“La Chandeleur without a lot of pancakes, it’s not La Chandeleur”, launches Jeffrey Cagnes mischievously. And that’s a good thing, because it takes three to compose your “thousand hole crepe”.
Prepared from a mixture of flour and fine semolina, yeast and just a touch of sugar and salt, the pastry chef decorates them with praline and crushed hazelnuts before inviting his customers to come and taste them. “à la minute”, i.e. everything hot, between 14:00 and 17:00 from today Wednesday to Sunday, in its brand new Parisian store at 73, rue de Montorgueil (2nd).
Two yeasts instead of one
Former pastry chef of Thoumieux and Stohrer, Jeffrey Cagnes called on his Moroccan origins to bring baghrir, this specialty of Berber pancakes back into vogue. It is the two yeasts used, chemical and bakery, that give it its soft texture and its appearance full of small holes.
The two yeasts that cause the dough to swell are actually responsible for the small bubbles in the preparation, which turn into holes in the dough that settle in the pan. Hence the popular name of “thousand hole pancakes”. But how does he, this pastry genius, make us drool so much? You can just watch him do it (the video is made for that), but you can also rush into the kitchen…
The preparation of the thousand hole pastry
In a first container: Mix 90 g of flour with 225 g of fine wheat semolina. Add 1 bag of baking powder, 2 teaspoons of sugar, 1/2 teaspoon of salt.
In another container, mix 5 g of baker’s yeast in 10 cl of lukewarm water. Leave for 7 to 10 minutes, the yeast will begin to “foam”.
Mix the two preparations and add 45 cl of water while whisking. Transfer the mixture to a blender and blend until the consistency of a thick pancake batter. Pour the mixture into a bowl, cover and leave for about 30 minutes. The dough is ready. Take out your spread and toasted hazelnuts.
Two pancakes and a donut to enclose the praline
To cook the pancakes, grease (barely) a small pancake pan, cook a ladleful of batter over low heat without turning the pancake, small holes will form when cooked. Repeat the process until there is no more dough.
For the assembly, take a pancake and detail its interior with a cookie cutter to empty it of the heart and keep only the edge in the form of a ring or “doughnut”.
On the pan on low heat, place a whole pancake and run raw dough over the edges to stick the “doughnut” pancake. Add praline spread and a few hazelnuts, raw dough again on the edges and then cover with another whole pancake. Let cook for a few seconds until the dough is firmly attached and the praline melts a little, remove from the heat, divide your assembly in half and enjoy. A pleasure!
