Crepes
Do crepes intimidate you? I was intimidated as soon as I heard you had to have a special pan and that they were French. And so I never made them. That is, until I had gluten free crepes at a wonderful restaurant in St. Louis called Rooster. After that I knew that I had to learn to make them.
According to my copy of Joy of Cooking, there was no need to be intimidated in the first place. Crepes were introduced to the U.S. by English settlers in the early 1600s. I doubt those settlers had fancy equipment and they certainly weren’t French. I decided that I was not going to by a fancy crepe pan (though you can certainly use one) and my flat cast iron griddle has worked perfectly.
Crepes are actually incredible easy to mix up. All of the ingredients are mixed up in a blender and then the batter is set aside to hydrate for 3o minutes, or up to two days if refrigerated. The ingredients in the recipe that we are using are flour, milk, water, eggs, butter and salt. The only essential ingredients are flour, eggs, and liquid. If you are making savory crepes, you may use stock instead of milk and water. If you are making sweet crepes, a juice can be substituted. For those of you who don’t do eggs, you can still make this. Just do a Google search for “eggless crepe” and follow one of those recipes, substituting GF all purpose flour for the flour in the recipe. The butter can be real butter or any one of the various buttery substitutes.
Cooking the Crepes
Cooking the crepes is the tricky part. If yours stick and tear, don’t cry. The torn and messy crepes still taste good and you can just pile the fillings on top instead of wrapping them inside.
Start by heating a crepe pan, non-stick pan, or well seasoned cast iron pan on medium to medium – high heat. (Recipes that I researched varied on the suggested heat.) Then add butter (or the appropriate substitute for your diet) to the pan. Watch the video to get an idea of the appropriate amount. Then lift the pan off of the stove and pour the batter onto the pan as you rotate it. This will spread the batter evenly over the pan. It’s probably easier to see this in the video than to understand it from words. Place the skillet back onto the stove and cook for just a minute until the batter is set. Then you flip it over and cook the other side.
The size of your pan will determine how much batter to use. You can also make your crepes thinner or thicker, depending on how you like them. If you’re going to wrap stuff up, then thicker is probably better. I also think that thicker crepes are easier to turn, so you might go with thicker if you’re new at this. Have fun and experiment! This is not like baking gluten free bread. Unless you burn the crepe, you should still have good eats even if the crepes aren’t pretty.