The Really Thin Pancakes

Today I made crêpes for breakfast. I woke up and made crêpes from scratch before leaving to go to class. I've never been a morning person. Usually I do as little as I can in the morning before leaving so I can get more sleep. But this morning when my alarm went off, I thought about crêpes. I didn't hit the snooze button once. It was time for some really thin pancakes.

The French have a notorious reputation for claiming that crêpes are very difficult to make properly, but I do believe I got the hang of it. These were rather good, as attested by my roommate.



What you need:
2 eggs
2/3 cup all purpose flour
1 cup milk
2 tsp. sugar (1 tbsp. if you're making dessert crêpes)
2 tsp. vegetable oil
Pinch of salt

Rationale:
Nothing here is too out of the ordinary, but the oil you put into the batter makes it so you only have to oil your pan once during the initial heating, which is pretty convenient.

Now let's get to crêpe making.

Lightly beat your eggs in a medium or large bowl. Add the rest of the ingredients and whip the absolute life out of them. You want to rid your batter of all lumps, if possible.
If you have a blender, skip the bowl. Put the eggs in and pulse a couple times to beat the eggs, then add everything else and blend until smooth.

 Oh, and if you don't like cleaning your whisk, I picked up the idea that chopsticks can be excellent whipping/stirring utensils while watching some Japanese cooking videos.

Your batter well mixed, pour about 1/4 cup of it into a 9 inch pan that has been heated to medium high and lightly oiled. Turn your pan around in a circular motion in order to make the batter coat the pan in as even a disk as you are able to make. It can be difficult if you used too little batter or if your pan is too hot, but you don't want to use too much batter because thick crêpes are improper crêpes.

 As a side note, the lumps you see in the pictured pan are butter. I used melted butter in this batch (this was one of the first batches I tried making) instead of oil. As it hit the cold milk and flour and whatnot, it re-solidified into little chunks. Thus, I advise using oil, or heating your egg, milk, and flour mixture to about 115 degrees Fahrenheit before adding the butter to keep everything liquid. You have to be careful if you try this though, otherwise the egg may start to cook, leaving you with much worse chunks than the butter would have made anyways (since the butter chunks will melt during cooking).

Anyways, when the edges start to look like this (about 1-2 minutes)

Flip it.

 Glorious, no? Cook for another minute or so and flip it onto a plate. If you cook it right, the other side of the crêpe should have a similar golden appearance, but in my experience it is more spotted than the first side.
Repeat a bunch more times until you're out of batter. I think I usually get around 10 crêpes per recipe. I usually eat them all.

So now you have crêpes. What should you do? Eat them straight? I certainly wouldn't bar the idea. They're delicious by themselves. Light, tender, slightly crisp at the edges, subtly sweet, they delight the palate.
I decided to put some blackberry yogurt and roasted chopped macadamia nuts on mine though. You can do whatever you like, making these wonderful disks savory or sweet.

I'd like to extend thanks to Alton Brown yet again for being an awesome source of information.

Thanks for reading!