Superb Soured Pancakes

This morning I ate the best pancakes yet. It was the first day back to school for my children after the Toussaint holidays in France. I thought I would send them off this morning with nice full tummies.

I usually make these pancakes for breakfast, since I am gluten intolerant. I have always prepared them in a normal fashion with gluten-free flour. Tasty, but not the best and always tending to go stiff-as-a-board unless you got the cooking and the fat just right (impossible in the morning when you are trying to find pairs of socks and school books and cook breakfast at the same time).

“House wives of old knew that the most delicious pancakes, muffins and cakes could be made by soaking the flour in sour or cultured milk, buttermilk or cream”
Sally Fallon - Nourishing Traditions

So I thought this morning I would try Sally Fallon’s pancakes from her ‘Nourishing Traditions’ Cook Book. This has to be quite simply a recipe for the most superb pancakes I have ever tasted and believe me, my neighbour owns a crêperie in the local village and I have seen every kind of crêpe you can imagine. She is French - but I now can say without hestiation, that I make a better crêpe then her. It’s true.

Some gluten intolerant people may be able to eat the whole wheat in these pancakes, because the gluten has been broken down somewhat during the period of fermentation the night before. The agent of this fermentation is yoghurt. It is a fascinating method and one that has been done instinctively with grains for millenia. Every indigenous culture in the world, apart from the aborigines of Australia, found an important place for fermenting in their cuisine. Since we present-day people have moved onto the modern production of food, the fermentation of grains prior to cooking has been forgotten in the wake of convenience, yield and profits. Interestingly, grains were often pre-sprouted too, as in the following exerpt:

“Before the advent of factory farms, grain was partially germinated, but modern grain consists of dormant (resting) seeds…
In former times grain was harvested and sheaved. The sheaves were put into shocks and were gathered and built into stacks which stood in the field for several more weeks before threshing.
During this period of weathering in the field, the grain seeds were exposed to rain and dew, which soaked into the sheaves. the grain could pick up this moisture and, with heat from the sun, conditions were ideal to favour an degree of germination and enzyme multiplication in the grain.
The modern combine harvester removes the grain immediatley after cutting and permits it to be hauled away to the granary. Hence there is no weathering and consequent enzyme development, resulting in a mature but dormant seeds.”
Edward Howell MD, Food Enzymes for health and longevity.

Unlike bread, whose gluten can be made digestible, even to those with celiac disease through sourdough or levain levening methods, flour destined to be used for baked goods that will not rise with yeast can still be fermented using yoghurt, kefir, buttermilk or soured cream. The key here is that the fermentor must be ‘live’; must contain bacteria which, instead of spoiling the flour, eats away at the gluten, partly predigesting it for us. These fermented flour products are much easier for wheat sensitive individuals to digest as the enzyme inhibitor phytic acid, present in all seeds and grains has been broken down too.

I made up the whole of the recipe: i.e. the 2 cups of flour and yoghurt to ferment overnight, but I only mixed up half that amount in the morning into a batter. Twenty pancakes in the morning is far too much for us to eat, although we can polish off ten between us, mostly after the children have gone to school, though they can eat four between them.
So I added 1 egg, plus 1 egg yolk, (saving the white in the freezer to make meringues with at a later date) half teaspoon salt, half packet of vanilla essence and 1 tablespoon butter. If you are making savoury pancakes with cheese or whatever, you may want to omit the vanilla. But I have found that no-one complains of any vanilla taste when they eat savoury.

Soured Pancakes:
2 cups of wheat flour, I used type 80.
2 cups of plain yoghurt,
3 eggs lightly beaten,
1 teaspoon Celtic Sea Salt,
1 packet vanilla sugar or 1 teaspoon vanilla essence
2 tablespoons melted butter
Filtered water.

In a glass jar add the flour and the yoghurt and mix well. Make sure all the flour has been moistened. Leave this jar covered in a warm place overnight, or for 24 hours.
In the morning, I add half of the remaining ingredients, (see above) to make up half a batch of pancakes,adding the water to bring it to the best consistency. For french style crêpes, the batter needs to be able to pour like thin cream. Melt the butter in the pan you will cook the pancakes in, so that the pan is already greased, and add the butter to the batter. I find that it is best to re-grease the pan before each pancake with a small amount of butter. If you have a large frying pan, use three-quarters of a soup ladleful of batter for each pancake and make sure the pan is very hot before you cook the first, keeping it hot throughout. These pancakes take longer to cook than their white flour alternatives, but don’t cook for too long as they will go stiff.

We eat our pancakes with lemon and raw sugar and I spread raw butter on the cooled pancakes for the children before I add the fillings. The taste is just beyond this world - not like any other pancake I have tried. The combination of soured wholewheat, (which is much softer than un-soured) raw butter and dark sugar with lemon really can’t be beaten. The butter caramelises in the pan and the flavour is so raich and mature. I am convinced that this is how pancakes must have been prepared in the past. It just seems to have such a mellow, old kind of taste. Perhaps that is where the original tradition of leaving the batter to rest stems from. I know no real reason why we need to leave the batter to rest for half an hour in modern pancake recipes. It has no bearing on taste or cookability (Jane Grigson agrees with me). I am convinced that this is a throw-back to the original method of souring the grain overnight.