In Good Taste #32: Kefir Pancakes (Oladi)/Bircher Muesli
Two ways to eat kefir for breakfast; Kickstartering tortillas; getting intimidated by Robert Caro
Well, hello there! How are you?
Good I hope. Thank you so much for being here.
(Not up for the chitchat? Completely get it. Click the email title to go to a web-based version then jump straight to the recipes, or Cultural Fun.)
Whether you’re teaching or learning or both, every day’s a school day and I like it that way. I had a nice class at the Chiswick branch of Borough Kitchen on Monday. Sadly scheduling issues means my Hampstead class on Tuesday will be my last for them for a while - the class will still be taught, just not by me. Hopefully I’ll be back at BK in the late spring though. (Subscribe to be the first to know all my upcoming course dates.)
Then on Tuesday evening I was on the other side of the cookery teaching table, attending a tortilla-making class by Michelle of the insanely popular Sonora Taqueria in Stoke Newington. The class was a Kickstarter reward from the fundraising Michelle and her husband Sam did to upgrade from market stall to bricks-and-mortar and I”d been looking forward to it for ages.
Although corn tortillas are seen as more “authentically” Mexican, wheat is traditionally used in Mexico’s northern states including Sonora where Michelle is from. It’s mixed with fat (we used lard), salt and water and makes the most beautifully flexible and flaky tortillas, reminiscent of paratha. I didn’t take many photos during the class as my hands were covered in lard (Michelle: “I never need to use hand cream!”) but you get the idea from their instagram. That slight translucence from the fat and the charred flaky bubbles! So good…
Thank you!
It’s been really lovely to receive messages (and even some comments in real life) from people saying they are enjoying the newsletter. Thank you to everyone who took the time to tell me they’d made a recipe, been inspired to draw or just that I made them laugh. It really means a lot and gladdened my heart no end. Can I ask a favour though? Would you mind gladdening Substack’s heart - or at least clicking the little heart icon at the bottom of this. Apparently it is good for algorithms which will help me readh more people. Thank you. Thank you!
Cooking with Kefir
Did you make some kefir? I hope so. If not and you would like to, then go back to last week’s newsletter, get hold of some grains and give it a go. It’s so easy and your gut will definitely thank you for it.
As well as just eating a bowlful with fruit and muesli for breakfast or a snack, kefir is a useful thing to have on hand to cook with. Like yoghurt, it can provide a creamy tang to soups, stews and curries. It’s good in salad dressings and the acidity makes it useful as the basis of a marinade for meat.
Today I’m just giving you a couple of breakfasty ideas for your kefir, both super simple. We’ll return to a few other uses soon when you’ve perhaps had more time to play with your grains and got used to making the kefir itself.
Recipe: Kefir Bircher Muesli
My standard breakfast is still just plain kefir with some fruit and muesli/granola/nuts and seeds. Sometimes I have porridge if I’m really hungry and can be bothered. Bircher muesli is a nice halfway house.
The dish seems to have had a reinvention in recent years and is now asking people to call it “Overnight Oats” - I guess as a bid to shake off a slightly uptight Swiss sanatorium vibe - but we all know it’s plain old bircher under the goji berries and chia seeds and whatnot so I say just go with it.
This is barely a recipe, more a serving suggestion. This is what I did but you can, of course, gussy up you bircher in any way that appeals. The original muesli invented by Dr Maximillian Bircher-Benner was mainly grated apples mixed with oats soaked in water and was eaten for dinner. These days yoghurt, juice or milk usually replaces the water and it’s definitely a breakfast item. But using kefir gives you digestion a boost as well as introducing plenty of tangy flavour. The oats will ferment slightly, getting tangier, if you leave it for a couple of days.
The measurements I’ve given made enough for about three or four breakfasts-worth. So scale up or down as appropriate. It will sit happily in the fridge.
Ingredients
500ml kefir
400g oats
350g blackberries
2 apples, grated
Method
Put the kefir in a container with a lid and stir in the oats and fruit.
Seal the container and leave overnight.
In the morning, eat as it is or with extra toppings.
Notes (If Ifs And Ands Were Pots And Pans…)
I used frozen blackberries which worked very nicely. You could obviously use any fresh, frozen or dried fruit you fancied and add seeds or nuts too.
Top with whatever you like. I added a little of the grain free granola that I buy for an extortionate £4.50 per tiny packet when I really ought to make my own. Banana, peanut butter and cinnamon would also be good.
Recipe: Oladi (Kefir Pancakes)
Males about 12 medium pancakes or 40 little ones
This is a more indulgent breakfast but also very easy. Even though it contains kefir this definitely isn’t a health food: Dr Maximillian would not approve. It is very nice though and would be a great thing to make with kids at the weekend.
