Sweet Flädle

Method

1. Blend the batter and sweeten it by hand. Blend the eggs, milk, mineral water, salt, vanilla and melted butter until smooth and frothy, add the flour and starch, and pulse just until the flour disappears. Stir the sugar in afterwards with a spatula rather than blending it. Sugar blended into the batter dissolves fully and makes the pancakes catch and darken in the pan before they are cooked through. Rest 30 minutes.
2. Cook down the first two thirds of the fruit. Put 200 g of the blueberries in a small pan with the sugar, lemon juice and water over medium heat. Cook 5 to 6 minutes, crushing the berries against the side of the pan with a spoon or a fork as they soften, until you have a loose jammy compote that coats the back of a spoon.
3. Add the rest of the fruit off the heat. Stir in the remaining 100 g of blueberries and let them sit in the hot compote for a minute, just long enough to warm through and start to slump without bursting. This is what keeps the filling from tasting like jam.
4. Cook the Flädle. Wipe a 24 cm pan with butter over medium heat, ladle in enough batter to coat the base, and swirl. About 1 minute a side. Sweetened batter colours faster than plain, so watch the first one and drop the heat if it browns before the surface sets.
5. Fill and fold. Spoon warm compote down the centre of each pancake, add a spoonful of cottage cheese or vanilla yoghurt, and roll or fold into quarters. Dust with icing sugar and serve the rest of the cheese alongside.

Fillings

Same batter, same fold. Roughly 300 g of fruit or a few generous spoonfuls of spread per batch.

• Warm blueberry compote with cottage cheese. The version above. Works exactly the same with frozen blueberries, which need a minute or two longer and no added water.
• Fresh berries, uncooked. Raspberries, strawberries and blackberries tossed with a little sugar and left 10 minutes to release their juice. Best in high summer when cooking good fruit is a waste of it.
• Sautéed apples. Two firm apples, peeled and sliced, cooked in 20 g butter with 20 g brown sugar and a good pinch of cinnamon for 6 to 8 minutes until soft at the edges but still holding shape.
• Caramelised bananas. Three bananas halved lengthwise, laid cut-side down in butter and brown sugar and left alone for 2 to 3 minutes until deeply caramelised, then turned once. Do not stir them or they collapse into porridge.
• Nutella. Spread thinly on the warm pancake so it melts, with sliced banana or toasted hazelnuts. Thin layers only; a thick one seizes into a solid stripe as it cools.
• Peanut butter and jam. Peanut butter spread on the hot pancake first so it loosens, then jam over the top. Salted peanut butter is much better here than sweet.
• Lemon and sugar. The plain one. Squeeze of lemon, scatter of caster sugar, roll up. Needs no filling and no planning.

Notes

• Cook the fruit in two stages whatever you use. Half broken down for body, half added late for texture. A compote cooked all at once has one note.
• Cottage cheese is the reason this works as breakfast. It brings protein and a savoury edge that stops the whole thing reading as dessert. Vanilla yoghurt is sweeter and closer to pudding; quark sits between the two and is the most German answer.
• Make a double batch of plain Flädle batter and split it, sweetening one half and folding herbs into the other, and you can put breakfast and dinner on the table from one bowl. Sweeten only the half you are using; sugar cannot be taken back out.
• Cooked Flädle keep 3 days refrigerated between sheets of baking paper, and the compote keeps a week in a jar.

Good with

• Flädle (German crêpes)
• Savoury Herb Flädle

From Christoph Mayer