Like all of you I was doing a ton of cooking at home throughout Covid. Naturally I was on the lookout for easy recipes that would fill us up and also provide a good change from the usual. The other day I was thinking back on all the cooking skills and recipes I picked up during the past year, and I realized a lot of my newly picked up culinary skills were in fact around making different types of pancakes! Pancakes are fabulous, aren't they? Pretty easy to whip up, highly customizable and filling.
Certain cooking patterns evolved due to the nature of crisis we were in. We used to go out for grocery only about once in ten days during Covid, so when we did we really used to stock up on fruits and vegetables. Towards the end of the ten days we often ended up with apples going a bit soft. Who likes to eat a soft apple? Exactly, no one. And that's how the first recipe was discovered:
German Apple Pancake
We made this roughly every other Sunday throughout 2020. It was a simple joy, something to look forward to in times when we were cooped up at home all the time. Caramelized apples, drenched in a luscious batter, baked to perfection, topped with maple syrup, and takes all of 25 mins to make. What's not to like?
One time a team mate was crowd sourcing new breakfast ideas from the team and someone suggested okonomiyaki. I was intrigued and soon after, an "Okonomiyaki Kit" was on its way to my house from Amazon!
Okonomiyaki
It is a savory Japanese pancake with lots of cabbage, often pork or other meat (though most times we had it without any meat) but what I love about it is really the toppings which take it to another level. Luckily my kit had all the toppings in their authentic form. Okonomiyaki sauce (tastes a bit like bbq sauce without the smokiness), kewpie mayonnaise, nori (seaweed) flakes and bonito (fish) flakes. S and I enjoyed drawing squiggly lines of kewpie mayo and the okonomiyaki sauce on our steaming hot pancakes just flipped from our trusty cast iron pan.
The last type of pancake I want to share with you is not really a pancake. It has no eggs or flour, and it is fermented. I'm talking about the Indian uttapa. During the pandemic, I learnt to make uttapa batter from scratch by soaking rice and udad dal, grinding it in a blender and letting it ferment over 12-24 hours. Yes, it is certainly the most involved recipe out of the three! The toughest part was figuring out if it is fermented enough. Is it fermented too little? Too much? Is it too frothy? If it smells sour, is that good or bad? I did use the phone-a-friend option quite a bit at this stage in the uttapa-making journey. I left no stone unturned to make sure my batter was fermented right. A friend suggested keeping it in the oven with the light on. My cousin suggested leaving it in the afternoon sun (covered, of course). Finally I realized the secret was in the blender. After I got a suitable blender (Preethi brand) my batter was finer and fermented more easily.
Uttapa
It was a labor of love and so satisfying when I finally tasted a homemade-from-scratch uttapa that I had been missing for some months as we weren't eating out.
