Buckwheat Crepe Batter (Page 640)

RECIPE #876

• Date: Sunday, November 23, 2008 -- 10am
• Location: Bloomington, IN
• Kitchen: My Apartment
• Fellow Chef: Matty
• Recipe Rating: A-
  

These crepes were a component of a a brunch dish I made last weekend, which will be my next post. The picture you see above is of the entire dish -- I forgot to photograph the crepes alone. These crepes were quite good. The batter was very typical: butter, flour, salt, milk, and eggs. There were two things that made this crepe batter a bit different from a typical one. For one, the melted butter that went into the batter was browned on the stove before it was added. Browned butter has a lovely, nutty flavor to it. This flavor was very subtle in the finished crepes, but I think it did have a positive effect on their taste. The other interesting thing about this recipe was that instead of using all white flour, this recipe called for a combination of buckwheat flour and white flour (with much more of the former than the latter). The buckwheat flour gave the crepes a nice hearty flavor. I liked these crepes quite a bit. The batter was thicker than typical crepe batter, which meant that the crepes also ended up a bit thicker than usual ones. But that slight thickness worked nicely with the hearty flavor of the crepes. We used these crepes with a savory filling, and they were excellent that way. I'm not sure these crepes would be as good with a sweet filling (since they have such a hearty, nutty flavor) but my special gentleman used the extra batter to make himself some lemon sugar crepes and he said they were excellent, so maybe it does work fine. I liked this batter quite a lot and I will certainly use it again for making savory crepes.

Here is the recipe.

For me certain foods have very strong connections to particular memories. Crepes are one such food. It's a mysterious thing because I have eaten dozens and dozens of crepes in my life, and the memory I have attached to them is not of the first crepe I ever ate, nor is it of the best crepe of my life. The crepe itself was rather unremarkable. It was in the summer of 2006, and Emilee and I were spending a couple days in Las Vegas on a little girls-only vacation. We spent a lot of time wandering through the various casinos, marveling at their size, and the ridiculousness of it all. We were wandering through Paris, Paris one evening around dinner time and we saw a little crepe place. We stopped in front of it, trying to figure out if crepes sounded good. As we stood there, inspecting the menu, the man behind the counter started speaking to us in a completely fake French accent. That pushed the prospect of eating crepes inside a hotel in the shape of the Eiffel tower from absurd to completely ridiculous. I couldn't stop giggling. I don't even remember what kind of crepes we ate that evening. What I do remember is that we spoke in terrible French accents throughout the meal, and laughed and laughed. That whole trip was lovely (and completely absurd -- Vegas is so bizarre!), and I hope I always think of it when eating crepes, wherever I may be.