Pancake Travels

I'm sensing a pattern here, and me thinks it will continue next week once we're done with China.  So for Chinese pancakes, we did no research because I learned how to make Chinese pancakes several years ago from our friend Lei, who is from China.  While we didn't have to research a recipe for these, I have had to think about how to present this recipe, as I learned it without making any measurements for ingredients since this is the way Lei makes them.  I will give rough amounts, and show you what the consistency of the batter should look like once you're done.  That way if you decide to make them, you'll have an idea of what it's supposed to look like.  Here's what you need to make Chinese pancakes: flour green onions water salt eggs (2 for each person you will be serving, so if you're serving 2 people, you will need four eggs) First you'll need to chop the green onion.  We usually just chop the whole bunch of onions as you buy it from the store, be...

Aye, aye, aye - all of this travel back and forth between Asia and South America is causing some serious jet lag to my taste buds.  Hahaha! Here we are back in South America on the western coast.  I will have to say I was VERY excited to learn that Chileans eat one of my favorite types of pancakes, potato pancakes!  Who could ever say no to a fried potato?!?  In Chile they refer to potato pancakes as milcaos, and they make their milcaos slightly different than I'm used to making potato pancakes.  I was very excited to get started on these!  Here are the ingredients for milcaos: 12 medium potatoes 3 tablespoons vegetable shortening, at room temperature 1 tablespoon butter Vegetable oil for frying Salt to taste First you'll want to take 6 of your potatoes and peel them. Next put them in a pot of water on the stove, and bring the water to a boil.  Once the water is boiling, simmer on medium heat until potatoes are tender.  I chopped my potatoes into ...

We've now traveled back to Africa to the country of Chad.  I'm seriously experiencing some jetlag here!  I'm wondering if maybe we should have planned our trip a bit differently, like all of the countries on one continent and then moved to another continent.  Oh well, we didn't, so here we are back and forth across the world again.   While researching Chadian pancakes, we discovered that millet is the important grain in this country.  At first we found lots of references to something called aiysh in Northern Chad and biya in Southern Chad.  We soon learned that these are the same thing, balls of fried millet, in both regions.  For some reason they just have different names.  We were a bit disappointed to find out that these were balls, because we don't really consider fried balls of dough to be pancakes (with the exception of abelskivers of course, but we'll get to them when we get to Denmark).  So we continued to look for Chadian pancak...

Next we find ourselves on what could seem like the far opposite side of the globe in Canada.  In all of our research, we found that Canadian pancakes are very similar to American pancakes, especially in their many and varied forms.  We opted to go for a buttermilk version of the Canadian pancake, and we made sure we had real maple syrup imported from Canada to go with them!  Here's what you need for the buttermilk Canadian style pancakes we made: 1 1/2 cups of all purpose flour 3 tablespoons of sugar 1 teaspoon of baking powder 1 teaspoon of baking soda 1/4 teaspoon of salt 1 3/4 cups of buttermilk 1 egg 2 tablespoons of butter, melted 1 teaspoon of vanilla oil for cooking Place all of the dry ingredients into a large bowl and whisk together until combined. In a separate bowl, mix together the wet ingredients.  We made sure to mix the melted butter with the buttermilk first, so that the melted butter would cool a bit and not cook the egg once we mixed it in.  He...

On our journey to discover Cameroonian pancakes, we found many recipes for akara.  For those of you who may not have read some of our other African pancake recipe, akara is a black eyed pea type of pancake.  In Cameroon they aren't flat like in the other African countries we've visited.  Instead they are shaped like balls and look more like fritters.  So we opted not to make Cameroonian akara on this particular journey.  We did run across a recipe for African crepes from Cameroon in our search, so we decided to go ahead and give it a try.  For Cameroonian crepes, you will need the following: 140 grams of flour 50 grams of sugar pinch of salt 360 milliliters of milk 4 large, ripe bananas mashed oil for frying powdered sugar for dusting The first thing we did was mash the bananas.  Our bananas were quite ripe with lots of brown spots on the outside, so we were able to mash them quite easily.  We started out using a fork to mash them, but switched to...

As we arrived in Cambodia, we soon discovered that Cambodia has rice flour pancake.  Sam was really excited for this pancake, as the recipe also calls for shrimp.  We discovered that this style of pancake is called banh xeo in Cambodia, and while we found several recipes for banh xeo, many of them were not for Cambodian banh xeo.  We eventually found a Cambodian recipe.  So here is what you'll need to make Cambodian banh xeo: 1 3/4 cups of rice flour 2 cups of water  1/2 teaspoons turmeric  1 yellow onion sliced  1/4 cup plus 2 tbsp of vegetable oil  1 pound of medium shrimp, peeled and deveined ( we used frozen shrimp that was already peeled and deveined for us from Trader Joe's)  Instead of the shrimp, you can also use mixed varieties of sliced mushrooms for a vegetarian option or you can use ground pork meat or chicken meat or a combination. 1 small green onion thinly sliced  1 1/4 teaspoons of salt  1 1/4 teaspoons of freshly gr...