You there! Yes, you! You with the computer! Do you like pancakes? Yeah? How about crêpes? Alright, do you like fire? Well then do I have a meal for you… I sometimes get the feeling that Hungarian food is a tough sell in America, maybe because the first thing people think of is not any particular dish, but of Hungary’s HILARIOUSLY ironic proximity to Turkey and Greece. BAH HAH HAH HAH, good one.

That ends today with this foolproof gateway drug to Hungarian cuisine: ladies and gentlemen, say hello to palacsinta. That’s PAUL-ah-cheen-tah to you, bub. Are you sick of the same old crêpe? Try these Hungarian pancakes. This particular recipe, Gundel palacsinta, takes its name from one of the oldest and grandest restaurants in Budapest and has everything you could want in a meal. Hell, it has everything you could want in a weekend: Booze! Fire! Chocolate! Cinnamon! Nuts! You’ll laugh! You’ll cry! The results, I promise you, will be nothing short of crêpetacular.

The recipe for palacsinta really doesn’t differ much from that of its French cousin or from any of the other folded, stuffed pancakes eaten throughout South Central Europe. The only difference is a splash of soda water added at the last minute. Does the carbonation really make the pancakes fluffier? Or does the added liquid just make the batter thinner? What do I look like, nineteenth century Hungarian physicist Lóránd Eötvös? It’s tradition, cut me some slack.

What does make palacsinta unique among all its neighboring pancakes are the fillings. The specific recipe I’m writing about is a pretty legendary one, a mixture of ground walnuts, cream, sugar and cinnamon topped with a liquored-up (and potentially flammable) chocolate sauce, but there are plenty of other sweet and savory fillings where that came from. Some other classics include a cottage cheese/sugar/cinnamon mixture (which can also be made with ricotta, as described here), or apricot jam, which I ended up making for some variety alongside the Gundel palacsinta. I also just happened to have a fridge full of another Hungarian favorite, leftover chicken paprikash – a stew of onions, paprika and chicken, and one of my go-to recipes (I usually make this version). I chopped the chicken small into pieces, rolled it up in a pancake and doused it with sauce.

The French might turn up their noses and ask “what is this crêpe,” but my point is that you really can’t go wrong with palacsinta. The pancake is forgiving; you’re eating it more for its texture than it’s taste, which is bland enough to go with just about anything. So keep experimenting until you come up with a winner. My chicken paprikash concoction wound up being a great success – in fact a cursory googling revealed that it wasn’t a new trick at all, but actually an old Hungarian standard by the name of Hortobágyi húsos palacsinta (that’s WHORE-toe-badge-yee WHO-show-sh to you, sonny).

Hortobagyi Husos Palacsinta

Gundel Palacsinta, sin fuego

The basic recipe for palacsinta follows, as described in George Lang’s The Cuisine of Hungary and confirmed by my great-grandmother. Recipes for the Gundel filling come afterwards.

Palacsinta – Hungarian Pancakes

Makes 8-9 pancakes

3 eggs

1 cup milk

1 cup all purpose flour

¼ cup club soda

Butter for frying

Mixing this recipe is easy: combine the eggs, milk and flour, beat until smooth; add the soda just before making the first pancake. The cooking technique is where things get interesting. Set the heat to medium, add butter to the pan, and pour in ¼ cup or so of batter. Palacsinta are supposed to be very thin, so don’t use too much. As you add batter, lift the pan and tilt around in a circle so the batter just coats the bottom. It’s not that hard, but it does take some practice so don’t be disappointed if you end up with a worthless piece of crêpe on your first try.

A couple things that can make things easier are the right kind of pan, and the right amount of butter. A traditional crêpe pan is almost completely flat, with very low, sloped sides, so it’s easy to slide a spatula under the pancake. But not everyone has a crêpe pan cluttering up their kitchen, and as celebrity chef Donald Rumsfeld used to say, you cook crêpes with the utensils you have, not the utensils you want: any frying pan with sloped sides will do, but steer clear of big cast iron skillets with tall, steep sides… like the one in all of my pictures. I managed to survive because I kept the skillet well-buttered: started with about ½ tablespoon, and added another small chunk (say ½ teaspoon) before each new pancake.

