Sher Ping Pancakes

I was reading through Jamie's America and found these Sher Ping Pancakes, which mean pan-cooked pancakes and thought, I can make these! So I did.

I'm not going to spend ages going on about the recipe, because it's not my own and I don't know enough about Chinese cookery to be able to comment on alternative ingredients/spice mixes/tips and tricks to get the pancakes right...etc. But what I can tell you is that I used plain flour for this recipe even though it called for strong white flour and my pancakes turned out fine. I also put broccoli in instead of cabbage, because, well I didn't have any cabbage. I do get moments during the seasons when I get a cabbage in the vegbox, don't use it then another fresh cabbage comes and joins it in the fridge a week later in my new vegbox. I am having that moment now with broccoli. There's only so much broccoli one can handle in the space of three days, but I have to say this is a delicious way to use it up. ;)

The pancakes themselves were very easy to make, though time consuming. I made these during a day off from work so I didn't really mind that they took a while. However the time they took was completely worth it as the end result was delicious! I am definitely making these again!

I struggled a bit with the cooking as I wanted to make sure the pork was fully cooked, the outsides crisp but not blackened, so that took some experimenting. For me it worked best on my stove with the biggest ring but on the one above lowest setting. The photo below was after the flip using the lowest setting. The second batch I made (no photos) had slightly crispier outsides.

I also worried that the sides were going to be un-cooked and stick to the roof of my mouth. But after the cooking had ended on the second side, the sides of the pancakes didn't crisp up but were cooked. I think I would prefer to have them crispy like the rest and use the sides of the pan to heat those up.

I seemed to have a lot more filling than Jamie did from the pictures in his book. Possibly because I had 100g more pork mince than him. But after the pancakes were cooked, I'd use my bigger filling again. You can see from the pictures, the top side of the pancake has a thicker pancake layer from the overlapping dough. Any thinner filling would have been lost in all that pancake.

Eating from hot is the best way to go as they're steaming when you open them, slightly too hot to hold and then start dripping with juices when you take a bite. It's messy but fun. The ginger and spring onion flavours first hit you then the meaty flavour of the pork and finally the pancake. There's lots of textures going on because the veg are still crunchy (they're cooking for a total of 8 minutes in between that pancake mix), the pork is soft and the outside of the pancake is crisp.

You can really go wild with the dipping sauce here. I used sweet chilli (from Riverford) and soy sauce. Byron later added a whole Scotch Bonnet chilli to the sweet chilli sauce as he wanted it to be spicier. Needless to say the sliced Scotch Bonnet did make it a tad too spicy. I liked dipping them into the chilli sauce, taking a bite, then into the soy sauce and taking a bite. The flavours are both complementary but in different ways.

The recipe from the book made 8 that was supposed to serve four people. We ate six between myself and Byron. Uh oh... :) Byron had the remaining two for lunch the next day, but they don't taste quite as good when they're cold, or by yourself. ;)

So if you have the book, try it. If not, let me know and I'll type out the recipe for you.