An alternative to pancakes on Shrove Tuesday
There’s nothing better than a pancake sizzling hot off the pan, the ideal excuse to be greedy as they are best eaten straightaway! Professional baker Dan Lepard has combined the pancake with the pikelet to come up with the 'picklet' - and he shows Angharad Law how to make it.
Brown Butter Picklets recipe
My mother had a large aluminium electric frying-pan, called a Sunbeam, that used to be brought out every Saturday to make pikelets, what I knew to be tiny pancakes made with milk and egg and butter. But there is a simpler bread, completely forgotten now, with the slightly different spelling of 'picklet', which was a version of the crumpet. This was cooked on a griddle as served warm with a little butter or jam.
Ingredients
100g wholewheat flour
100g white flour
100g milk at 20C
100g water at 20C
1 1/2 tsp (5g) fresh yeast
50g butter
1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
1 tbs water
Method
Mix together the white and wholemeal flour together with the salt. In another bowl, mix together the milk with the yeast, then stir this into the flour and beat well until smooth. Cover the bowl and leave for 2 hours, until the mixture is bubbly.
Place the butter in a saucepan, and heat until it is nut brown in colour, then remove the pan from the heat and pout the butter into a small bowl to cool slightly and stop cooking. You could simply run cold water across the underside of the pan, and this will lower the heat quickly as well. Beat the browned butter into the yeasted batter until it is evenly combined. Next, mix the soda with the tablespoon of water and stir that through the batter.
Preheat a non-stick frying pan, and add a tsp of oil, lard or butter, until it is almost smoking hot. Rub this evenly around the surface with a ball of paper towel. Then lower the heat and spoon 30g blobs of batter into the pan, 2 or 3 at a time, and cook until the edges are crisp and brown after a minute or so, and the surface broken with air bubbles that break through to the base of the pan. With a spatula loosen each little picklet from the frying pan and flip over. Cook each for another minute or until both sides are brown. Remove from the pan, place on a plate and cover with a cloth while you cook the remaining picklets.
Reproduced by kind permission of Dan Lepard from his book, “The Handmade Loaf”, published by Mitchell Beazley, ISBN: 1840009667
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