Even if that fails, a hole-y crêpe is nothing to worry about and can be easily concealed with some artful rolling. There are a number of different schools of thought on palacsinta assembly. Most common is the cigar, popularized by the Seinfeld episode in which Kramer hires Dominican instead of Cuban cigar rollers at his friend’s crêperie, with explosive consequences. This is what I grew up with, because if you’re feeding a small army, say at Christmas dinner, you can pile the rolled crêpes into a casserole and keep them in the oven on low heat. We used to cover the top layer with sour cream, which goes well with our usual fruit or sweet cheese fillings and traps in moisture so that the pancakes don’t get dry and brittle in the oven. But what if you’ve got a really chunky filling? Or say you’ve got a sauce to pour over your palacsinta, and want some more surface area? Try gyro-style: roll two sides of the pancake in, and leave it kind of open at the top. Fold it in half like a taco. Or fold in all four sides, like a wrapping a present, until you’ve got a rectangle. Hell, go crazy: make it a rhombus.

Pictured: Hole-y Crepe

Since the palacsinta are so thin they come off the griddle very quickly, and as a result it really isn’t much work to crank out a stack of pancakes tall enough to feed a crowd. But in case you’re daunted by the amount of work, and are asking yourself “why do I have to put up with this crêpe?” (LAST ONE, I promise), I ask you to just stay tuned through to the end of the following recipe, which is spectacular enough to make it worth while.

Gundel Palacsinta

Nut Filling:

1 cup milk or cream

1 cup sugar

2 cups chopped/ground walnuts

¼ cup raisins

1 Tbsp cinnamon

Zest of 1 lemon

1 shot dark rum (~ 1 ½ oz.)

• Mix milk or cream with sugar. Bring to boil.

• Lower heat and stir in remaining ingredients. Once all ingredients have been added, keep stirring the mixture over the heat for a few minutes until it reaches the desired thickness. You don’t want the filling to be dry, but you also don’t want it soaking through your palacsinta.

Chocolate Sauce:

3 egg yolks

3 Tbsp cocoa

3 Tbsp sugar

1 cup cream

4 Tbsp bittersweet chocolate

2 shots dark rum (~ 3 oz)

(can substitute brandy instead)

• Melt chocolate in a small pot or double-boiler, add cream, stir to combine, and bring to boil.

• Remove from heat and add whisk in beaten egg yolks.

• Add cocoa, sugar, rum. Return to low heat, and stir until smooth (about 5 minutes.)

Serving:
Stuff your palacsinta and set them aside.

Put the chocolate sauce in a serving dish.

Now heat about an ounce or so of rum in a glass or a measuring cup – do this over a candle if you’re being romantic, or nuke it if you can’t be bothered, but just make sure the rum is warm or it will not ignite. Dress each plate with a small splash of hot booze and a dusting of powdered sugar, then quickly place a palacsinta on each dish, drizzle with chocolate sauce, and tell your squeamish friend to put away the fire extinguisher and hit the lights. As soon as you touch a match to each plate, the desserts will be engulfed in blue flame, and they should stay lit long enough for you to carry them out and present them ceremoniously to your awestruck guests.

Unless of course you’ve used paper plates… aw crêpe.

Citius, altius, fortius, eh?

Good morning sports fans, and merry belated Winter Olympics. Weren’t they great, these past few weeks? Rushing home after work to catch some sweet biathlon footage only to find… really? More ice dancing? Okay, seriously, how many rounds of this are there? But in spite of tape delays, ice dancers and Apolo Ono’s soul patch, there was as always a lot to love about the Winter Olympics. I know that the image of a crowded late-night sports bar with half a dozen massive flat screens turned to a curling match is one I will cherish for years to come.

The host of these past games, Canada, is a surprisingly large country located somewhere north of Seattle, and as the photo above clearly shows, its chief exports include hockey players, beer, and maple syrup. Okay, so there’s no maple syrup in the photo (and honestly one of those silver bullets looks suspiciously like a Coors Lite), but I have it on good authority that the amber stuff is a treasured national resource. Brown gold. Canada-C. You know, like Texas Tea? Oh forget it. Tonight, as a tribute to our hockey overlords north of the border, and as part of Food Junta’s ongoing wall-to-wall Olympics coverage, I present to you: bourbon maple syrup. Swifter, higher, stronger! Sweeter, tipsier, earlier!

