Pancakes!

Pancakes, who doesn’t love pancakes? I make them quite often, different flavors, Noble Pig has a great pumpkin pancake recipe, I have a good lemon cornmeal recipe, and then there’s plain ol’ pancakes.

We were at one of our favorite St. Paul establishments, Yarusso’s, a week or so ago and got to chatting with one of the owners, Fred Yarusso.  He’s the sweetest guy. On this particular evening we were talking about cooking and baking and how so few people do it anymore.

He asked what we thought of his pizza dough. We like his pizza dough. It is crispy with the perfect amount of salt. He told me that he uses Pivetti flour in his dough. It’s Italian 00 flour and it is all he will use in his crusts. If you’re not familiar with 00 flour, it’s a very finely ground flour that supposedly produces pizza and breads with a delicate crumb and a very crisp crust (much like Yarusso’s!).

I, of course, checked Amazon and they had it, so right there I ordered some to give it a try.  As we were chatting about pasta, cookies and farmer’s market he told me that this flour also makes amazing pancakes and he gave me his recipe.

Now I had to do some scaling. His recipe started with 15 egg yolks!  The other key ingredients were buttermilk and half & half.

I mixed it all up and let it rest a little while I warmed up my cast iron griddle.

Time to make pancakes, batter on the griddle and wait for big bubbles then flip!

Yes, occasionally my flipping skills were tested...

But we ended up with a nice big pile of pancakes.

But how did they taste?  Was the special flour worth it?  I took one bite, looked at my husband and said "These are GOOD!"  He looked at me with that "whatever" look, then he took a bite and looked at me with an expression of shock and awe!  These were really good pancakes!  I've made buttermilk pancakes before and they've been good, but there was just something about these that made them better.  They melted in your mouth and had a nice tangy flavor.  This is now my go-to pancake recipe.  

With the scaling I need to tweak it a bit.  I think the batter was just a touch too thin so the pancakes didn't fluff up as high as I like them.  Otherwise, perfection!  Thank you Fred Yarusso!  Now on to pizza dough with this new flour!