Crepe

At one time, my fondness for crêpes almost led me to open a crêperie. Friends prevailed and I opened a restaurant instead, but crêpes are still one of my favorite desserts—especially made with buckwheat flour. The batter is best made a day in advance.

Cuitlacoche is a fungus that makes corn kernels swell to ten times their normal size, turning them an inky black color. Its smoky-sweet flavor is a cross between corn and mushroom. I grew up eating cuitlacoche stuffed in a quesadilla or in a squash blossom. It’s a delicious, earthy addition to everything from quesadillas to empanadas. If you can’t find canned cuitlacoche in your local Latin market, substitute sautéed wild mushrooms for an equally delicious result.

Between the omelet and the pancake lies the crêpe, an almost pastalike thin wrapper usually served as a snack or dessert. (Not always, though; see Buckwheat Crêpes, page 86.) They are universal but most closely associated with France and are sometimes made with chestnut flour (which, if you can find it, is a nice change). Fill them with cooked berries or other fruit, with fresh ricotta mixed with a little sugar, with chocolate sauce, or with anything else you like—ice cream, whipped cream, and so on. There was a time when you needed a special crêpe pan—one reserved strictly for this purpose—but a six- or eight-inch nonstick skillet is the perfect vessel.

Everyone knows about sweet crêpes (page 645), but visitors to France quickly become addicted to these—the classic snack food of Brittany—especially the ham-and-cheese variation. Traditionally, the batter sits for an hour before starting to cook. As long as you plan ahead a bit, that shouldn’t be a problem. But in a pinch you can skip the resting period—it doesn’t make too much difference—and overall these are easy to make and great as savory starters or a light lunch or supper.

These are very similar to crêpes—the staple of Brittany (page 86)—but thinner and more delicate (and the filling, which follows, is like nothing you’ll find in the French tradition). Though they’re often called “Philippine Egg Rolls,” lumpia—again, like most crêpes—require no cooking once they’re filled.

Crespelle (Italian for “crêpes”) are easy, delicious, and versatile. You can fill and bake them with almost any stuffing. Here’s a favorite of mine, crespelle filled with a creamy mushroom ragù, as they do it in Maremma. Many wonderful dishes can be made using crespelle in place of pasta. If you have all the ingredients for a filling for lasagna, for example, but do not want to make pasta, crêpes are ideal.

Every culture has its pancakes, and Istria has palacinke. Though they are no different from crespelle or crêpes, palacinke is the name I first learned for the delicious thin pancakes my mother would whip up for us for dinner. As a child, I loved them any way she served them, often with only a sprinkle of sugar or a bit of home-preserved fruits, like rose-hip jam, apricot marmalade, or prune butter. Sometimes palacinke were more elaborate: filled with ricotta and baked or layered like a cake with different fillings in between. But the most luxurious—and always our favorite—were palacinke spread with melted chocolate. That’s the version I share with you here, but I also encourage you to enjoy these homey treats any way you like. Today my mother still makes palacinke, but now it is her great-grandchildren who wait in line for the next one to come out of the pan so they can spread jam on top, roll them up, and devour them, still warm.

I believe I was about six years old when I fell in love for the first time. You see, Sundays are usually family days in Mexico, a day when brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents, and parents stroll around and go out to eat. My parents would often take us to restaurants that had tableside service (but they were not as fancy as you might think), and my sister Yael and I always ordered the crepas de cajeta. They were only good if they were cooked as a spectacle, because that was a big part of the deliciousness that would soon follow. We would stand way too close to the waiter and impatiently watch as the butter bubbled when it hit the pan. The cajeta was poured and a thick, gooey caramel sauce slowly melted into a silky sheet that would cover and warm the golden crepes that were folded into triangles. We begged for the spoon that inevitably had some cajeta left on it, and more often than not had fights over it. And then we would take a step back so we could watch the blue and orange flames as if they were the “poof” in a magic trick. Oh, the anticipation would make our mouths water, and although we stood still, I felt as though my heart was jumping up and down every time—I thought they were palpitations for the man who made those wonderful crepes! We would rush to our seats as he plated the crepes and would hold our forks ready to attack. Yael always asked for vanilla ice cream, and it is the ideal complement to the dessert, even though, in my opinion, they are perfect just the way they are. If you would like them with ice cream, they go very nicely with Requesón Cheese Ice Cream (page 185).

When I roast a lamb shoulder, I like to set a big hunk of meat in the middle of the table, letting everyone tear off a chunk of it and eat it like a group of happy Neanderthals. Crespelle are basically Italian crepes, and here they are used like tortillas, providing a delicious wrapper for hunks of lamb and creating what is basically an Italian taco. You need to use a 10-inch skillet to make the right size crespelle, and if you have a nonstick one this recipe will be foolproof. If you don’t, brush or wipe the pan between crespelle with olive oil and you shouldn’t have any problems. It’s okay to make the crespelle ahead of time and leave them stacked and wrapped in a cloth.

