Pear Pancakes with Ragi Flour

Life with Gau is a constant tussle between developing good habits for work, play and food and letting him simply have fun.  Whether the struggle is at its most intense when it comes to regulating game time or food intake is a toss up.  Weekends exemplify both.  He has firm ideas about what I should cook and serve. He considers it blasphemous that I add beans when I make burger patties for him.  He thinks baking fries is a terrible idea.  He will never try kanji or ragi dosa unless I bribe or yell.... You get the idea?

Saturday mornings start very lazy for us and then there is a rush to get Gau to his music class by 10.  He usually insists on eating out Sat morning, eating just the Pooris in Sangeetha without touching the vegetable laden side dishes.  The battle is stacked against me 3 to 1.  Today ash had a very long sleep in and I was able to persuade Gau to come into the kitchen and help me make Pear Pancakes. An adaptation of Kim Boyce's Pear and Buckwheat pancake.  He saw the picture online and agreed to help. He comes into the kitchen, washes the pears on my instructions and starts peeling them with his back to me.  I put my earthenware Tawa and started roasting a good cup of Finger Millets from Restore.  He has no clue about what I am up to and continues to Besiege me with questions and comments as he grates the pears.


My youngest one barges in demanding we handover the pear we are grating.  His problem is really not the pear, it is the perceived exclusive attention big brother is getting.  I tell him to look for another one in the fridge.  None in the fridge.  More tears before I give him pomegranate and oranges as a bribe to just stop.  I still managed not to burn the millets!

"oops, I grated too deep and a seed fell inside.",
"is this peeling fine? Does it need to be totally peeled?"
"Oh, I didnt notice the seed falling in"  (I was looking over his shoulder)
"It is OK if the counter is covered in peels, I will clean up. Later"
"What do I do with the brown parts"

I measured out the atta and the baking powder, then blitzed the finger millet and added it to the dry ingredients and mixed it all up thoroughly before I poured 1/3rd into the wet bowl and started folding it in, gently.  He took over and I added the flour in 2 more batches.

"The batter is too stiff.  Did you measure correctly?"


I finally cooked and served the pancakes a short 30 minutes after I had started.

He said it tasted delicious before I revealed my sneaky ingredient :)  He spent the rest of the morning complaining how much better it would have tasted if I had used maida instead.

The trick to avoiding the goeyness inherent in finger millet flour is making your own flour.  Dry roast the finger millet until crunchy and then just blitz it in the blender.  Done.  Of course, the butter in these pancakes couldn't hurt ;)

Even without your ten year old "helping" you, you can still get done within 30 minutes if you plan and get the flour ready the previous night.

While I firmly believe in buying local, local pears are too firm.  You could choose to poach the pears and then use them in the pancake, but that would multiply the cooking time by 2 easily.

I make my pancakes on a non-stick tawa.  The cast iron pancake descriptions are always drool worthy, but I have never successfully seasoned cast-iron skillets.  Mine get rusty too fast.  So.  Non stick it is.

Pear Pancakes With Ragi

Bowl 1:

  • 1 cup roasted ragi (finger millet flour)
  • 1 cup whole wheat  flour (organic atta)
  • 3 tablespoons sugar
  • 2 teaspoons baking powder

Bowl 2:

  • 2 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted and cooled
  • ¼ cups whole milk
  • 1 egg
  • 2 asian pears (the big yellow kind, not the small, hard Indian variety) , ripe but firm

Sauce:

  • 60g unsalted butter (i used about 1/4 of a 500g block of butter, the standard size here)
  • ½ cup honey  (i started off making just 1/3 cup sauce, then I had to make some ore since we had pancakes and no sauce.)

Mix the Bowl 1, dry ingredients thoroughly.

In Bowl 2, whisk the melted butter, milk, and egg until thoroughly combined.

Peel and grate the pears, using the large holes on a box grater, into the milk mixture; the pear juice is retained in the bowl 2 this way.

Pour Bowl 1 into Bowl 2 and combine with a light hand. If the batter feels too thick, add some more milk.

Melt the butter and honey together in a small saucepan and cook until boiling, and slightly thickened 2 to 3 minutes. Pour the honey butter into a bowl.

Heat a skillet over medium heat melt a tbspoon of  butter;  pour 1 ladle of batter at a time and spread it a little.  Mine is a large pan and could hold 3 pancakes at a time. Once bubbles have begun to form on the top side of the pancake, flip it over and cook until the bottom is dark golden-brown.

Serve warm with the honey butter syrup.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Hi, Thanks for sharing the recipe. I was wondering whether you tried making the pancakes with all ragi. --A
P.S. I threw my nonstick pans in the trash and gave myself no choice but to use iron pans. I do use separate pans for rotis and pancakes/dosas and egg. I do have an assortment :)

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