Taste of Russia - Crepes

Sharing this crepe recipe is very important to me because it comes from my grandpa who makes the best crepes, or blinchiki, in the whole world. He is a real crepe magician - not even my grandma, my mom, or the best rated crepe restaurant can make such perfect crepes as my grandpa makes. 

As I was growing up, my grandpa would come to our home on weekends and make us a whole stack of crepes; so many that our entire family could not even finish in one day. But as he was mixing his batter and flipping the crepes on the frying pan, my brother and I would be sitting in the kitchen and waiting for the first crepes to slide off the pan.

I always loved the pure taste of crepes - a bit sweet and buttery. In fact, my grandpa would melt up some butter for me, and I would dip my fresh off the stove crepes in it and eat about a dozen of crepes in one sitting. They are that delicious! My love for crepes eventually grew into a desire to learn how to make them myself. And so I managed to get this secret crepe recipe from my grandpa and now I am happy to share it with you.

Ingredients:

Milk - 6 cups, lukewarm (you can microwave or heat it on the stove)

Flour - 6 cups

Eggs - 3

Salt - 1 teaspoon

Sugar - 3 tablespoon (depends whether you like your crepes sweet or not)

Vegetable oil - 3 tablespoons

Warm boiled water - half a cup

Directions:

In the large mixing bowl, mix the flour, salt, sugar. Then beat in the eggs and half the milk. Mix the ingredients into a thick batter; make sure to get rid of any clots of the flour. You can use an electric mixer on low speed, but you don’t have to. My grandpa never used a mixer and his batter was always perfect.

Then pour in the rest of the milk as the mixture is turning into sour cream like batter.

Stir in the vegetable oil and warm water and mix very well. Although you might be anxious at this point to start frying your crepes now, it’s better to spend more time mixing the batter than eat crappy crepes.

Heat a lightly oiled crepes pan over medium high heat. Pour the batter onto the griddle, using approximately 2 tablespoons for each crepe. It’s not easy to measure how much batter you need for each crepe. It also depends on the size of your frying pan. But the goal is to make your crepe only 1 millimeter thick, or as thin as possible.

The key to making wonderful, delicate crepes is to tip and rotate pan to spread batter as thinly as possible as soon as you poured the batter on the pan. It will take about 2 minutes to have the bottom of the crepe turn golden brown. Then carefully pick it up with a spatula, flip, and fry for another minute or so. Serve hot!

Some crepe secrets from my grandpa:

• Your crepe frying pan should be only used for crepes and nothing else!
• Never pour oil onto the frying pan - it will be too much! You can brush the crepe pan with oil, or peel and cut a medium potato in half and dip it into the oil and then spread the oil using that potato. You can also use a cooking spray, but you don’t have to spray it before every crepe. Don’t worry! Your crepes aren’t going to burn.
• The milk and water you use to make the batter have to be very warm (not hot, but warmer than room temperature). It’s essential for a good batter and consequently good crepes.
• Make many crepes at once - you will not even notice how quickly they will be gone :)

This recipe will make enough crepes for a company of eight. You can serve your crepes with melted butter, sour cream, jam, honey, Nutella, fruit, or, if you want to be a real Russian, try them with caviar!