Times have changed since Nick Charles woke up and asked for “a drop of something to cut the phlegm” in Dashiell Hammett’s The Thin Man, and nowadays whiskey in the morning may not seem like the breakfast of champions, but bourbon and maple syrup are a natural combination of flavors. I had never mixed the two over breakfast before, but the pairing is by no means original: big-name distillers Evan Williams and Jim Beam have their own brands of pancake syrup, while on the bartending side maple syrup has become a popular ingredient at whiskey joints. And in Michigan one chef’s brand of maple syrup, aged in bourbon casks, has earned the closest thing America has to a royal warrant: “it’s one of Oprah’s favorites.”

Yet despite the great taste, the marketing, and all the Oprah-atic fervor, finding a recipe to make bourbon maple syrup at home proved to be a challenge, an emotional voyage, a journey of redemption; indeed, it would take heart, passion, spirit and determination, along with grit and an almost superhuman will to succeed, in order to endure all of the Google searches necessary to reach that one proud, golden, magic moment where –

What? Sorry, I’ve watched too much Bob Costas lately. Anyway I ultimately triumphed over adversity and found two recipes, one with a little liquor, one with a lot. The first proposed flaming vanilla beams (sliced open, seeds scraped out) in 2 tablespoons of whiskey, with the remnants being poured into 1 cup of syrup. Problem was, most of the liquid evaporated in the flames, leaving only a very (very) subtle vanilla flavor. Maple syrup is pretty damn good by itself, and this recipe just doesn’t add enough to be worthwhile. As long as I’m quoting literary booze-hounds in this post, Henry Chinaski famously said, “If you’re going to try, go all the way. Otherwise don’t even start.” I assume he was talking about spiking maple syrup, and so today’s recipe, as if you even had to ask, is the one with a lot of booze. It is delicious.

This recipe is very simple, with two pretty obvious main ingredients. First, the booze: I know that bourbon is from Kentucky, not Canada, and I know that there’s even a brand of whiskey called Canadian Club, which really would’ve fit better into the whole narrative of this year’s Olympics. But Canadian whiskey is rye whiskey. Bourbon is sweeter and has a stronger taste, and for our maple-flavoring purposes it seemed like the best choice. So now it’s a NAFTA recipe, sue me.

On to ingredient #2: maple syrup, like ice dancing, has been plagued by scoring controversies. In your average supermarket’s maple syrup aisle (hey, a guy can dream right?), Grade A maple seems like the obvious choice. But be warned, syrup grades are based on purity, not quality. Grade A wins its high marks for being sweeter and lighter colored because it’s been filtered more – because there’s less maple in it. If I just wanted sweetness from my syrup I’d save money and boil sugar cubes. Don’t take the maple out of our syrup! Buy the darker, more flavorful Grade B!

But uh… angry mobs aside, all maple syrup is pretty delicious. And here, arguably, is how to make it better:

Bourbon Maple Syrup

Adapted, oddly enough, from this kosher butternut squash bisque recipe.

1 cup bourbon

½ cup brown sugar

½ cup maple syrup

Optional: 2 vanilla beans (de-seeded) or a drop of vanilla extract

Stir brown sugar into bourbon over low heat until the mixture is thickened, reduced by half. Add maple syrup, simmer for 3 to 5 minutes and let cool to room temperature. I might also suggest adding a couple of vanilla beans (surprisingly expensive) or a drop of vanilla extract during the simmering – adding the one highlight of the first recipe to the strong caramel, maple and bourbon flavors of the second.

Naturally you’ll need some sort of syrup delivery device at this point. Kevin’s Johnny cakes recipe from a couple weeks ago would be an obvious choice. Vanilla ice cream, it turns out, is another perfect match. But I, as usual, fell back on my Dad’s pancakes. This recipe, one of the first things I ever learned to cook, makes pancakes that are a little smaller, denser, and more flavorful than your average fat, fluffy diner flapjacks.

