How to make Shandong pancakes

1000 grams of millet and 100 grams of soybeans.

1. Wash the millet and soybeans. First, boil 500 grams of millet until it is seven-mature, take it out, let it cool, then grind it together with another 500 grams of uncooked millet and soybeans, add water and grind it into rice paste, put it in a basin to make it slightly sour.

2. Heat the pancake griddle (the fire should be slow and even). Pour a spoonful of rice paste in the center of the pancake pan with your left hand. Use the pancake spatula with your right hand to push the rice paste clockwise as quickly as possible into a pancake shape. At this time, spread the pancake pancake shape. The good batter will be cooked in about 1 minute after pushing it with a knife. Use a spatula to scrape the edges of the pancake along the sides, lift the edges with both hands, and add paper to the thin pancake. It will be brown, soft and chewy, with a slightly sour and sweet aroma.

There are three main tools for frying pancakes: one is the spatula, which is made of iron and is round. There are three types: large, medium and small. The medium spatula is about 65 cm in diameter, with a slightly convex center and three legs underneath. , use firewood or coal to heat the bottom, and pancakes can be baked on top. Pancakes are a special tool for frying pancakes. The Kangxi Dictionary has a note about "犊", and the Tang Dynasty's "Chao Ye Qian Zai" has the phrase "cooked pancakes served on hozens", which shows that pancakes have a long history. The second is a hand-held tool used to push the paste, which the locals call "chizi". It is a wooden plate-shaped arc with a handle. After putting the paste on the hot griddle, push it left and right with a spoon, and the paste will be spread thinly on the griddle surface. Some use chopsticks, while others use "bamboo splits", which have the same effect, but the pancakes they bake have their own characteristics. The third is the oil wiper, known as the oil wiper by the masses. It is a square wiper sewn with more than ten layers of cloth, with cooking oil seeping on it. It is used to wipe the griddle to prevent the pancakes from sticking to the griddle. The making process of pancakes is more complicated. It uses wheat, sorghum, corn, millet, sweet potatoes and other grains as raw materials. After washing, soaking, and then grinding them into a paste with a stone mill, the people call it "pancake paste". In other places, 1/3 or half of the clinker is put in before grinding the paste, which is called "Half and Half". People say that the paste is easy to bake and the pancakes are soft and delicious. Grinding the paste is very labor-intensive. It usually takes two or three hours to grind twenty or thirty kilograms of grain. Because the grinding speed is too fast and the paste is too thick, the pancakes will not taste good. When grinding, the ingredients must be added by experienced hands, and they must be added frequently and sparingly, so that the paste will be fine and even. In the old society, a family would usually grind the mill for those who could hold the grinding stick, and it would take most of the night to grind twenty or thirty kilograms of grain. Only wealthy families could afford to use animals to grind mills. Nowadays, with the grinding machine, the cleaned grain can also be crushed into flour, and then mixed with water to form a paste. But people always think that it is not as good as the fragrance ground by stone mill. There are already ways to make pancakes by machine, but the taste of machine-made pancakes is not as good as handmade pancakes. The traditional process of making pancakes by hand is very complicated, including grinding batter, setting up griddles, spreading or rolling, and storing. Therefore, handmade pancakes are often made in large quantities at one time and then stored for long-term consumption. The following introduces the traditional pancake making process in rural areas.

