Savoury Corn Pancakes – A Demonstration

Start with an egg. The egg in this picture is very small.
I didn’t have a bigger egg to put by its side for comparison.

It looks lonely and lost in this medium-size bowl:

So I added a generous pinch of salt and a small amount of water: 3 tablespoons. For a more average egg, it would have been 4 or even 5.

Next, the cornflour. 3 level tablespoonfuls. Or ever so slightly heaped, like a gentle desert dune maybe. Again, your average egg tends to get 4 instead.

Then I mixed it all up with a spoon. Unlike wheat, it doesn’t clot up. A smooth thick batter results in just a minute or so.

I selected a small onion so as not to intimidate the egg. I also added a spoonful of olive oil which I had forgotten, though it is quite important, if I forget to mix oil into the dough, the end result can be quite dry. I eat those with butter.

The onion became even smaller after I undressed it. The spoon, put there to indicate size, reflected me.

I chopped it up. I call this fine-chopped (=about as small as I can be bothered to chop a small onion), though I know others would call it medium to coarse-chopped:

Then I got me some slices of smoked ham. Try to stay away from the industrial fast-cured variety, whose honest name would be “Questionable-Pig-Derived-Protein-With-Water”.

The whole thing, mixed up again:

As an afterthought, I added some cumin seeds and some Turkish oily crushed peppers (not hot, but lovely peppery flavour, I’ve been quite keen on them for a while). They had a thing about paparazzi, hence the out-of-focus look.

Not too little butter is placed in a non-stick pancake-making pan:

It is melted:

The dough is poured in and flattened out lovingly with a spoon. A decent-sized egg would have just produced enough to fill one of these pans. The dwarf egg didn’t quite provide the coverage:

I make sure that the butter is good and hot before I start, and I fry the first side until the top begins to go tacky. This takes not much more than a minute. Then I flip the thing over:

After another minute or so, I can flip and flip again until both sides are slightly browned, just the way I like it.

I had it with “vinete”, my mum’s transsylvanian aubergine dip.

The fillings and the seasoning can vary greatly, though the quantity of what you put in it cannot be much more than what you see here, or the pancake will not stay in one piece (still edible, though! it is very hard to spoil this dish!). I’ve successfully tried with tuna, salmon,  ardines, I’m sure you could do roast chicken breast as well, chopped fine, or any other deli meats. Grated carrots or parsnips, even finely chopped cabbage has worked well (the finely grated vegetables are an exception to the quantity thing, a small amount of batter can accommodate a great deal of those, though you end up with something more like a bhaji than a pancake when you fry it, and you need to increase the fat in the pan), and I’ve made cakes with garlic, ginger, hot chillies (great with sour cream or yoghurt dips), black pepper, coriander seeds, mustard seeds. The oil in the batter can be sunflower or whatever, and frying is great in goose or duck fat or in coconut oil as well. Simple, fast, gluten-free and tasty. Oh, and unlike much of the specifically sold-as-gluten-free stuff that usually tastes bad, it’s also quite cheap.

Yum.