When I was a kid, I loved Shrove Tuesday. Not only did we get to eat pancakes at school, but when we got home, dad would make more pancakes in a frying pan and flip them, with amusingly variable results. As far as holidays based around fat and sugar consumption went, it was a close third to Christmas and Easter.
There’s a famous pancake saying that ‘the first one goes to the dog’, and it wasn’t hard for me to argue that the first one should go to the Dom – that is, me. We invariably ate them with lemon and sugar, and that’s still my favourite dessert pancake – no need for any milk-based additives if your pancake is hot off the pan.
In Australia, we most often eat pancakes for dessert, or for a decadent breakfast, and we serve them in thick stack form with ice-cream on the side. But around the world, there are some excellent savoury versions. In South India, they stuff enormous, paper-thin lentil and rice dosai with any number of fillings, most famously masala with potato and spices.
I’ve never quite understood those North American diner-style pancakes served with maple syrup, bacon, sausages and eggs, all on the same plate. But I love the Beijing (formerly Peking) version, wrapped around slices of roast duck with shallots and hoisin sauce.
My favourite pancake of all, though, comes from France. Crêpes are ubiquitous there, and no tourist’s visit to Paris would be complete without a piping hot Nutella one from a street stall. On a recent visit, though, my wife and I fell deeply in love with the variety that hails from Brittany – the galette.
Get the recipe for Buckwheat crêpes with eggs .
Buckwheat crêpes with eggs.
The key difference with a galette is buckwheat, which not only makes them healthier than regular crêpes, , but results in a brown colour and a rougher texture. Over the course of a week, I ate five of them, ridiculously.
My favourite was the complète, which was like a buckwheat croque madame with ham, gruyère cheese and a fried egg on top, but I also tried one stuffed with ratatouille and salmon, and a plain ham one, which was delicious nevertheless.
Regular crêpes melt in your mouth, which is what makes them so perfect for dessert, but a galette feels more substantial. The taste is reminiscent of a flatbread, like a pita or lavosh. But there’s a wholemeal texture and flavour that’s somewhat like brown wholemeal bread – and with a hint of crust flavour, too.
Most crêperies in Paris offer galettes for the main course and the standard white wheat pancakes for dessert, and if you’re feeling really decadent you can have both – which we did on more than one occasion. Our favourite place, Little Breizh, also had some dessert galettes, with flavours like stewed apple, calvados, dark chocolate and salted caramel. Spectacular.
But it’s the broad range of savoury toppings that really makes galettes special. We saw a huge variety of flavours on offer – asparagus, crème fraîche, onions in mustard cream, Breton sausage, scallops, leek stew, smoked salmon. And of course there were many varieties of cheese, both goat’s and otherwise.
And that’s before you get into fusion options, which I’ve been imagining ever since – I’m desperate to try a Margherita galette with buffalo mozzarella and napoletana sauce, or perhaps a beef teriyaki one. Just about anything you can serve on a toasted sandwich should work a treat in galette form.
Buckwheat’s gluten-free, too, and given the popularity of that diet at the moment, I wouldn’t be surprised if we see a lot more of them on Australian menus in the near future.
They’re not easy to make well, though – we had one soggy-tasting galette at a street stall, but they’re best when slightly but not very crisp. Plus, the folding is quite an art – they’re most commonly served in a square shape, with the sides of the pancake folded in to contain the topping, though I also ate a raised triangle galette that reminded me of a three-corner hat.
Making galettes is a serious business in France: a teacher assists a student during a class at the Ecole Maitre Crepier in Rennes. Source: Getty Images
In keeping with the Breton theme, all the crêperies we visited recommended you wash down your galette with cider in a bowl. I developed a taste for the dry variety, which is quite unlike the sickly sweet stuff that’s often served at Australian pubs.
My search engine tells me that there are quite a few restaurants in Oz that serve galettes, and I’m determined to seek one of them out. Because once you’ve had a perfect, thin savoury crêpe, it’s hard to go back to those thick, American-style pancakes.
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Gorgeous galette recipes
Brittany galette
