Japanese Fluffy Pancakes

The next handful of posts will all be inspired by my recent trip to Asia. I ate so much delicious food abroad and not all of it is readily available which means I have to make it at home. Probably one of the least accessible of the dishes I enjoyed is today's recipe. While in Kyoto, we specifically looked for restaurants serving fluffy pancakes for breakfast and we wound up at a little spot called Kohikan. When we ordered the pancakes, they informed us that it could take up to 15 minutes and confirmed that was okay with us, which it totally was.

These take a bit longer because unlike traditional pancakes which are thin enough to cook up in just a minute or two, these are basically just normal cake that you delude yourself into thinking is justifiably a breakfast food because it's topped with butter and syrup.

Ingredients [yields 4 pancakes]:
2 egg yolks
2 tablespoons sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
⅓ cup flour
½ teaspoon baking powder
½ teaspoon salt
¼ cup milk
4 egg whites
¼ teaspoon cream of tartar
3 tablespoons sugar

Start by separating the yolks and whites. You'll have two yolks leftover; why not make some custard or ice cream?

Address the yolks first. Add 2 tablespoons of sugar and vanilla and whisk until it goes from a rich deep yellow to a pale yellow and the mixture doubles in volume. You're looking to incorporate a good amount of air so that this mixture is light and aerated.

Sift together the flour, baking powder, and salt, and then add to the yolk mixture in installments, alternating with the milk, until everything is completely incorporated. You'll want to be moderately aggressive with your mixing to make sure the batter is pretty homogenous but make sure you're not over mixing and making the batter unnecessarily dense.

Set the yolk mixture aside and get to work on the whites. Break them up a bit and whisk until frothy and add in the cream of tartar. Whip up to soft peaks and then slowly drizzle in the sugar, whisking continuously.

As you add the sugar, the meringue should go from a bubbly-looking mixture to a white goop.

Keep whipping until you achieve stiff peaks, which just means that when you hold the whisk upside down, the meringue holds its shape. Be careful not to overwhip or you'll break the meringue and end up with clumpy, dry egg whites.

Carefully fold the meringue into the yolk mixture. Start with a little bit of meringue to initially lighten the yolk mixture and then incorporate more and more. Don't mix too aggressively or else you'll deflate too much of the air out of the batter.

Before you even add the meringue, you should actually prep your cooking set up. Grab a nonstick pan and place nonstick 4-inch ring molds inside. The amount of batter in the recipe will yield four pancakes. I had these rings from mini spring form pans. Place the pan over low heat and get it nice and hot before the batter is finished. Don't grease anything because that will just cause the cakes to deflate. If you're not confident in the nonstick status of your pan or molds, use a v. light spritz of nonstick spray but expect the cakes to deflate quite a bit.

Add a good amount of batter to each ring - divide the batter evenly - and then place a cover on the pan. I didn't have a lid for this pan so I just used a piece of foil.

When the cakes have been cooking for 4 to 5 minutes, add a few drops of water to the pan underneath the lid and let the water steam the cakes. This will help them rise and also create more heat around the rings and allow the cakes to cook through more evenly.

If you can see the difference between the initial photo of the rings with batter and the photo below, you'll see that the cakes have puffed up quite a bit. That's when you'll know they're ready to be flipped.

When the cakes have been flipped, repeat the same process. Let the cakes cook for another 4 to 5 minutes with the lid on and then steam them a bit at the end.

Look at those beautiful puffed up cakes!

While the cakes are cooking, wash some berries. The strawberries on sale at my grocery store lately have been so gorgeous. They're ripe from tip to top with a gorgeous red color so that's what I decided to have with my pancakes. Plus, the pancakes we had in Japan were served with macerated strawberries so that's just the best association for me.

Carefully remove the cakes from the pans. They'll definitely deflate a little; they're mostly collapsing under their own weight.

But they'll still be pretty high! The weight of the top cake is actually crushing the lower cake in the photo below, but that bottom cake still looks great, right?

Top with butter while they're still hot and serve with syrup.

The cakes are so light and fluffy and the sweetness isn't overwhelming but let's face it, this is basically equivalent to eating birthday cake for breakfast.

Here's the recipe page: