How to make crêpes

Making good crêpes takes no more than a little practice and one or two crêpe or omelet

pans. It may take you 15 minutes to master this simple culinary art, may take you longer. (Your not-

too-finicky pets will be delighted to get rid of your failures and call them successes.) You need a

frying-pan with a flat bottom and gently sloping sides. Using a regular sauté pan with steep sides is

difficult and frustrating. The crêpe takes up the entire bottom and in a steep-sided pan they are hard

to turn over and remove.

Cookbooks instruct you to reserve a pan just for crêpe making. I find this unnecessary. We

all have limited storage space and budget. Once a pan, any pan, is properly seasoned, you can use it

for any purpose as long as it remains seasoned. What seasoning does is to coat the metal surface

with a fine film of oil, filling the microscopic irregularities and preventing food from sticking. Using

soap and water removes that film. To clean up a well-seasoned pan, rinse it with plain hot water or

wipe it out with a paper towel and it is ready for the next use. If you prefer a non-stick pan, that

works well for crêpes, too. I like a 10 to 11-inch (25 to 28-cm) omelet pan best.

It is more efficient to make crêpes in two pans at a time. You can make double the number

of crêpes in the same amount of time by staggering the starting of each. You do need two identical

pans so the cooking time is the same in both—while one is just browning, the second is ready to

come out. Add the batter to the first pan, and a minute later to the second pan. As you turn over the

original, the second pan is browning the first side of that crêpe. Lift the finished crêpe from the first

pan and turn over the one in the second pan. Then pour more batter into the first pan, and so on.

With a little experience you can average a crêpe in less than a minute. Experienced professionals

use three pans at a time. It is not as hard as it sounds, but how many of us have three identical crêpe

or omelet pans?

Once you start cooking the crêpes, make sure nothing interrupts your rhythm. Prepare

everything you will need beforehand. A little bowl of oil (or melted clarified butter) and a brush to

just barely coat the pans, a spatula for loosening the cooked crêpes and turning them (if you are

good, you can flip them without a spatula) and a plate to stack them. You don't have to keep coating

the pan with oil every time after the first few. Enough oil sticks to the surface to keep several more

crêpes from sticking. If you want the characteristic brown mottled appearance, though, it is best to

oil the pan each time you start a new crêpe, so the first side, which will be the outside of the finished

crêpe, looks good.

Since crêpes are so thin, they cook very quickly in a hot pan. The first side should brown in

less than a minute. Once you turn it, the second side only needs 10 or 15 seconds, just until a light

beige color has developed. If you brown the second side too much, the crêpe loses too much

moisture, it becomes crisp, rigid that is hard to roll or fold.

How to roll and serve

There are two traditional ways to roll a crêpe: into a cylinder if the filling is firm, or folded

like an envelope or packet if the filling is soft and there is a chance for leak.

To produce a simple rolled crêpe, lay out a crêpe pretty side down, spread filling over the

surface almost to the edge and roll up like a thick cigar. Place on a plate seam down. For a runnier

filling, place the filling on the lower third of the crêpe (the third nearest you), roll the crêpe around

the filling away from you until you reach the center. Then fold in the two sides quarter way over this

partial roll and continue rolling all the way so the tucked-in sides are part of the roll. Place on lightly

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