Delia Smith Pancake Recipe

Earlier I tried the Delia Smith recipe earlier. I didn't think about what to expect because I've no idea how big a cook she actually is. 

    

110g of Flour
200ml of Milk (+75ml of Water)
2 Eggs

I can't express enough how bad this recipe is. The mix was so thick that it barely even spread out across the little hobs and took ages to cook. When they were cooked they were so stodgy that the knife barely cut through them, and I could only bring myself to eat twelve of these, whereas I managed to eat twenty of each of the previous two.

I feel like this photo best illustrates how thick and stodgy these pancakes were. The ladel was lighter than the mix. It sat on the surface of the mix. It was offensively thick.

BBC Good Food Pancake Recipe

This evening I tried the recipe for BBC Good Food pancake recipe, it's fair to say I wasn't expecting as much from this recipe as the last one.

      

2 Eggs
100g of Flour
300ml of Milk

     

Given the lower hopes for the recipe, I was very impressed with this recipe, they were considerably better than the previous recipe, and probably better than I've ever made pancakes before. I got a mate to try some and he said they were the best pancakes he's ever eaten.

Tante Marie Pancake Recipe

Today I tested the first pancake recipe in the last post, the one by the supposedly famous French chef.

        

100g of Sugar
2 Eggs
200ml of Milk
100ml of Water

 

I had really high hopes for this recipe, given that it was suggested as the best pancake recipe by some top chefs. Unfortunately I was let down slightly.

I topped them with golden syrup because it is something that is easily quantifiable in the sense that you can see how much you put on, whereas this isn't the case with something like lemon juice. Doing this means I can better compare the recipes.

I was disappointed with them when eating them in a stack, because they seemed quite stodgy, slightly more so than the usual pancakes I make, which doesn't really have a recipe as I tend to measure it by eye. When eating them individually however, I thought they were better than usual as they were quite fluffy. I imagine the effect of piling them on top of each other takes away from this. My housemate and flat mate from last year was around at the time, I gave him some to try, and he agreed with me, but thought that they were slightly better than my own mix.

Whilst he was there, I gave him some with caramel ice cream on them as that had gone far in the previous section of the project.

He agreed that it was really nice and said that the difference in temperature between the hot pancakes and the cold ice cream was surprisingly nice.

Pancake Recipes

Given that I came to the conclusion that there is no food culture in Britain, it follows from that there is no traditional British pancake recipe, and so in order to try and sell the idea of eating more pancakes to people by finding the best and most reliable recipe. I've gathered a few recipes and will test them at some point. 

Tante Marie

Tante Marie is supposedly a famous French cook, although I've never heard of her, not that that's saying much in all honesty. Apparently her recipe is lighter than most recipes, and is supposedly endorsed as the best crepe recipe by by a group of chefs who include Nigella Lawson, Nigel Slater and Heston Blumenthal. Given that she's French, I rather hope this isn't the best recipe.

Recipe

200 ml. milk (2/3 cup)

100 ml. water (1/3 cup)

100 g. all-purpose flour (3/4 cup plus 2 tsp)

2 large eggs

1/4 tsp salt

1 tsp vegetable oil

1 tsp brandy (optional)

BBC Good Food

I know that both my mum and step-mum use BBC Good Food from time to time when they're cooking, so I'd have thought that there would be a fair amount of reliability in their recipes given that I know two people who repeatedly use this as a source for their cooking.

Recipe

100g plain flour

2 eggs

300ml semi-skimmed milk

1 tbsp sunflower oil or vegetable, plus extra for frying

pinch salt

Delia Smith

With the football-related twist on this project, it seems appropriate to test a Delia Smith recipe. I knew that she used to be the owner of Norwich City Football Club before I even knew she was a chef.

Recipe

110g/4oz plain flour, sifted

pinch of salt

2 eggs

200ml/7fl oz milk mixed with 75ml/3fl oz water

50g/2oz butter

BBC Fluffy American Pancakes

Similar to the earlier BBC recipe, I'd have thought this would be a reliable recipe as well, but it is different in that I'm expecting it to be a bit thicker and sweeter.

Recipe

135g/4¾oz plain flour

1 tsp baking powder

½ tsp salt

2 tbsp caster sugar

130ml/4½fl oz milk

1 large egg, lightly beaten

2 tbsp melted butter (allowed to cool slightly) or olive oil, plus extra for cooking

Jamie Oliver Breakfast Pancakes

I remember that Jamie Oliver was involved in some sort of controversy with school dinners in Rotherham, a town that I live very near and my dad lives in. I know that a lot of people in Rotherham now hate him, and that he's known for being a bit pretentious with food. 

