knife. It is then mixed with the soaked corn and ground into a paste on a water mill. And this process is time-consuming and laborious. The water mill
is made of a coarse, round granite disk, with two pieces stacked on top of each other. Both contact surfaces of the discs were chiseled
with stripes to increase the grinding and discharging capacity of the paste. The upper disk has two small holes cut into it to allow the material to be added by spoonfuls
of water. Pushing the upper plate crushes the material, and what comes out of the gap between the upper and lower plates is the pancake batter used to make the pancakes.
Pushing the mill is done with a horse or a donkey, or with a horse and a donkey. You can use horses or donkeys to push the mill, but that was only possible for landowners in the pre-liberation period, and ordinary people only had people to
push it. A small mill can be pushed by one person. But the big mill to three or four people can push. Later, when electric water mills became available,
people were freed from this heavy physical labor.
The next step was to make pancakes. The first tool was a griddle, a round cast-iron iron
plate, flat and smooth on top, with three corners for support and a space between the griddle and the ground for
adding wood to the fire. Then there is a rake, a wooden board with a handle pressed vertically on it, which can be dragged by hand, or
"spread". When the griddle is hot, use a spoon to scoop up a spoonful of pancake batter on the griddle, with a rake along the griddle to spread
a circle, pancake batter where it is quickly coagulated into a layer of unsettled batter was raked forward, rake
length is exactly equal to the radius of the griddle, the rake around the field for a week, the pancake is into. In order to pancake quality is better, in the upper layer of the pancake
cake paste is not completely solidified before frying, with a wooden board (known as scraper) in the top scraping, you can make the top of the flat
neat and uniform thickness. Because the pancake is thin and burns easily, this operation requires a quick eye and hand. When it is ripe, you can
cover it up. The size of the pancake depends on the griddle, usually between half a meter and 80 centimeters in diameter.
Good pancakes should be thin and of uniform thickness. This not only requires that the pancake batter be finely ground and properly thickened, but most importantly
is the spread. When you're doing it, you have to be smart and have the right amount of heat. Pancake spreading is often the housewife's work, in Shandong over
to examine the new daughter-in-law will not do the work, as long as the spreading of pancakes can be known.
Just off the griddle, the pancake is very soft, you can roll it into a pancake roll to eat, so there is a "pancake rolled onion"
The saying. The newly cooled pancake will be dry due to loss of moisture, but the pancakes are often stacked on top of each other, and gradually become soft again
and can be kept for a long time by covering them with a cloth. When you are ready to eat, you only need to remove one sheet, which is very convenient. After
Come out in Jinan, a kind of pancake, like a pastry wrapped in paper. That kind of pancake tastes sweet and more like a pastry, unlike
pancakes. What is even more intolerable is that this kind of pancake is given a very dry and crispy, needless to say rolled, just touch and crumble.
The ratio of groundnut to corn in the pancake varies, as does its color. I especially like the kind of pure yellow corn pancakes
Pancakes, if it is freshly produced corn pancakes, golden color, eat the smell of corn, the taste is very
crisp, is a good example of fine grain - the same grain made of corn and tortillas can not be comparable.
Pancakes are also a richly varied food. In addition to dried groundnuts and corn, they can be made with a variety of other ingredients, such as
soybeans, which make them much more flavorful. Pancakes made from wheat are very sinewy, and the best are, of course, millet pancakes, but millet
is not plentiful, so naturally you don't eat much of it. The worst is the sorghum pancake, which tastes astringent and faggy. It is the same
ingredients that can be varied. For example, in the summer, the pancake batter is ground and left for a day to turn sour on its own, making
pancakes with a sour flavor very special. Some people intentionally leave some pancake batter behind when spreading pancakes, and then spread it again the next day just
for the sake of eating these sour pancakes. In fact, my favorite pancake is persimmon pancake. When the persimmons are shantung and wait until they are ripe on the ground,
the persimmons will soften. Before the pancake is cooked, put the peeled persimmons on it and use a spatula to scrape them evenly
over the pancake. When cooked, the pancake is reddish red and tastes sweet and very tasty. The fiber of the grain and the vitamins of the fruit are
naturally rich in nutrients. For modern people who are tired of eating big fish and meat, it is simply a healthy food.
There is also more than one way to make pancakes. Some places do not use the stall, but the dried groundnut flour or corn flour with water and a large piece of
dough, with the hands of the griddle rolled on a layer. This kind of pancake eliminates the process of grinding the batter, and the pancakes are fluffy and very
many, but their thickness is not controlled, often too thick, and the flavor is far more delicious than the pancake batter.