Upon a fancy breakfast I found myself trying to choose between something savory (buckwheat crepes with ham and Gruyere) and something sweet and tempting (sour cream hazelnut waffles.) Savory won. With me, it always does. And while the crepes were delicious I found myself wondering at the possibilities of this sour cream hazelnut creation. Coincidentally, on the way home I stumbled on a Bon Appetit magazine with pancakes piled high on the cover. With waffles so thoroughly on the brain I couldn’t pass.
Once home I discovered that it was a whole grains issue. One of the recipes was for some wheat, maple, and oat sandwich bread and seemed to require a dough hook. This is a good opportunity to explain why I consider myself to be a decent cook but terrible baker. I don’t like following recipes and I don’t like measuring. When cooking you add what you like, if you like more of something you put more and it all comes together rather nicely. With baking this is not usually the case. There seems to be a science involved, it gets very particular, and the oven always gets upset if you don’t do it right. With baking there’s special equipment involved- dough hooks, sifters, thermometers, pans with proper depths. I don’t care enough to spend money on a dough hook so I settled for a $12 hand mixer, knowing full and well I was signing up for disaster.
I went home, I made the bread. The recipe specified to use a maple syrup that was at least Grade B (to maintain maple flavor throughout baking.) I used some crappy sugar free kind to spare a few calories. It also wanted maple extract which I could not find so I tossed in some almond. The water for the yeast was supposed to be a specific temperature, I deemed lukewarm appropriate enough. Halfway through the mixing process my cheap motor blew out on my hand mixer. Eventually I will construct some sort of toothpick/cotton swab device to pull all the dough out and attempt to return it but in the meantime I rolled up my sleeves and put some good old fashioned work into it. I wrapped it in two of my finest bath towels (the ones from my college dorm) and set it next to the radiator to rise. Shockingly, it worked well enough and even baked through despite the pilot light on my oven going out several times. It smelt good but was overpowered by the carbon dioxide emissions which also agitated the woman on our fire alarm who politely chants, ‘fire, fire, fire’ as if the ear piercing siren isn’t enough.
The bread came out tasty (though not maplely) but slightly dense. I’m not sure if this is what they meant by ’sandwich’ bread or if it was a nice little error on my part but it holds sandwich ingredients well as it is firm. This brings me to my next adventure. If I was going to go through the trouble of baking sandwich bread I better have some damn good sandwich spread. Inspired by an olive tapenade I recently made I threw some pitted kalamatas, pimentos, lemon juice, basil, parsley, thyme, onion, garlic, and pine nuts into a food processor to make some sort of olive pesto tapenade concoction, naturally salty but delicious!
Yet still, I had pancakes on the brain. I found a recipe for some regular wheat ones and did a few variations substituting fat free sour cream for milk and adding chopped hazelnuts. By ‘chopped’ I mean I put them in a plastic bag and beat them with a potato masher- who has the patience to chop nuts with a knife, really? The batter was a little thick so I added some skim milk and molded them by hand- more like working with dough than pancake mix. They were fat, so they got a little colorful on the outside but were still moist on the inside. I topped them with some fresh strawberries and blackberries and sided them with chicken sausages (cooked with fresh rosemary and thyme) and some egg whites. Breakfast for dinner. They were fantastic. When I make them again, and I will very soon, I will toast the hazelnuts first to release some of the fragrant oils- this is something my haste robbed from me the first time. I highly recommend you give these babies a try.
When I finished my pancakes I sipped some spicy ginger tea. Breakfast for dinner…a little sweet, maybe I needed something savory for dessert?
these pancakes were good whilst also tasting sort of healthy!