My Bayona staff served this dessert at the Taste of the NFL, a huge hunger-relief fund-raiser that we have participated in for over fifteen years. It takes place the night before the Super Bowl in the host city and is attended by more than 2,000 people, dining on food donated and prepared by chefs representing each NFL team. In seventeen years we have raised over $5 million for food banks and relief agencies all over the country. Now that’s a party with a purpose!

Buttery, golden crêpes, with just a sprinkle of sugar or a warm, luscious filling, are one of the simplest, most appealing, and most versatile of all desserts. They are easy to make ahead and freeze, and a snap to whip up at a moment’s notice—what’s not to love! In fact, my earliest cooking memory is making crêpes or “roll-up pancakes,” as we used to call them, for my little brother and me while watching Popeye cartoons early on Sunday mornings. My mom taught me how to do it so she could get a little extra sleep! We would roll them up with grape jelly on the inside and confectioners’ sugar (probably way too much) on the outside. Hmmm, wonder if our kids, Kelly and Evelyn, want to learn this recipe….

This recipe is an adaptation of a dish from the Troisgros Brothers, a famous restaurant in Lyon. The “gâteau” is a stack of delicate crêpes layered with creamy béchamel sauce, Gruyère or Comté cheese, ham, and prosciutto. There are countless variations to this elegant dish. You can use plain crêpes or herbed, as I do here. I sometimes make a more “locally flavored” version by folding crayfish and spinach into the béchamel (and omitting the hams). The key is cooking the assembled gâteau until it’s bubbly and brown. I like to serve this with a deeply flavored Smoked-Tomato Butter (p. 63), but this dish is great on its own. For a quick assembly, make the sauce and the crêpes a day or two in advance. Wrap the crêpes in plastic wrap and freeze until needed.

Crêpes are incredibly delicious and probably one of the most versatile foods you can make. They feel fancy and sound impressive, but are fairly cheap to make. When you make these, do not, I repeat do not use the so-called Parmesan that comes in a green shaker can. Use the real stuff; you’ll need about 3 ounces to make 1 cup.

At a glance, this recipe may look like the one for Sizzling Crepes (page 274), and in fact these crepes from the central region begot sizzling crepes. But the popularity of the child has eclipsed that of the parent, and nowadays it is hard to get banh khoai unless you make them yourself or go to the source, Hue, where delightful crepes live up to their name. They are crunchy, rich from being cooked in a fair amount of oil, and full of toasty rice flavor. Banh khoai are traditionally fried in special small cast-iron skillets (five to six inches in diameter) with long handles (so you can avoid the splattering hot oil). They are difficult to find, however, so I use an eight-inch cast-iron or heavy nonstick skillet.

Named for the ssssseh-ao sound that the batter makes when it hits the hot skillet, these turmeric yellow rice crepes are irresistible. Fragrant with a touch of coconut milk, they are filled with pork, shrimp, and vegetables and eaten with lettuce, herbs, and a mildly garlicky dipping sauce. Most Viet cooks make sizzling crepes with a rice flour batter, but the results fall short of the nearly translucent ones made by pros in Vietnam. To reproduce the traditional version, which captures the alluring toastiness of rice, I soak and grind raw rice for the batter. It is not as daunting as it sounds. You just need a powerful blender to emulsify the batter to a wonderful silkiness. Adding left over cooked rice and mung bean, a technique I found buried in a book on Viet foodways, gives the crepes a wonderful chewy crispiness. Make your crepes as large as you like. These instructions are for moderately sized eight-inch ones. In Saigon, the same crepes are typically as big as twelve inches, but in the central region, they are as small as tacos. At my house, we serve and eat these crepes as fast as we can make them.

These nearly translucent, soft steamed rice crepes are served plain with slices of gio lua (sausage), or they are filled and shaped into small rolls, as they are here. Finished with cilantro, shallots, thit rouc bông (cotton pork), and a little sauce, these rolls were one of my father’s favorite foods to prepare for our family when I was growing up. In Vietnam, making bánh cuon was usually left to professional cooks who had mastered the technique of steaming a thin rice batter on fabric stretched over a pot of boiling water. In the 1970s, Vietnamese expatriates devised an easier method of making the crepes in a nonstick skillet. For the batter, they blended cake flour (very fine, soft Thai rice flour was not readily available then) with tapioca starch and cornstarch. While that approach works fine, I prefer to use Thai rice flour in place of the cake flour because it yields a more delicate result that is closer to the original version. The tapioca starch and cornstarch help the batter set up nicely and contribute to achieving the tender yet chewy texture of the traditional crepes.

Though French by definition, these delicate and lemony crêpes are an American tribute, boasting a sweet filling of tart, silky lemon curd and a juicy blueberry compote. The black currant–flavored crème de cassis contributes a sophisticated undercurrent of berry flavor to the compote and enhances its deep purple-blue color. Just as a stack of blueberry pancakes is made that much better by a melting pat of butter, a drizzle of browned butter enhances this dish with its nutty richness.