Weekend Food Blogging: Oatcakes

Maple syrup is not that brown-tinted corn extract that oozes out of matronly-shaped plas­tic super­mar­ket bot­tles. No. It is the nat­u­rally sweet sap of the sugar maple that has built char­ac­ter dur­ing the bit­terly cold win­ter months, and mel­lowed under the gen­tler caresses of spring. No amount of chem­i­cal tin­ker­ing can match its com­plex bou­quet of bio­log­i­cal evo­lu­tion­ary flavours. Yes, it some­times comes in a bot­tle shaped like a maple leaf; still you must pair it with wor­thy pan­cake, like this one from an old Har­row­smith mag­a­zine. The oats make it slightly chewy on the out­side, but the inside is soft and absorbent, so that you can con­trol how much syrup it each bite soaks up. They aren’t too heavy or too wet like some other whole grain pan­cake recipes. Respect the syrup, and you can’t go wrong.

Oat­cakes for Sun­day brunch, ready to be paired with a lit­tle maple syrup. I slipped a few wal­nuts left over from Christ­mas and a very ripe banana into the batter.

Oat­cakes

Serves 3 to 4

• ¾ cup quick-cooking oats
• 1 ½ cups but­ter­milk
• ½ cup whole-wheat flour
• 1 tea­spoon bak­ing powder
• ½ tea­spoon cin­na­mon
• pinch grated nut­meg
• ½ tea­spoon salt
• 1 large egg, lightly beaten
• 1 table­spoon brown sugar, packed

1. Soak oats in but­ter­milk for 10 min­utes. In another bowl, sift together the flour, bak­ing pow­der, spices and salt. Then add the egg, brown sugar, and oat mix­ture into the dry ingre­di­ents. The tricky part is get­ting the con­sis­tency right, which you don’t really fig­ure out until the next step, when it is too late.
2. I use a large non-stick pan, lightly brushed with oil, and heated over medium heat until hot. Work­ing in batches, pour 1/4 cup bat­ter per pan­cake into the pan. In about minute, bub­bles appear on the sur­face and the under­sides are golden brown. If the sur­face starts look­ing dry, you’ve waited too long. Flip the pan­cake and cook the other side for another minute. Brush your pan lightly with oil between batches.
3. Serve with, what else, maple syrup.