Recipe

1 cup self-raising flour

1 cup semi-skimmed milk

1 free-range egg

1 pinch sea salt

A few knobs butter

Gordon Ramsay's Scotch Pancakes

The only cooking show I've ever chosen to watch was The F Word, which was a Gordon Ramsay sort of cooking-talk show with Janet Street Porter (who made the program a lot funnier than it would've been otherwise). What with him being Scottish he seems like an appropriate chef to have for a scotch pancake recipe. 

Recipe

150 grams flour

A spoonful of baking powder

A bit of salt

3 eggs

75 ml water

120 ml buttermilk

50 grams of sugar

Pancakes in British Food Culture

To begin with I wanted to ask a few questions that related to the pancake world cup day on Friday. I was interested in a few things. Firstly I wanted to know weather people preferred caramel ice cream to vanilla ice cream, as I was confused as to how one ice cream made it to the final whereas the other was knocked out straight away. The results are below.

The results show a fairly substantial percentage of people prefer caramel to vanilla, so I suppose it makes sense that caramel got further. Because I was unsure, I also asked which country people most associated with ice cream just to check my initial assumption was right, 11 out of 17 also said Italy, so I'm happy that I didn't make a stupid mistake. Further to this I wanted to find out just how popular caramel ice cream is. Of the 17 people that answered the survey, only 2 said caramel, this surely shows just how popular a topping ice cream is for a pancake in general, if it's not even most peoples favourite and yet it still came second. 

When I asked people what their favourite topping was this was confirmed as it was similarly popular to the other classic pancake toppings.

I asked which, if any, of the more obscure pancake toppings that made it past the first round sound appetising to them. None of the toppings sounded appetising to half of the people, which illustrates the point I made in my conclusion, that people are quite happy to assume that some things will be horrible as pancake toppings.

I also asked how often people ate pancakes and why that was, expecting the vast majority to say only once a year for pancake day. The result was pretty skewed towards once a year, with 8 people saying, that, yet 9 people said because of pancake day, which is strange. The only two reasons given for eating them every 3 or 6 months were "my flatmate and grandma make them" and "I'm not a morning person", whereas the weekly person said "I have protein pancakes".























This suggested to me that pancake day wasn't necessarily as big or important a thing in general society as it was in my household growing up, but retrospectively maybe it was because my family is fairly religious, and pancake day comes from the idea of lent. Pancakes were eaten then because it was a good way to use up rich foods such as eggs, milk and sugar before the 40 day fasting period of lent, where Christians had to refrain from eating foods for pleasure, and instead had to eat only basic foods in order to survive.

This made me wonder just how the pancake day tradition compares to other food habits in terms of how it's followed, so I asked people how many times they had a sunday lunch this summer, to see how much that still occurs, I asked if they still eat breakfast every morning, as people seem to be getting busier and busier. The last thing I asked was how often they ate takeaway or fast food, so I could compare that to the sunday dinners. This is important because I feel like when I was younger, the meal I looked forward to the most in the week was Sunday lunch, whereas nowadays I feel like people more value the convenience and lack of washing up that a takeaway offers.

From the answers I was given I worked out that average person 2 sunday dinners a month, whereas they have either 3 or 4 month. This combined with the fact that the average person in my survey reckoned they ate pancakes 5 times a year suggests to me that when it comes food, people don't always take notice of tradition any more. Which suggests to me that pancakes don't have a place in British food culture, basically because I struggle to believe that Britain has a food culture in regular society any more. I just assumed that most people had a Sunday lunch most weeks and hardly ever had fast food, but apparently I was wrong. 

Result and Evaluation

Result
Whilst the final two pancakes were chocolate sauce and caramel ice cream, which was somewhat predictable as soon as bacon went out, I feel like today has been a success as I have found some new pancake toppings that are slightly obscure, but have been proven to liked by more people than just myself, which was the aim of this project for me on a personal level, so I feel like it's been a success in that respect.

I asked my tasters some questions afterwards to see what they thought of the project. 

Q). Which was your personal favourite pancake?
A). Two said caramel ice cream, one said nutella and coconut, one said coconut, sugar and cinnamon.

Q). Which was your least favourite pancake?
A). Bacon and maple syrup, cheese, mint sauce, oranges and cream.

Q). Which pancake were you most pleasantly surprised with?
A). Two said butter and sugar, one said peach and meringue, one said ham and mushroom

Q). Which pancake were you most disappointed with?
A). Two said bacon and maple syrup, one said jam, the other said strawberries and cream.

Q). Out of all the pancakes you didn't eat, which one would you not want to eat?
A). Ham and mushroom, green tea, chilli and tomato, prawns.

Q). Out of all the pancake toppings you ate for the first time today, would you eat any again next time you ate pancakes. If so which one?
A). Two said no, one said butter and sugar, the other said bacon and maple syrup. When I asked the two that said no why they wouldn't they both said that they just preferred the more traditional toppings.

