Serves 6
This to me is the ultimate farm-to-table dish. It’s two components: First we take a cooked flapjack and blend it into a puree. Then we have the BLiS maple syrup—the best maple syrup out there. It’s like a crack addiction: once you taste it, you have to keep eating it. We chill a metal plate and spatula in liquid nitrogen and “cook” the pancake in the cold. Well, actually, we undercook it so that the outside is set and the inside is liquid, exactly the way you don’t want to eat a real pancake. Except that in our case, we’ve used a cooked flapjack to make the batter, so even as the diner experiences the texture of an undercooked pancake, they taste a perfectly cooked one. We put each tiny pancake in a spoon and serve it with some BLiS. It’s a super-intense flapjack and maple syrup experience that melts on your tongue like ice cream. This is one of my favorite dessert courses.
25 grams unsalted butter
45 grams all-purpose flour
17 grams sugar
1 gram baking powder
65 grams whole milk
25 grams buttermilk
100 grams cooked pancakes
250 grams whole milk
30 grams sugar
1.5 grams salt
100 grams BLiS maple syrup (see Sources, here)
Melt the butter in a small saucepot set over low heat. Put the flour, sugar, and baking powder in a medium bowl and whisk to blend. Add the milk, buttermilk, and melted butter and stir with a rubber spatula to blend, being careful not to overmix.
Set a nonstick pan over medium heat. Spray the pan with cooking spray and ladle in 20 grams of batter. Cook for 1 minute on each side, or until the pancake is golden brown and cooked through. Transfer to a plate and continue to cook the pancakes, stacking them on the plate, until all of the batter has been used.
Put 100 grams of cooked pancakes in a blender. Add the milk, sugar, and salt to the blender. Puree on high for 1 minute. Transfer the batter to a covered container in the refrigerator until ready to freeze.
In front of the guests, use a syringe to draw 20cc or measure out 20 grams of batter per person. Drop a metal plate (or cake pan) and the flat end of a metal spatula in a dewar of liquid nitrogen to chill. Remove the plate and the spatula from the liquid nitrogen and squeeze 20cc of batter onto the metal plate. Freeze for 30 seconds on each side, using the frozen spatula to flip each pancake. Put the finished pancake in a chilled metal spoon and top with BLiS maple syrup. Serve immediately and continue making pancakes for each guest, rechilling the plate and spatula if necessary.