Grinding batter

Wash, soak wheat, sorghum, corn, millet, dried sweet potatoes and other raw materials, and then grind them into a paste, commonly known as "pancake batter". In some places, before grinding the batter, one-third or half of the "grog" (that is, part of the raw materials that have been cooked until eighty or nine times ripe) is added, commonly known as "half and half", which is ground after "half and half" The batter is easy to spread and the pancakes are soft and delicious. In some places, after drying the sweet potatoes and grinding them into noodles, they need to be soaked in water to extract the black water in the sweet potato noodles. Some use dried sweet potatoes to soak them directly. This is very troublesome to make. The dried sweet potatoes need to be soaked in water for about a day. After the water has completely dissolved, chop them into pieces with a knife. Then mix it with the soaked corn and grind it into a paste on a water mill. This process is time-consuming and laborious. The water mill is made of round granite grinding discs with coarse particles, with upper and lower pieces stacked together. Both contact surfaces of the disc are chiseled with stripes to increase grinding and paste ejection capabilities. There are two small holes in the upper grinding disc, and you can add the ingredients mixed with water one by one. The material can be crushed by pushing the upper grinding disc. The pancake batter for making pancakes flows out from the grinding gap of the upper and lower grinding discs. Horses, cows, donkeys and other animals can be used to push the mill. It was only used by landlords before liberation, and ordinary people could only use it. Just one person can push the small millstone. But a big grinding mill requires three or four people to push it. Nowadays, machine grinding is commonly used. Usually the batter is ground the night before, and the griddle, fire, and pancakes are set up early the next morning.

Setting up the griddle

The process of setting up the griddle can be simple or complicated. The simple erection method is to use three bricks to prop up the griddle; the more complicated method is to use hard mud to form a stove and use a bellows to blow the air. Once the griddle is set up, you can start a fire. In rural areas, corn straw or wheat straw is generally used as firewood. Lighting the fire and spreading the pancakes are often a collaboration between two people. After the griddle is heated, you can spread or roll the pancakes.

Before spreading the pancakes

Before spreading the pancakes, you often rub oil on the griddle. This not only removes the debris on the griddle, but also makes the pancakes cooked. Easy to separate from the spoon. When the griddle is hot, you can use a spoon to scoop a spoonful of pancake batter onto the griddle and spread it around the griddle with a rake. Because the griddle is hot, a layer of pancake batter is quickly solidified wherever it goes, which is the so-called pancake. The ones that are not solidified are carried forward by the rake, and this process is repeated until the entire griddle is spread. The length of the rake is exactly equal to the radius of the griddle, so if the rake goes around once, the pancake will be ready.

For better quality pancakes, use a wooden board (called a scraper) to scrape the top layer of pancake batter before it is completely solidified and cooked. This can make the top layer smooth and even in thickness. Because the pancakes are very thin and easy to cook, you have to do this very quickly, that is, within twenty or thirty seconds, otherwise they will burn. When mature, you need to use a shovel to pick up the spread pancakes along the edge of the spatula and peel them off. The size of the pancake depends on the griddle, and the diameter is generally between half a meter and 80 centimeters. The amount of batter spread on the griddle determines the thickness of the pancakes. People with advanced skills can make very thin pancakes. Making pancakes is very particular about technique and heat.

Rolled pancakes "Rolled" are generally used to make pancakes with poor texture, most of which are pancakes made from dried sweet potatoes or corn. Turn the dough into a dough in a bowl. After the griddle is heated, hold the dough with both hands and roll it evenly on the griddle. The dough will leave a thin layer of traces of dough on the griddle. When this layer of traces is cooked and peeled off, the pancakes will become. This kind of pancake is thicker. The pancakes made by this production method are relatively loose, and it is difficult to control the thickness of the pancakes. The thickness is related to how finely the flour is ground. Coarse flour is relatively thick, while fine flour is thin. This practice is rarely seen now. After a pancake is peeled off from the griddle, it is often placed on the cover mat next to it, and then the pancakes are stacked one by one. The pancakes just removed from the griddle are very soft and can be folded into a rectangular shape and placed in an urn for storage. After cooling, the pancakes become thin and crispy. Since a large amount of moisture is released during the heating process, the pancakes can be stored at room temperature for a long time. In the past, they were a must-have food for traveling far away.

Mechanical pancakes

Some of the pancake factories that specialize in the production of pancakes now use large-scale mechanical or semi-mechanical pancakes. The large mechanized griddle is like the drum of a large winch. It burns a fire inside the drum and heats the outside of the drum. The drum keeps rotating slowly, and the batter is evenly spread on the outside of the radius of the drum. When the drum is turned, a thin layer of batter spreads evenly across the same width of the drum. When the drum turns half a circle, the batter sprinkled on top is cooked, and is peeled off here. This kind of pancake is a long piece, like a piece of cloth rolled up for sale. This kind of pancake is not as delicious as the handmade ones.

