Poffertjes

Ingredients

• Buckwheat flour130 g
• Plain flour130 g
• Warm milk400 ml
• Dried yeast7 g
• Egg1
• Sugar1 tbsp
• Butter80 g
• Icing sugarto taste
• Salt1 pinch

Salt and spices grow more slowly than the rest: doubling a dish does not double the pepper.

Weight converts to ounces and volume to cups. Grams of flour are not turned into cups, because that depends on how tightly it is packed.

Method

1. 1

   Dissolve the yeast and sugar in half the warm milk and let it foam for ten minutes.

   10 min

2. 2

   Mix both flours with the salt, pour in the yeast liquid, the egg and the rest of the milk, and whisk smooth.

   5 min

3. 3

   Cover and leave it an hour in the warm. The batter turns bubbly and roughly doubles.

   60 min

4. 4

   Heat a poffertjes pan or an ordinary one, butter it and spoon batter into the hollows without stirring what is left in the bowl.

   5 min

5. 5

   After a minute, when the edges set, turn them with a fork and give them forty seconds more.

   12 min

6. 6

   Serve them hot with a knob of butter on top and a generous dusting of icing sugar.

About the dish

Poffertjes are not mini pancakes: they rise on yeast rather than baking powder, and there is buckwheat flour in the batter. That is where the faint sourness, the greyish colour and the quite different moist middle come from.

The batter proves for an hour and must not be stirred before frying, or the gas escapes. Ladle it gently from the top.

They are turned with a fork or skewer once the edges have set and the top is still wet. Waiting for it to set fully is wrong: the middle is meant to stay moist.

Worth knowing

• — Without the special pan an ordinary one will do: drop the batter by the teaspoon for three-centimetre rounds.
• — Do not stir the bowl between batches. Ladle from the top, where the batter is at its airiest.
• — Eat them at once. Within ten minutes they settle and turn dense.

Nutrition

Per serving at the base yield, calculated from the ingredients rather than measured in a lab.

Calories

420 kcal

Protein

11 g

Fat

18 g

Carbs

54 g

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