Dad’s Pancakes

Serves 2

Dry:

1 cup flour

1 tsp baking powder

½ tsp salt

1 Tbsp sugar

Wet:

1 cup liquid

1 egg

1 Tbsp oil

• Flour: I use 1/3 all purpose flour, 1/3 cornmeal, 1/3 white whole wheat flower. Collecting all those different flours may sound like a pain, but the flavor is well worth the effort and certainly got me hooked – I remember one morning years ago I woke up and discovered my parents were out of cornmeal flour, and I was so fixated on these pancakes that I decided it was worth my while spending 30 minutes using a mortar and pestle to grind polenta (which we did have)  into flour.

• Liquid: I use buttermilk for pancakes, regular milk for waffles. Double the oil for waffles. And if you really get wrapped up in the spirit (ugh, unintentional pun) of your boozy breakfast, go ahead and add a tablespoon of whiskey to the batter too. It’ll add a slight flavor and aroma to the finished product.

When the syrup was mixed, the pancakes fried, and the waffles… ironed?… I invited a handful of hungry friends over, and with Pat, a real, honest-to-Gretzky citizen of Canada, presiding over the festivities, we sat down to ponder whether maple syrup could really be improved. Now I love the stuff at least as much as the next guy, and I still don’t know if today’s recipe is really an improvement. But it is delicious, and it is different: slightly more liquidy, and with a rich caramel flavor. As Kevin mentioned in his Johnny cakes post, even old favorites can use a new twist some times, and it’s always worth experimenting with booze in your food.

Remember the Olympic motto, folks: The most important thing is not to win but to take part. I’m Bob Costas. Good night, America.

Don’t get me wrong, I love pancakes. But we can get sick of even our most beloved dishes from time to time, and after a few months of making pancakes nearly every weekend, I’ve been on a bit of a hiatus recently. But last night, I was reading Deborah Madison’s What We Eat When We Eat Alone (a great little book) in search of inspiration for an easy Sunday dinner, when I stumbled upon a recipe for johnny cakes.

The pancake’s rustic cousin, a johnny cake is a no-frills griddle cake made with cornmeal instead of flour and usually without eggs or baking powder. They’re even easier and more forgiving than pancakes, and the cornmeal makes them seem more hearty and filling than pancakes.

Plus, their name makes them sound like an overweight mobster…

And actually, “Johnny Cakes” is what Vito Spatafore nicknames his lover in the Sopranos. So there’s that.

There are a number of etymologies for johnny cakes: The two most prevalent are that they were originally called “journey cakes” because they were good food for travelers or that they were originally called “Shawnee cakes” after the Native American tribe that Europeans picked up the recipe from, probably right before committing some horrible atrocity against them. Either way, the name got mangled and became johnny cakes.

The cakes are a Rhode Island specialty, and the recommended cornmeal is Kenyon’s White Corn Meal. Recommended or not, I couldn’t find any. What I did find was self-rising corn meal, which just means corn meal that already has baking powder and salt in it. So right off the bat, I was breaking from tradition, which says that johnny cakes are made without baking powder. But who’s going to stop me? I went ahead and added an egg as well, just to be a complete heretic.

The results, traditional or not, were delicious. Slightly thinner than pancakes, the rougher grain of the corn meal gives these cakes an awesome texture and makes the batter much more forgiving in the pan. It only took me about 20 minutes to make enough cakes for two people, and I think these might become a regular pancake alternative for me.

There are a thousand recipes out there for Johnny Cakes. The one below is for using self-rising corn meal, but if you’re working with regular cornmeal, give this one a try.  Either way, be aware that the batter will be thinner than traditional pancake batter and will spread out more in the pan.

Johnny Cakes

1.5 C Self-rising corn meal
1 C Milk
1 Egg
~1 tbsp. sugar (More or less to taste. None is fine.)
1/3 C vegetable oil

1. Combine all ingredients and mix well.

2. Heat a skillet or griddle and coat with butter or (sigh) cooking spray. (Bacon fat is good as well.)

3. Ladle on batter and cook, flipping when bubbles start to appear and burst on the uncooked side of the cake.

4. Serve with butter and maple syrup or honey.

When I was a little kid, the most exciting days were always when my mom would take time off work and we’d go out to breakfast. Now, still, whenever I come home, my mom usually blocks off a morning for Bette’s. I’m not sure which is the greater draw for her, actually — some quality time with her ever-nomadic, ever-aging daughter or these pancakes. Probably the pancakes.