Semi-mechanized pancakes

Semi-mechanized pancakes rotate, some manually, and some driven by motors. What's burning is briquettes. Nowadays, most people use this kind of griddle to make pancakes. Others are the same as the stall system, generally the diameter is 150 cm.

Good pancakes should be as thin as cicada wings and even in thickness. This not only requires that the pancake batter be ground finely and be appropriately thick, but the most important thing is to spread it. When spreading, your hands must be nimble and the heat must be appropriate. If you use the pancake continuously for four or five hours, you have to stop and cool it down, otherwise the pancakes will not be spread out. No one has explained why, but it must be done. Making pancakes is often a job for housewives. In Shandong, it used to be necessary to check whether the new daughter-in-law knew how to do the work. She only had to make pancakes once and she would know.

The pancakes that have just been peeled off the griddle are very soft and can be rolled into pancake rolls to eat, which is why pancakes are called "rolls". Pancakes that have just been cooled will be very dry due to loss of moisture, but pancakes are often stacked on top of each other and will gradually return to moisture and become soft. If they are covered with a cloth, they can be kept for a long time. When you are ready to eat, you only need to open one sheet, which is very convenient. Later, a kind of pancake came out in Jinan, which was wrapped in paper like pastry. The pancakes taste more like pastries than pancakes. What's even more intolerable is that this kind of pancake is very dry and crispy. Not to mention rolled, it just falls apart when touched. Obviously, the quality indicators of "Peach Cake" are applied to the quality control of pancakes.

To make high-quality pancakes recognized by the market, you must work hard on the selection of ingredients and workmanship. Take corn for example. Not all varieties can be used. The best ones are "oily" "small yellow" and "small red". Millet must be spring corn, while summer corn (also called late corn) has more bran and less rice. , Fachai (meaning dry and tasteless in dialect). The special pancakes are also mixed with some white sesame (black sesame dyeing affects the color of the pancake) or refined soybean powder. Then the workmanship must be fine. Everyone can say "fine", but not everyone can do it. It requires hard work and brainpower. For example, crushing corn is not like grinding it into flour in an electric mill as usual. It requires several steps. First chop it coarsely, separate the corn husks and handles, and then sift out the "floating noodles" (broken noodle handles). After grinding the raw materials into flour, the "mixing of the glutinous rice flour" is also very particular. The amount of boiling water and the amount of cold water must be mixed in proportion. Grinding the paste cannot be done with an ordinary grinder, it must be a fine grinder. For paste fermentation, you need to master the "heat" and method. The traditional method is natural fermentation. The fermented paste is easy to spread. The pancakes are non-stick and easy to store. The only drawback is that this pancake tastes slightly sour. Besides, natural fermentation is time-consuming and requires a fire to be heated in winter. The fermented " "Fire" is also difficult to control. Now we use yeast for fermentation. The advantage is that not only does the paste ferment quickly, but the pancakes are not sour and taste sweet. In the past, when making pancakes, you would usually use a pancake tong to evenly spread the batter on the griddle and wait until it was cooked, then peel it off and it was done. Now they add another step: scraping. That is, when the pancakes are not yet cooked, quickly use a "bamboo scraper" to scrape the pancakes back and forth. The scraped pancakes have a uniform surface, are crystal clear and can be stored longer. A pancake with a diameter of more than half a meter weighs less than half a pound on the scale, which shows how thin it is. Because "scratched pancakes" are particularly popular in the market, most of the "scratched" ones on the market now are.

How to make pancakes and fruits

Materials:

100 grams of mung bean flour, 100 grams of water, 250 ml of miso, a little green onion, a little egg, fried dough sticks, kelp shreds, potato shreds, pickles , appropriate amount of lettuce