hello this is chef john from food wishes calm with souffle pancakes that's right
I'm gonna show you my technique for making souffle pancakes which by the way
should not be confused with Japanese souffle pancakes which while much taller
and visually impressive are not in my occasionally humble opinion as good a
pancake eating experience alright I'm trying to eat a pancake and
not a cylinder of sweet and eggy foam but anyway let's move on from throwing
shade to getting these made but before we get to the batter let me show you a
nice trick for prepping your berries if you're gonna top your pancakes with
these which is very much recommended and what I like to do is actually pour some
maple syrup over my berries and we'll go ahead and gently mix those with our
spoon and what this is gonna do is give those berries a beautiful shine and
possibly make for a little better presentation I mean it's a proven
scientific fact that people love shiny food so we'll go ahead and give those a
mix and set them aside at which point we can move on to our soufflé pancake
batter which we'll begin by separating two large room-temperature eggs and as
you can see I like to do this by cracking the egg in my hand and letting
the whites fall between my fingers which i think is very effective and feels
pretty cool so that's my separation policy but if you want to use the
shelter shell method go ahead oh and remember a little bit of the white in
the yolk bowl is okay but we don't want any of the yolk and the white bowl
otherwise we might have problems whipping those up and then what we'll do
once those are separated has add some white sugar to our yolks
and we'll go ahead and whisk that for about a minute or two until our sugar
dissolves and the mixture takes on this beautiful pale yellow appearance and
then once that's been accomplished we'll go ahead and add a little vanilla
extract the pure and the real as well as a little bit of milk and a little bit of
melted butter and then we'll give that a quick mix to combine
before sifting in some self-rising flour and by sifting in I mean just dump it
all in okay I'm not a big sifter and I've never really had an issue so go
ahead and sift it if you want but I'm just gonna go ahead and take the whisk
and mix that in and as usual if you don't have self-rising flour
I'm gonna tell you what to do in the blog post it's very easy to make
yourself but anyway we'll go ahead and give that a mix just until that flower
disappears at which point we'll stop and move on to whipping our egg whites but
before I do that I'm gonna add one optional ingredient a little pinch of
cream of tartar which helps stabilize the egg whites which means theoretically
they're gonna whip up bigger and faster oh and by the way make sure you're using
a clean whisk for this and not that dirty one you just used for the batter
okay so start with a clean whisk and preferably your biggest widest one
okay the bigger the whisk the faster this is gonna go which reminds me
cream of tartar or not this is only gonna take a couple minutes so
personally I don't think it's worth dirtying a mixer for so I almost always
do this by hand Plus this is as close to a workout as I'm gonna get this week and
what we want to do is whip these until we have fairly stiff peaks okay so right
here I was getting close and those are what most people would consider soft
peaks so we'll go ahead and give that a few more seconds until we have peaks
that look like this where you see how that peak is standing I'm nice and tall
and sharp without flopping over okay that's what we're going for and then
what we'll do at this point is switch to a spatula and we'll transfer roughly 1/3
of our whites into our batter which we will stir and fold in and as you may
know this first edition is just to lighten the mixture in anticipation for
folding in the rest of the whites so we don't need to be super gentle with this
first edition but of course on the other hand you do want to use a relatively
light touch okay the less air we knock out the better and then once we've
lighten that mixture with the first third of the whites we will go ahead and
transfer the rest in at which point we'll fold those in but much more
carefully are using nice long slow movements we are scraping that spatula
along the bottom bringing that batter up over the top as we occasionally rotate
the bowl oh and I should mention I'm doing a very basic version here okay if
you wanted to sneak in a little bit of flavoring into your batter like some
almond extract or maybe some freshly grated lemon zest be my guest
I mean you are after all the one-man Wolf Pack of your extra-light flapjack
so go ahead and flavor these as you see fit
but anyway we'll go ahead and carefully and thoughtfully folding our egg whites
as shown at which point we should have a beautiful super light airy batter and
then once that's done we can switch to a scooper or spoon and we'll head to the
stove where we're gonna cook these up in a lightly buttered non-stick pan set
over between medium low and medium heat in case you're wondering the reason I'm
using such a small pan and totally inappropriately crowding these is
because while the first side cooks we really want to cover them and I simply
don't have a cover that fits my big nonstick so as you can see I am really
pushing it here with the spacing although since I'm doing it wrong
I might as well show you a little tip if you give these like a minute to set you
can actually sort of separate them with the edge of a spatula which is probably
recommended so they're easier to turn but anyway once our batter has been
placed in what we'll do is go ahead and cover these and cook them for about
three minutes or so or until we see bubbles popping up through the top and
they start to dry out a little bit around the edges and once that happens
we'll go ahead and uncover them and we will give them a flip which as you can
see is extremely challenging when they're this close together but you know
what I got it done and that's because I did it with confidence and did not let
those pancakes sense any fear oh yes food can sense fear and then
you're gonna have issues and the reason we're keeping our heat kind of on the
low end is because these do take a few minutes to cook through and if our pan
gets too hot we're gonna go from golden brown to golden black so somewhere
between medium low and medium should be perfect and that's it once successfully
flipped we'll give that second side another two or three minutes at which
point we'll pull them from the heat and get them ready to eat which means
transferring those on to a nice warm plate all right only a crazy person
would put hot pancakes on a cold plate and if I remember in the blog post I
will tell you my favorite ways to warm those up and then once played it we'll
go ahead and spoon over our shiny berries along with that now slightly
berry infused maple syrup which I really wanted to use more of but I was trying
to be good plus we're gonna get all that beautiful juicy sweetness from the
berries and that's it I finished up with a
little bit of powdered sugar which is completely unnecessary although if you
are gonna take pictures it does look kind of nice and that's it what we're
calling souffle pancakes are done so let me go ahead and grab a fork and dig in
and what we're attempting to do with this technique is to create the lightest
airiest most delicate pancake possible that still feels and tastes like a
pancake and I'm very happy to report that's
exactly what we have here okay these things really are feather-light yet you
still feel like you're eating a good old-fashioned pancake and not some tall
foamy cylinder that's reminiscent of a pancake alright there's nothing wrong
with a steam room but it's just not the same thing as a shower and yes that
analogy was as bad as these pancakes were good and again as you can hopefully
see from this shot just because we didn't use a mold and these are not
super high doesn't mean they're not everybody's Aryan light so I really do
think with this approach we have the best of both worlds
so whether you're gonna do these for a fancy Easter or Mother's Day brunch or
just some weeknight when you feel like doing breakfast for dinner I really do
hope you give these a try soon so head over to food wishes comm for all the
ingredient amounts of more info as usual and as always enjoy
you