UGLY DUCKLING TO SWAN
UGLY DUCKLING TO SWAN
How a mistake led to a new way of cooking a pancake.
“Being a chef is like being a swan. The final presentation gives no indication of the struggle going on beneath murky waters, how hard we’re working to keep things beautiful above the water line,” said my culinary instructor towards the end of a year-long cooking intensive I completed in 2015.
Wise words.
I think of them often, including last week when I woke with a hankering for pancakes. Pancakes for breakfast are right up there as a stellar breakfast choice. I’ve written about pancakes several times before. Ever since eating a batch of silver dollar pancakes at a diner as a child, I’ve been a pancake lover.
But making pancakes on a weekday morning is usually something I don’t do in the interest of time and my hunger level. I wake up with a strong appetite and can’t wait to start eating. The last thing I want to do while my stomach growls is make a batter, then stand at the stove, flipping pancakes.
So, what’s a pancake lover to do on a random Thursday morning when the mood strikes?
I gave into my craving.
On this particular morning, I decided to make a single, large pancake. I was aiming for something that might be a cross between a Dutch Baby and a crêpe.
Spoiler alert. The resulting pancake came out nothing like I envisioned.
Did I bother with an actual recipe?
Hell no.
I’m smack dab in the middle of a serious buckwheat flour obsession. I measured out some buckwheat flour, about 50 grams, slightly more than 1/3 cup, adding enough water to get the consistency I wanted. In went a quarter teaspoon of baking powder, a teaspoon-ish of avocado oil, and a sprinkle of salt. I purposefully omitted eggs from the mix since, like I said, I just wanted to get the batter going. The faster I could mix and cook the batter the sooner I could be eating!
The batter came together in no time, so I got the coffee brewing while I waited for my 10-inch non-stick pan to heat up on the stove. In went a blob of butter and another squirt of avocado oil. When the temperature was hot enough, I poured in the batter.
As the batter began to set, I sprinkled some fresh blueberries and some cooked ground turkey on top while I waited for the telltale bubbles to appear. Those bubbles never lie. When I see them, I know it’s time to flip the pancake. But something was bothering me, something I couldn’t quite put my finger on.
When the pancake was just about ready to flip, I grasped my biggest spatula. That was the moment realized I’d forgotten to add sugar to the pancake batter.
That’s what was bothering me.
Maybe I should have started with a cup of coffee before attempting this weekday pancake adventure.
It was too late. I definitely wasn’t going to throw away my almost cooked breakfast and I was too hungry to start over. I lunged for my Mason jar of granulated sugar and threw about a heaping teaspoon’s worth on top of the pancake. I knew that once I flipped the pancake the sugar would caramelize as it hit the hot surface of the skillet. My fingers and toes were crossed, hoping the sugar wouldn’t burn.
You’ve probably heard of happy accidents, right? Well, this near fiasco was a prime example of a happy accident.
My culinary instructor would have called it failing upward.
It reminded me of that time in culinary school when I over mixed some vanilla ice cream I’d made for a cooking challenge. The ice cream tasted delicious, but it was grainy, and kind of flat. It was the opposite of creamy. Nothing I tried changed the consistency of the ice cream. I had no choice but to serve it when the challenge came to an end. My only hope was to make it look as pretty as possible. It was an example of failing upwards of making the best of an error, of being OK with ugly.
The smell of caramelizing sugar is literally mouth-watering. Once I flipped the pancake and smelled that sweet, caramel flavor, I thought maybe I was on to something with this cooking method.
I’m someone who likes contrasting texture in my food. A little bit of crunch goes a long way in my opinion.
This not so pretty pancake has texture.
Pancakes have always been more preferable to me than French Toast. French Toast is just too damn soggy. There’s no bite, no snap. But stay tuned, because I think I’m going to try making a batch of French Toast using this cooking method so that a crunchy sugar crust develops on the toast as it cooks.
All my pancake needed at this point was a side dish of maple syrup for dunking. This is my preferred method for using syrup. Dunking bites of pancake into syrup is much preferable to soaking the pancake in syrup running the risk of soggy, overly sweet pancakes.
As you can see below, this large, buckwheat blueberry pancake is not pretty. It turns out that forgetting to add sugar to the batter wasn’t the only misstep I made. The pancake took a tumble as I slid it out of the skillet onto my plate. This poor pancake was just meant to be ugly.
These days, we’re inundated with stunning images of food. They’re everywhere. Sometimes, the images are so exquisite they bring me to tears. We even take our own pictures of meals we’re about to dig into, of frothy cups of coffee, of farmer’s market tables laden with organic produce. It’s all just so damn beautiful.
That’s why I wanted to share this experience I had the other day, this experience with the ugly pancake.
Something less than picture perfect.
Something indicative of process over end result.
As ugly as the pancake was, I knew I had to re-create this happy mistake again in exactly the same way. And I did, but this time, you’d better believe I had a cup of coffee at the ready.
I know making mistakes can be triggering, maybe even pushing us towards despair or negative self-talk.
Making mistakes has always been hard for me. My father was an exacting disciplinarian who imposed unattainable demands. I learned early, and well, to hide my mistakes, to feel ashamed about them.
It’s taken me a long, long time to understand how often mistakes help inform my next steps, those all important next attempts. That the process is just as important as the end result. Mistakes are far from something to be ashamed of.
Mistakes are just ugly ducklings waiting to be turned into swans.