Episode 62 – Pancakes with Blueberry Confit

Episode 62
August 7, 2011
Pancakes with Blueberry Confit

It’s been about a month since the waffles episode so how about another breakfast item?  To be honest, of all the breakfast foods out there I’d have to say that pancakes are probably one of the last things I would order on a menu.  Why?  I’m not exactly sure why but I’d have to say it has a lot to do with the fact that pancakes are one of the easiest things to throw together at home.  Plus I almost always have all of the ingredients available at home so it’s not like I have to make an extra trip to make pancakes.  However, I wouldn’t count pancakes out of the breakfast picture completely.  Pancakes are great because they are inexpensive to make and are easy to customize and experiment with.

One of my favorite pancake recipes is Nigella Lawson’s recipe.  She has a pretty standard recipe that is reliable but to me there isn’t anything special about it.  The recipe I made for this episode is a product of experimenting on hers.  Now if you don’t know Nigella Lawson, she is a tv chef that has been on several different channels.  I think she was actually on TLC or Style or a random channel like that before going on the Food Network.  One of my favorite things about Nigella is that she enjoys food like you’re supposed to.  She eats large servings with abandon but she always finds a way to balance it all out.  Plus she makes it all from scratch, doesn’t take gimmicky shortcuts, doesn’t have any cheesy gimmicks, and she always has a fun story to go along with her food.  One of my managers from when I was still in high school turned me on to her.  Our favorite part of the show was at the end when they would catch her kids sneaking down the stairs in the middle of the night to eat fistfuls of cake and pie.

Anyway, so I decided to try different things.  I used different kinds of sugar, different kinds of milk, melted butter, room temperature butter, different kinds of flours, and so on.  Eventually I stumbled upon this fluffy monster that I immediately fell in love with.  I love pancakes that have body and are nice and thick.

But don’t think I stopped there.  Just recently I made chocolate chip pancakes with her recipe that came out fabulously.  I used brown sugar, room temperature butter, and soy milk and made the recipe using the creaming method instead of the blitz method.  So amazing.  It was like eating a chocolate chip cookie but in pancake form.  I can’t wait to do a video on it – but not too soon!  After all I don’t want two pancake videos back-to-back.

One thing that lots of people seem to ask me is how do you know when to flip a pancake?  A friend once told me when the air smells of pancakes.  That works well, but after awhile your entire kitchen starts to smell like pancakes.  Another good way is when you start to see bubbles starting to form on the top of the pancake.

Now the blueberry confit is a completely different creature all on its own.  Confit refers to something that has been cooked in its own juices and commonly refers to savory dishes like duck confit.  However, berry confit is one of the sauces we learned in school and it’s a surprisingly easy sauce to make.  It’s actually more closely related to a reduction sauce than a compote – although to be honest compotes and reductions are almost the same thing with only cornstarch separating them.

To make a confit all you really need to do is make a simple syrup (equal parts sugar and water) and cook it down to 230 degrees F.  While it’s still lava hot add in your fresh berries.  The heat from the ultra-hot syrup will cause the berries to burst and the color and flavor will be distributed throughout.  A similar technique (make the simple syrup, continue to boil on stove, add blueberries until they burst, then strain blueberries) was used in a restaurant I worked in where the blueberries were basically used just for the natural coloring.

Anyway, here’s the recipe for the pancakes and the blueberry confit. Enjoy the video below!