Savoury crispy pancake

Serves 4

Preparation time: 15 minutes
Cooking time: 45 minutes

What is a crispy pancake?  Essentially it is a savoury baked pancake that is covered in breadcrumbs.  It is crispy yet soft and delicious.   

The pancake part of this recipe is really for English pancakes, similar to crepes, (only without the butter) but a little thicker. You might think that this recipe a tad slap dash/thrown together - which might drive some people crazy - but the wonderful truth is that this pancake mix is very forgiving and that it will work well despite the slap dash approach. So, don’t worry too much, give them a go. My only cautionary word on this is pancake: folklore dictates that the first pancake just does not always work and needs to be thrown away, if this happens to you, know it happens to most of us and carry on, your second pancake will work like a dream. 

Ingredients
5 very heaped spoons of plain flour (I just use my large cutlery spoon)  
1 egg  
300ml - 500ml milk   
Oil - not olive but a flavourless oil such sunflower, vegetable, groundnut etc  
1 egg, beaten 
4 tbsps panko breadcrumbs or nacho cheese doritos crushed 

Ingredients for the curried mince 
Oil 
1 large onion, finely chopped 
3 garlic cloves, finely chopped 
350g beef mince 
1 tbsp medium Raja curry powder 
1 tsp ground turmeric 
¼ ground black pepper 
1 tsp salt  
1 tbsp Worcestershire sauce 
1 tsp vinegar, I use South African brown but any other than malt will work 
100ml beef stock 
2 tbsp Mrs Balls chutney 
50g frozen peas 

Method
Start with your filling. 

Put a wok with 1 tbsp of oil on a medium heat and then start to cook the mince over a high heat for around 10 minutes - until all of the liquid has come out of the mince and it has started to go golden.  Remove the mince and add an additional 1 tbsp of oil followed by the onion and cook over a medium heat for 3-5 minutes until translucent and soft.  Add the garlic and cook for another 2 minutes.  Add the mince back to the pan along with the curry powder, turmeric, chillies, black pepper, salt and mix, cook for a further minute.  Add the Worcestershire sauce, vinegar, beef stock, chutney and jam, mix, turn up the heat and cook for 10 minutes until the liquid has almost all gone.  Remove from the heat and add the peas.  

Preheat your oven to 180c and put a large baking tray into the oven. 

In a jug put your flour and the egg on top of the flour. Add abut 100ml of milk and stir.  The mixture will be very very thick but the idea here is to get the mixture going and it is easier to remove lumps with less liquid.  Take your balloon whisk and vigorously whisk, the best way is to go around the edge of your jug very fast as this usually removes all lumps.  Don't worry too much if it does not though, they will work out.  

Add another 50ml of milk and mix again, start slowly as it tends to slosh everywhere if you mix too fast.  Continue to add milk and vigorously whisk until the consistency resembles double cream.  The amount of milk you use really will depend on the amount of flour you added so just add a little at a time until your mixture is the right thickness.  This will be anywhere between 300ml and 500ml.  

Take a frying pan and put roughly a tbsp of oil in it, turn on the heat to medium high (on my induction I put the heat to 7).  The oil will get hot and start to almost shimmer, very very carefully swirl the oil around the pan a couple of times then pour just under a ladleful of batter into the middle of the pan.  This will start to set so you need to gently tilt and turn the pan so that the whole of the bottom is coated with batter with no gaps and there are no thick areas.  

The bottom of the pancake will take a few minutes to cook and go golden.  Once you can see it starting to colour, take your fish slice and carefully go around the inside edge of the pancake until you can slide the pancake and it is not stuck at all, check it is golden and then turn over.  Be very careful once you turn it, the bottom will take maybe only 30 seconds. 

Put your pancake on to a sheet of greaseproof paper and make the next pancake.  Each pancake should go onto its own sheet of greaseproof. 

Once all of your pancakes are done you can fill and bake.  Put the mince over half of your pancake and fold the top half over.  Get your beaten egg and using your finger, put egg on the edge of the bottom half of the pancake - this will glue the bottom and top half together.  Cover the top in the egg and scatter with the breadcrumbs.   

Put on to your preheated oven and bake for 20 minutes.