I had some whole wheat flour at home, so, naturally, I wanted to try to make crepes with it. BTW, the Italian for crepes is crespelle. I've also been working on streamlining my crepe making process. I hate leaving two dirty bowls after I'm done making the batter. So, I've tried sifting the flour straight into the milk, egg, oil mixture. It works. The batter is initially more clumpy than if you pour liquids into the flour, but nothing a few extra minutes with the hand mixer won't fix. It works.

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This turned out surprisingly good. I made my regular crepes, similar to what I've described before, but this time with olive oil instead of the butter. I got tired of mucking with the butter and oil worked just fine. So, take regular breakfast fare, bacon, scrambled eggs, sauteed onions, put in the crepe and roll up. Tasted great! I think the important ingredient here is the sauteed onions: they give the volume, make the roll moist, and just slightly sweetish.

So I have been making crepes, a couple of times already. I have not gotten around to making anything really sophisticated with them, but I tried a few easy things, like stuffing them with some soft cheese or other dairy product. Here is what I found.

Stuffing them with cream cheese does not really work. Cream cheese has too much flavor and overwhelms the crepes.

Sour cream is OK. That's how we eat crepes in Russia, dipping them into sour cream. I liked it, but my resident food critic only warmed up to sour cream after she mixed it with whipped cream. Overall, I think, we will not bother with sour cream again.

Ricotta was not impressive either, until I mixed in a tea spoon of sugar. I liked it a lot more this way, but my resident food critic thought it was too sweet.

Mascarpone: same as with ricotta, tasteless by itself, better with some sugar. I liked the flavor and texture of mascarpone a lot more, though, than ricotta's, so out of the combinations I tried, this one is my favorite. For now.

I have already made my first crepe making mistake. I did not sift the flour before I dumped the butter/milk/egg mix into it. The batter developed clumps that I could not break with my hand mixer no matter how much I tried. Fortunately, my instructor mentioned in the class how to deal with a situation like this: the whole batter needs to be sifted. It helped. There remained a few very small clumps, but they seemed to have dissolved after an hour or so and it did not affect the texture of the crepes.

As I have already mentioned, I have recently taken a cooking class on
crepe making and I have already attempted to try what I have learned at
home. The first try was a great success with crepes coming out just the
way they are supposed to. What I did at home was not identical to the
recipe in the class (it never is, is it?), so I need to document it
while it's still fresh in my mind.

I started with putting 1 cup of regular all-purpose white flour in a big
quarz mixing bowl. I added half a tea spoon of regular salt to it. The
crepes ended up tasting a little bland, so I'll try more salt in the
future.

In another bowl I was supposed to mix butter, milk, and eggs. I started
with a table spoon of butter from the fridge. I melted it in the microwave.
3 min at 6. And then I dumped 1 cup of cold milk into it. Of course, the
got all solid back again. I tried to warm up milk in the microwave, but
it did not melt the butter. The butter stayed clumpy through the end. It
did not affect the quality of the crepes, but still... I either need to use
oil, or figure out a better way to melt butter into the mix.

Into the warmed up (room temp) milk and clumpy butter I put 3 eggs and
whisked them by hand as well as I could.

I then dumped the fluids into the flour/salt mix and whisked them by hand
until they got basically mixed up. After that I got a hand-held electric
mixer, set it to speed 2 (out of 5) and kept on mixing the batter until it
was very smooth (about 10 min). The batter was of a very fluid consistency.
It would barely stick to the mixer's blades and drip off right away.

I covered the bowl with the plastic and let it sit at room temperature
for 30 min.

After that I got a medium size iron pan (which you can see in the pics
on the previous post) and heated it up on high heat on my gas stove. I have
to say that my gas stove is very old, so saying high heat does not really
mean much. It's just the highest setting my stove is capable of. I have put
a small amount (1 tbsp) of peanut oil into the pan. In the class we used a
non-stick pan without any oil.

I used a regular soup laddle to pour the batter and after a few tries I
discovred that I need to fill it up just more than half for best results.
The trick is to take the skillet off heat and hold it at an angle. Pour
batter into the top part and let it flow down one side and then re-orient
the pan to let the batter flow down the other side of the pan. When it
reaches the point where it originally landed on the pan, all pan surface
should be covered by batter and the should not be left any more batter to
make a second coat. If there are any gaps left, they can be quickly covered
by a few drops of extra batter, but it needs to be done really quickly. The
crepes come out about 3mm thick.

Return the pan to the heat, cook for 1-2 min until the edges dry up. I used
a small silicon spatula to check on the down surface. When it had enough
color, I would pick up the crepe up with 2 fingers of each hand and flip it.
(Yes, yes, I have not learned yet how to flip the crepe with the pan. I'm just
a beginner). Once the crepe is flipped I quickly sweep it with a stick of
butter to butter it up, wait a minute, and use a bigger spatula to move it
off the pan and to a plate. Once the next crepe is cooking, I would butter
the other side of the crepe on the plate. The two sides look totally
different with the pattern of the color. You can also see this difference
in the pics on the previous post.

I discovered that once my pan is hot, I needed to reduce the heat a bit, not
quite down to the medium, but more than half way there. I also saw that
every few crepes or so I needed to add a little bit more peanut oil. The
do absorb a bit of oil and when the pan dries up, the color of the crepes
does not quite develop.

This is pretty much all there is to it. The amount of batter I made was
just enough to stuff the two of us. It all turned out to be pretty easy.

If you know what you are doing. Or somebody shows you.

Yesterday morning I took a crepe making class at Central Market in Austin, Texas. I had a most wonderful instructor who really new what she was doing.

This morning I tried to make crepes myself at home, and lo and behold! They came out just right. I could not believe it myself, but it just worked!