Oladi are fluffy little pancakes, very popular all over Ukraine and Russia. They use kefir like American pancakes use buttermilk: as an acid to activate baking soda. I only encountered them for the first time at the beginning of this year when we spent a few days with our friends Sammy and Clare in Northumberland. I didn’t actually get to meet the Ukranian couple who are currently living with them but I tasted Sergii Karaschuk’s pancakes and was smitten. They were light and fluffy and not too sweet. He provided a link via WhatsApp to this recipe and I’ve tweaked it a bit.
Ingredients
200g plain flour
1 tbsp caster sugar
large pinch salt
1 tsp baking soda
250ml kefir
1 egg
vegetable oil or butter (or both) for frying
Method
Put the flour in a large bowl and add the sugar, salt and baking soda.
Put the kefir in another bowl or jug, add the egg and beat with a fork or whisk until smooth.
Add the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients and whisk until just combined. Stop mixing as soon as the texture is even and there are no visible pockets of flour left: beating any more will develop gluten and make your pancakes tough. It will also disperse the bubbles of carbon dioxide that start to form when the acid kefir meets the alkali baking soda meaning they are less fluffy too. Just don’t do it!
Leave for 15 minutes or so for the bubbles to develop but no longer than half an hour or they will begin to escape.
Put a frying pan over medium-high heat and add some oil or butter. Fry a few spoonfuls of the batter at a time, keeping an eye on the heat. Heaped tablespoons give palm-sized pancakes. Fry for about 2-3 mins then carefully flip and do the other side. They’re quite thick so adding a lid helps them cook through evenly. Eat immediately or, if not dining tag-team (which might be uncivilised but is the best way to eat pancakes IMO), keep them warm in the oven whilst you fry the rest.
Notes (If Ifs And Ands Were Pots And Pans…)
I ate mine with sour cream and cherry jam which was delicious. More accurately it was smetana, an Eastern European type of sour cream with a higher fat content. Last time I tried smetana I wasn’t impressed. I could taste the starch that had used to thicken it and it was grainy and gross. But reading online about how the good stuf was the proper thing to eat with oladi, I went to the local Polski Sklep and got some that was much nicer. There was still starch listed on the ingredients but it was so thick and creamy. I did a side-by-side taste test with sour cream and it was no contest (18% fat to 12% so what do you expect…). But sour cream or crème fraîche would also be lovely.
Alternatively, I fried some of the batter in teaspoonfuls and tossed them in sugar for a half pancake/half doughnut effect which was very nice too.
These are best eaten hot out of the pan. But I was actually first given them cold and they were still nice as an afternoon treat with a cup of tea.
Cultural Fun
Continuing our attempt to watch all the Oscar Best Picture nominations before the ceremony in March, James and I went to see The Zone of Interest (Jonathan Glazer’s loose adaptation of the Martin Amis novel about Auschwitz) on Friday and were not terribly impressed.
Glazer nails his arthouse colours to the mast from the beginning, opening with two minutes of black screen. It reminded me of Craig Brown’s parody of Amis’s Night Train which begins: “I am a serious.” And it is a serious and accomplished film. The sound editing is interesting and the performances believable. I’m just not sure it has anything particularly interesting to say.
Reviews in British Press have been laudatory but American critics don’t seem to have been so kind. I’m not sure I agree with Richard Brody in the New Yorker who called it “Holokitsch” but I do think he’s right that Glazer lacked the courage of his convictions and should have kept the action outside the camp, trusting his audience to get the point.
I wouldn’t normally make a recommendation (or otherwise) until I’ve finished something but I’ve started reading The Power Broker, Robert Caro’s Pulitzer-winning 1974 biography of Robert Moses as part of the 99% Invisible podcast’s readalong bookgroup so thought I would mention it in case anyone was interested in joining.
Moses was one of the most powerful men in the history of New York, an unelected urban planner who literally reshaped the city and state, building highways, parks, bridges and dams on an unprecedented scale. I only heard of him in 2022 on seeing David Hare’s play Straight Line Crazy at the Bridge Theatre but he seemed like a fascinating character. When 99PI, which is one of my favourite podcasts, announced a year-long project to read the book and introduced it with an episode singing the praises of Caro as a writer I was in.
The book is a proper doorstep of a thing though. I don’t have a Kindle but I really should have got one, just to avoid the backstrain of lugging this behemoth around (1246 pages plus index, 1347g, 6cm thick!). lt also would have saved me from putting my card details into a fake website and getting a load of scam phonecalls. But that’s a story for another day.
I’m only a few chapters in but enjoying it so far. Caro is known for his extreme attention to detail (The Power Broker is brief compared to his four volume - eventually to be five - biography of Lyndon B Johnson) but it goes down easy. In fact, stylistically, it’s very “great American novel”. We open on a swim team meet at Yale and go from there.
Let me know if you start!
Bye! See you next week!
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In Good Taste is a Sycamore Smyth newsletter by me, Clare Heal.
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It's so rare that I read a newsletter and immediately start scheming as to how I can fit both recipes contained into the next 24 hours. Thanks!