portability is so convenient. (Repeat about 100 times).

I was a little intense about the chocolate crepe is the point. We call that our "here is why we're eating a chocolate crepe" story. I'm sensing that the anecdote might be amusing only to us. So with this post, WELCOME TO GAY PAREE.

Crêpes are difficult to make without a crêpe pan.

Here are the ingredients:

1 large egg
1 large egg yolk
1/4 cup sugar
3/4 cup AP flour
1 1/4 cups milk
1/2 tsp pure vanilla extract
4 tbsp unsalted clarified butter
pinch of salt
additional clarified butter for cooking

Stir together the egg, egg yolk, 2 tbsp sugar, flour, and 1/2 c. milk in a bowl until a paste forms. Add the remaining milk, vanilla, clarified butter and salt. Stir until the mixture is smooth, then strain through a fine-mesh strainer. Let the batter rest for an hour.

So once the batter is all ready, it's time to prepare the receiving pan by sprinkling it with sugar. You're also supposed to prepare a water bath to cool the cooking pan between batches. Ok, so far so good....but here's where the challenge began.

Heat a non-stick skillet over medium-high heat. You can tell that the pan is ready when you drizzle a few drops of water onto the pan and they sizzle and evaporate. Brush the pan with clarified butter. Using a ladle, pour a little of the batter into the pan and swirl it around so that the whole pan is coated. Cook the crepe until it looks brown around the edges. Then your troubles begin.

Flipping is a challenge that I attribute solely to our wrongly-shaped saute pan. You're supposed to slide a knife under the edge of the crepe, grip crepe with fingertip, and flip. This is difficult because the crepe and pan are hot as anything, and your fingertip will not enjoy the experience. We tried to flip with a sharp BACKFORTHUP movement of the pan. We achieved about a 50% success rate with this technique. J. was the better flipper. My BACKFORTHUP shake was a little too vigorous - no joke, my crepe flipped end over end about 3 times...then landed on the floor. Oops.

Once flipped, cook the crepe for about another 30 seconds. Gently let the crepe fall into your prepared sheet pan. Cool the pan in between each crepe and then repeat. MANY TIMES OVER.

So then you have a big pile of sugared crepes; is that such a bad place to be? We heated ours in a little butter, powdered sugar, and lemon zest. You want a killer dessert? Plate the crepes, then add a swirl of Barefoot Contessa's raspberry sauce.

These were worth the hassle. Once we got rumbling along - aka by about our 15th crepe out of 20 - we started to semi get the flipping concept down. They taste wonderful: vanilla, butter, and lemon zest. I think we might need to invest in a crepe pan.

Comments

[Jenny]

Hi, after reading your blog, the book publishing group situated in Northern California that I work for would like to send you a review copy of a food memoir. Is there an e-mail address or snail-mail address that we can use to contact you more efficiently? We will not use your e-mail address for purposes beyond the sending of the review copy.

[littledebbie]

The crepe flip is hard... I don't have a crepe pan but if I use a really big frying pan its easier, I just don't let the crepe go all the way to the ends and I use a spatula to flip.

ALso I'm a freak don't like to reheat the crepes with stuff, I think it makes them rubbery. I like to cook my stuff on the side and then put a little inside the crepe or just eat it plain.