Dutch Baby Pancake

What an odd name: Dutch Baby Pancake.

We’ve known about Dutch Baby pancakes for years, but we never had one. We knew that they are basically a large popover type dish that you bake in the oven, and for a long time we just figured that if we were going to eat something like popovers, we might as well eat popovers. Then we had a friend tell us about a Cacio e Pepe Dutch Baby that she made and showed us pictures of how well it turned out. With an example like that, we knew we had to try one (Thanks, CL!) . We figured you’d like to try one yourself.

We decided to make one for our breakfast this past Sunday (as we’ve mentioned in the past, we started making a bit more elaborate breakfasts on Sunday), so we figured we wouldn’t want cheese and pepper in and on it, so we looked in Breakfast: The Cookbook by Emily Elyse Miller. We had just checked this out from the library and figured why not try out a recipe. If we hadn’t had it, we would have looked in The Joy of Cooking instead, after all, JofC has recipes for nearly everything. With a recipe in hand, let’s get scratchin’!

Ingredient discussion:

While we list all-purpose flour, we actually used a 50-50 mixture of white whole-wheat and all-purpose. We find that most recipes will still work well with a bit of whole-wheat flour, making them a bit healthier. And speaking of healthy, we use eggs that we know come from a healthy flock of hens that are allowed to run and peck and scratch and eat grass and bugs. We think that’s important for healthy (and tasty) eggs. You can find eggs like this at your local farmers’ market. If you use maple syrup, we recommend the real deal, the 100% maple syrup. It just tastes better.

Procedure in detail:

Preheat oven to 425°F. After a few minutes of heating, place a 10-inch cast iron skillet in the oven to get nice and hot. You’ll want it in there for about 10 minutes, which will give you plenty of time to make the batter.

Make batter. The original recipe suggested using a blender for this, and you could — we almost did, but we figured it would be easier to clean our a bowl and whisk. In a medium bowl, or if you have a large measuring cup with a spout, whisk together the milk, flour, eggs, salt, and sugar. Unlike pancake batter which should be lumpy, whisk this batter until smooth. Once smooth, slowly pour in the melted butter while whisking.

Butter and batter pan. If your pan hasn’t been in the oven at least 10 minutes, just wait. The batter will be fine. Once your pan is nice and hot, remove it from the oven — careful, no one likes to touch a sizzling hot skillet. Drop in the tablespoon of butter and swirl it around to coat the bottom of the pan and up the sides a bit. Once buttered, immediately pour in the batter and return the pan to the oven.

Bake. Let the batter bake for 18-20 minutes. It should rise up and partly out of the pan. It might be the edges of the Dutch Baby Pancake, or it might be the middle. Don’t fret, as only the cooked part gets pushed up, so it won’t make a mess in the oven. After 18 minutes or so, the pancake should be browned and puffed and ready to come out.

Dust with sugar. This is really optional, but it makes the pancake look nice, so you might as well hit it up with a bit of confectioners’ sugar. So take the pan from the oven, place it on a cooling rack, and sprinkle a bit of powdered sugar all over. We place a bit of confectioners’ sugar in a small fine-mesh strainer and tap it to “snow” sugar.

Serve. Slice into quarters and serve with a drizzle of maple syrup.

What could be better than a few minutes whisking, yet results in a great meal? We loved it! The Dutch Baby Pancake was delicious and we have no idea why we’ve never made one before. And once you taste it, you can see how you might modify it for other, more savory meals, by leaving out the sugar and adding cheese and pepper, for example. As is, it’s a great, relatively light breakfast, and sure a whole lot easier than frying up pancakes a few at a time. Five stars. We still don’t understand the name.