I see this as a success, as one of my tasters said their favourite pancake was coconut, sugar and cinnamon, one of my less conventional toppings. Not only this, but there was a range of most pleasantly surprising pancakes, which shows that there were a few obscure toppings that were really nice. The same could be said for the most disappointing pancakes however, which is slightly disappointing in itself. The range of the answers for the least favourite is pretty broad, and I think that reflects the fact that not everyone ate the worse pancake toppings, which was the idea. The ones that people wouldn't have wanted to eat are pretty understandable, and the answers to other questions don't contradict this. The thing I'm most pleased with however, is that two of them said they'd choose to eat some of the pancakes again. Which to me shows a pretty high degree of success in the project, especially since those two were ones that came form my initial first hand research.

Evaluation
Initially I said I wanted to find out which world cup country had the cuisine for the best pancake topping. The results show that Belgium, Argentina and Colombia are the top three, but there are so many other good choices that I don't feel that the strength of my project came in the conclusion, but more the process of reaching the conclusion. 

The fact that you had to choose one topping over another meant that you had to try both to know for sure that one was better than the other. If you'd told me beforehand that I could choose to have an Italian based topping or a Bosnian based topping, I'd have chosen the Italian one all day long out of a lack of adventurousness on my part. This method avoided this, and hence I found nice obscure toppings from Colombia, Nigeria, Bosnia and Portugal that I wouldn't have otherwise. I wonder how many people in the UK have ever had grapefruit on a pancake, or grapes with pepper.

I really enjoyed this project, which was stressed to be important when we were briefed, which gives me encouragement, because looking back, really, what I've gathered are opinions rather than facts, which isn't really what I associate with research. But in all honesty I think you could have left me for another decade before I came up with an idea that was more appropriate to me and that I'd enjoy doing as much, so I'm happy.

What Next
From here onwards I will think about my presentation, which I feel will need to highlight the successes in my project rather than "expose" the lack of hard facts gained from it. Before this I also want to put together a few surveys about pancakes generally to try and gain a bigger understanding about them and where they stand in Britain's food culture today.

Pancake World Cup Continued

Half Way Point Review
After all 32 countries had had a pancake eaten I wrote down some observations and thoughts on how the day had gone so far. We stopped for a bit as people were starting to get full and the kitchen was getting hot due to the heat from the pancake machine. There was rather a lot of mess as well, obviously. 

Favourites

At the half way point I'd have definitely said that the most likely candidates to win would've been chocolate sauce, caramel ice cream and bacon and maple syrup. Unfortunately when I wrote down which toppings would be competing against each other, it turned out that chocolate sauce was against bacon and maple syrup, which I thought was a shame given that there were a few toppings left in that seemed a bit underwhelming to me, such as banana, peach and meringue, and apple and raisin. But I suppose this is why it's important to have a variety of tasters.

Surprises

For me, regardless of what happened after this point, today was a success because of how many new pancake toppings I discovered that were really nice. I thought the grapefruit and sugar one in particular was really, really nice. Alongside this were other surprises, coconut, cinnamon and sugar, nutella and cocount, grapes with pepper and cinnamon, and bacon with maple syrup were all very nice. 

I was surprised however at a couple of exits. I thought that vanilla ice cream would go further, although I suppose the fact that caramel ice cream got through means that there's more variety left. Alongside this, I had a lot higher hopes for the pineapple pancake, especially given that it was in a pretty weak group on paper.

General Observations

Whilst it's not really a surprise, it seems like the sweeter pancakes are being more successful, with sangria, chilli and tomato, prawns, cheese, mint sauce and green tea all going out. 

I also noticed that all the toppings representing African countries failed to get through. Whilst I'm not surprised that mint sauce didn't get through, I'd have given all the others a fair shout at getting through, and like I said, I think the biggest surprise for me so far was how nice the grapefruit one from Nigeria was. 

The strangest thing I noticed is that earlier on in the day, the tasters were starting by deciding which pancakes they didn't want to go through. But then as the day went on that started to reverse, which is a good thing because it makes me feel like they're enjoying it more because they're having a harder time distinguishing between good options rather than doing it by a process of elimination.

Second Stage
For each match-up in the second stage I cooked a new pancake each time so that the taste of each pancake was fresh in the mind/mouth of my tasters. I didn't feel the need to take photo's of the pancakes from here on as I already had photo's of every pancake from the first round. The result of the second stage is below.

There weren't really any surprise results in this round. At a push I'd say apple and sugar being chosen over jam was a slight surprise as I didn't really rate apple and sugary. I was also slightly surprised that chocolate was chosen above bacon and maple syrup given how excited the taster was about a bacon and maple syrup pancake. It would've been interesting to see how far it would've got had it been matched up with something else.