Dutch Baby Pancakes

Dutch Baby Pancakes

All these long an complicated recipes being published. For once, I’d like to share a simple yet amazingly good pancake. Eat it for desert or, like I do, for breakfast. It yields two portions but to be honest, I eat one all by myself. The story behind Dutch baby pancakes, like with many other things, is that the name is a lie. It’s not Dutch and it’s not a baby nor small like one. I believe Dutch baby pancake is an American invention loosely based on the Dutch mini pancakes called poffertjes. They’re made on a special poffertjes iron and are served with powdered sugar. I guess Dutch immigrants took it to the US and made it bigger, I mean who has time for mini pancakes when you can make one big one? To a Swede, the Dutch baby pancake reminds a lot of ungnspannkaka (oven pancake) but unlike what you got in school if you grew up in the eighties and nineties Sweden, this one is good. It puffs up, it’s crunchy on the edges and soft in the middle, and it’s just amazing. You’ll find many different recipes online, but you can stop looking because this is the perfect one.

What you need:

  • 70 grams of flour
  • 30 g of sugar
  • 2,5 grams of salt (that’s about half a teaspoon, or two pinches)
  • 1 egg
  • 2 yolks
  • 130 grams of milk
  • 1/2 vanilla pod scraped out or 1/4 teaspoon of real vanilla powder
  • 50 g of butter
  • Powdered sugar
  • Fresh lemon

How to make a perfect Dutch baby pancake

  1. Mix flour, sugar, salt, egg, egg yolks, vanilla seeds and milk.* Mix it really good, preferably using an electric mixer to get some air into the very liquid batter.
  2. Turn the oven to 190°C while you leave the batter to rest. It needs about the time it takes an average oven to reach 190°C.
  3. Put a cast iron pan into the oven and heat it heat up to 190°C.
  4. Place 50 g of butter into the pan while still in the oven. Now keep an eye on it so it doesn’t burn. When a little more than half of it has molten, take the pan out and let the rest of the butter melt outside the oven. This will result in half the butter being browned, getting a nice nutty flavour while the rest of the butter simply melts. That’s perfect.
  5. Pour the batter into the center of the pan. You’ll see that the butter moves out to the sides, and forms a glossy ring around the batter. That’s what you want.
  6. Put the hot pan with the batter into the hot oven. Now wait 20 minutes. It will puff upp a lot, and then collapse when you take it out, forming nice thick wrinkles.
  7. Take it out, powder it with sugar, and serve it with a lemon wedge. Some lemon on every bite, and put it into your mouth! Isn’t that marvelous?

Recipe notes

* Some recipes will call for room temperature eggs and milk, but I’ve noticed no difference whatsoever so do whatever is more convenient.

Dutch baby pancake