I, for one, don’t usually order pancakes when I go out for breakfast. I can never finish them, and I always end up wishing I had ordered something savory. This is why going to breakfast with your mom is nice! She will let you eat as much of her pancakes as you want, while you get to enjoy corned beef hash. The other reason I don’t usually order pancakes is, while it would take me longer than I want on a Saturday or Sunday morning to make a corned beef hash, it is pretty ridiculously easy to make pancakes. But still, Bette’s pancakes are so great, that logic didn’t quite hold up — because a Bette’s pancake was a pancake worth ordering in a restaurant, and one you couldn’t quite make yourself. Until now…

Or really, until 1999, when this recipe was first published in the San Francisco Chronicle (Bette’s also has a cookbook, and sells pancake and waffle mix). I just found it recently, though, when headed up to Northern Minnesota for a weekend with my writer compadres. For some reason, weekend trip, to me, screams pancakes. There’s something about everyone gathering, hungover, around noon, in a heated cabin, with coffee gurgling and bacon frying and everyone switching off to fry pancakes, coming out three at a time, to make for a leisurely brunch.

All we had in the cabin was a cast-iron pan, which was a little hard to get used to at first, but produced great results — crispier, browner pancakes than I’ve ever had before (you just have to ignore a little inevitable charring). A regular skillet will work just fine, though.

Beyond my reminiscing about breakfasts with my mother, and my revelation vis a vis cast-iron pans, and the addition of buttermilk in this recipe, Kevin has covered pancake-cooking technique (and cooking-ahead technique, and storing technique) extremely thoroughly in a previous post on regular, buttermilk-free pancakes.

Pancakes. One of the world’s most perfect foods

Buttermilk Pancakes
Adapted from Bette’s Oceanview Diner, via SF Chronicle
Makes about 24 four-inch pancakes

Ingredients

- 2 c. all-purpose flour
- 2 Tbsp. sugar
- 2 tsp. baking powder
- 1 tsp. baking soda
- 1/2 tsp. salt
- 2 eggs
- 2 c. buttermilk
- 1/2 c. milk
- 1/4 c. unsalted butter, melted
- Butter/vegetable oil for griddle or skillet
- Optional: berries, sliced bananas, raisins or chopped toasted nuts

1. Combine the flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda and salt in a large bowl.

2. Lightly beat the eggs with the buttermilk, milk and melted butter.

3. Just before you are ready to make the pancakes, add the liquid ingredients to the dry ingredients all at once, stirring just long enough to blend. The batter should be slightly lumpy.

4. I like to sprinkle the berries on the pancakes once they’re in the pan, but you can also stir them in now.

5. Heat a lightly buttered/oiled griddle or heavy skillet (or cast-iron pan) over medium-high heat (375 degrees on an electric griddle).

6. Pour a big spoonful (about ¼ c.) batter per pancake onto the griddle or skillet. Try to space the pancakes apart so they do not run together (you can see in the photo above that we were unsuccessful at this). This is the point where I like to sprinkle blueberries over, because I think it’s more fun that way, and also that they’re less likely to get crushed.

7. When bubbles appear on the surface of the pancakes and the undersides are lightly browned, turn and cook for about 2 minutes longer, until lightly browned on the bottom.

8. Serve immediately, with more butter, syrup, and, most importantly, bacon.

As I’ve worked my way into my twenties, I’ve lost my teenage ability to sleep in, especially when I’m away from my own bed. So when I go with friends to the beach or a cabin, etc., I am often among the earliest risers. In recent years, I have actually come to take a strange and almost certainly excessive pleasure in being the first person awake in a house. I really love having a quiet hour to myself to start the day, and it feels like winning to me in some way that probably suggests I’m in need of some good psychotherapy.

But it’s not an entirely selfish pleasure. My third favorite early morning activity, after drinking 2.5 gallons of coffee and reading in the morning air, is making breakfast for everyone. Scrambled eggs are always a good option for feeding a lot of people, but there’s something about a pancake breakfast that just feels special.

