Saturday, June 7, 2008

A Tale of Three Crepes

Omnivorous Boyfriend has been bugging me to post about our crepe adventures, and since he's doing a load of mostly my laundry right now, I shall oblige.

Crepe's are his signature dish, he's been making basic egg ones for years. He was extremely dubious they could be made vegan, but willing to try. I saw this recipe on Vegan Dad's blog and it sounded good. I made the batter and he took up his station over the miniature stove. He even brought his fancy crepe pan and flipper thing over.
I in no way want to bash on Vegan Dad, as his blog is completely made of awesome and I think he's a great chef, but these were a disaster for us. OB couldn't get the batter to pour well or manage to flip them at all. I tried some of the scraped off dough, and it tasted wonderful, but it was clear that this was not turning into crepes for us. I think it was probably the tofu - I see now that it can be subbed with ground flax seed. Perhaps we shall try it again.

Anyways, I was ready to scrap cooking and go out for bagels, but OB was set on crepes. Enter Veganomicon, stage right. I made another round of batter following the whole wheat variation (half whole wheat pastry flour). Voila! Happy crepe time ensued. I have never made 'normal' crepes, so I do not know how they compare, but I really liked these. I didn't notice a bean taste at all from the chickpea flour and the texture was great. OB was quite satisfied with them and started telling everyone how chickpea flour has amazing, magical properties. We filled them with some chocolate spread I'd gotten as a gift and fresh strawberries. So so so good.
A while later, OB cooked me a birthday dinner (aww) and tried yet another crepe recipe, the one from Vegan With a Vengeance. These are made with water instead of soy milk, so they have less density and flavor, but they cooked up great and went very well with the sweet potato filling. That filling is incredibly good - like if Indian food and Thai food had a party and invited sweet potatoes. Just a great mix of flavors. We agreed that these crepes were well suited to it.

They aren't, however, well suited to being made healthier. We tried to repeat the meal for our parents, and I put half whole wheat flour in. Disaster. The texture was all wrong. I'd like to try again with whole wheat pastry, but maybe I should just stick with the Veganomicon version for that. Ended up having to make a second batch of batter, but the parents were all impressed anyway, so no big deal. We made two fillings that time, the second being the basic potato-mushroom filling accompanying the crepe recipe in Veganomicon. Very simple but really good; it was hard to decide which was better.

Oh, OB wants me to add that all variations of vegan crepes require more oil or earth balance to cook than regular ones. Duly noted. And I'd like to add that all crepes taste better if they are made for you by a handsome man.

2 comments:

Bianca said...

Oh I'm so jealous. I've been wanting to make crepes for quite a while now. But all my pans suck balls. I have to buy a new crepe pan first...and I'm lazy and often broke, so....someday I'll have them. Until then, I drool over yours. Thanks for the recipe reviews though. When I do make them, looks like I'll be sticking with the VCon ones.

jessy said...

ohhh - sounds like a need a crepe pan, too! thanks for all the information on your trials and errors! it's super helpful when people critique recipes and such - because then we know which ones rock the hardest! anyways - your crepes look freak'n awesome!!! and i think i'm going to have to make some crepes soon. mmmmmmmm!