This recipe comes from my good friend, Milena, who is from Germany. Similar to crêpes, German pancakes are large and thin and can be used for both sweet and savory dishes.
When I recently made these for breakfast, I made the sweeter version and added grated apples and blueberries to some of the pancakes. Due to the short cook time, I found that grated apples work better than chopped apples. Due to the batter being so thin, some of the fruit fell out of the pancakes when I flipped them but the extra fruit chunks, along with powdered sugar and cinnamon, made the perfect garnish for the plated pancakes.
As Milena recommended, I used a mixture of milk and sparkling water which seemed to make the batter especially light and bubbly. If you don’t have sparkling water you can use all milk.
The pancakes will be the size of your frying pan so you can experiment with the quantity of batter per pancake depending on the size of your pan. Using roughly 1/4 cup batter per pancake, I was able to make eight or nine extremely thin 10-inch pancakes.
- 3 eggs
- 10 Tbsp flour
- 1 cup milk (or better: roughly ⅘ cup milk + ⅕ cup sparkling water)
- Pinch of salt
- 2 Tbsp sugar
- For savory pancakes, add only a pinch of sugar.
- Beat the eggs and mix in the liquid.
- Gradually add the flour, salt and sugar, whisking constantly to make a smooth batter.
- Heat a pan over medium heat and coat the bottom of the pan with a little bit of butter.
- Pour roughly ¼ cup batter into the pan and swirl it so that the batter coats the bottom of the pan.
- Flip the pancake as it begins to set. It will cook quickly because it is so thin. You want both sides to be pale golden in color.
- Serve sweet pancakes warm with powdered sugar, syrup, jam and/or fruit. My friend, Milena, likes hers with sugar beet molasses. And during the winter, she likes to stir some ground cinnamon into the batter.
- To cook the pancakes with fruit, either add chopped or grated fruit to the batter or pour some batter into the pan, top with fruit and pour another layer of batter over the fruit. The batter will not really cover the fruit because it is so thin but the extra layer of batter will make the pancake easier to handle. Chunks of the fruit may fall out of the pancake when you flip it but they will continue to cook in the pan and you can sprinkle them on top of the finished pancake.