And with a little practice, pancakes are not very difficult. They require near-constant attention while cooking, but they’re much more forgiving than you might assume. The most frustrating aspect of making pancakes is that you wind up with a lot of batter-covered dishes to wash.

But given that you’ve just fed a houseful of people, I bet there’s something that can be done about that.

The recipe I’ve been using for the past couple of years is from The Joy of Cooking and is flawless and foolproof. Yes, you can make pancakes with buttermilk, and yes, you can beat the egg whites for fluffier pancakes, and yes, you can make buckwheat pancakes or whole wheat pancakes or even quinoa pancakes.

I’m a fan of all the above, but I’m also a fan of a recipe that can easily be committed to memory and requires 7 ingredients that most people already have in their pantry.You should measure each ingredient, but you’re not making a souffle or anything here, so don’t fret about being super exact.

Here are my major tips for pancakes:

1. Combine the milk and eggs together before adding the butter. Adding hot butter to just the eggs will actually cook them a little bit, and I don’t think I have to convince you that this is a really undesirable outcome.
2. Give the dry ingredients a good whisk (or sift them) before adding the wet to prevent big clumps.
3. Combine wet and dry ingredients thoroughly, but don’t overmix. It’s fine for the batter to be a little lumpy, and overmixing makes tougher pancakes. There’s some scientific explanation here involving gluten that Harold McGee could help you out with, but I haven’t the foggiest idea what it is. It’s pancake voodoo as far as I’m concerned.
4. Add butter to the pan before cooking your first pancake, and then again every three pancakes or so, as it seems like it’s needed. You want a greased pan, but you don’t want the pancakes actually cooking in a layer of fat. This is where the practice comes in. Once you’ve made pancakes a few times, you’ll be able to easily tell when you need a little more butter.
5. Pancakes are ready to be flipped when bubbles have formed and popped across the surface. You can also peek at the bottom to see if it’s that good color of pancake brown. If you’re pancakes are burning on the bottom before the bubbles happen, your heat is too high. (Don’t fret about a messy flip. Unless your pancake totally falls to pieces, it should still cook up just fine.)
6. Pancakes are done when second side is golden brown.
7. The first time I made pancakes, I served them to people as they were ready. Some pancake afficionados insist on this, saying that they really should be eaten the instant they’re cooked. Whatever. I think serving them this way is a totally miserable experience for the chef. People hovering around with plates asking where X, Y, or Z item is, which item is inevitably in the drawer in front of where you need to be standing just at that moment. Instead, put a tray or casserole in the oven at 150, and stack the pancakes in there as they’re ready. That way, you can lay out all the miscellany that people require, get your breakfast, and get the hell out of the way as the hungry masses storm in.
8. Pancake syrup is not maple syrup. Do not be fooled. Maple syrup is made from the sap of maple trees. Pancake syrup is made from corn. Maple syrup is for putting on pancakes. Pancake syrup is for putting on your enemies.

And that’s about all I’ve got. I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.

Pancakes keep much better than you would expect; I, at least, wouldn’t expect them to keep at all. But wrap any leftovers in saran wrap and keep in the fridge, and they’ll heat up great in the toaster. I’ve never tried keeping pancakes for more than a day or two, but if you’ve wound up making so many pancakes that you can’t eat them in the course of 72 hours, I think you’ve got a recipe problem, not a food storage one.

Pancakes

1. Preheat your non-stick griddle or pan and add a pat of butter.

2. Whisk together in a large bowl:

• 1 1/2 cups all purpose flour
• 3 tablespoons sugar
• 1 1/2 tablespoons baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon salt

3.  Whisk together in another bowl:

• 1 1/2 cups milk
• 3 tbsp. unsalted butter, melted
• 2 large eggs
• 1/2 tsp. vanilla (optional)

4. Pour the wet ingredients over the dry ingredients and gently whisk them together, mixing just until combined.  If you wish, add nuts, bananas, berries, etc.

5. Spoon 1/3 cup batter onto the griddle for each pancake, nudging the batter into rounds.  Cook until the top of each pancake is specked with bubbles and some bubbles have popped open, then turn and cook until the underside is lightly browned.

6. Bask.