Chestnut flour pancake 栗の粉のパンケーキ

When we got this year's shipment of North American Chestnuts I prepared my usual Chestnut rice and other chestnut dishes. In an effort to expand our seasonal chestnut repertoire my wife hit the internet and came up with several recipes using chestnut flour. This is an ingredient we have never used before so my wife had to hit the internet again to find where we could purchase some. She got chestnut flour from Amazon and we made these pancakes one weekend. This also uses almond flour which we just happened to have in our freezer (how it got there and why is another story).  By the way, this pancake is gluten free if that is important to you.



For a pancake without any wheat flour, this one came out very fluffy. I also added my chestnut in syrup as a garnish.



I used a small amount of maple syrup but this pancake is rather sweet and may not need any additional syrup.



This recipe came from this site. We modified the recipe using our CCK (Common Culinary Knowledge)

Ingredients: (4 pancakes)

- 3 Large Eggs
- 1 Cup Chestnut Flour sifted
- 1/3 Cup Blanched Almond Flour sifted
- 3 Tbs Granulated Sugar
- 2 Tsp double acting Baking Powder
- Pinch of Salt
- 1/4 cup Milk*
- 1 tsp Vanilla Extract
- 1 Tbs. melted Butter

Directions: sift the flours. (This step can not be skipped because the chestnut flour has a tendency to clump and without sifting ends up with several hard lumps). Mix the dry ingredients in a bowl and the wet ingredients in another bowl. Stir the two together. Adjust the amount of milk to get a pourable consistency. Ladle the batter into a hot pan with a little olive oil on the bottom. Cook as you would any other pancake.

*Note: It is important to have a appropriate consistency when making pancake batter. We had to add over 1/4 cup of milk (more like 1 cup) to get a "spreadable" consistency so that the batter would spread in the pan (see below). Probably we could have added more liquid to make it spread to fill the pan. We also omitted "vinegar or lemon juice" included in the original recipe since double action baking powder has it's own source of acid to activate and we judged that "acidic" taste will not be good in the pancake.



The pancake tends to brown quickly because of the sugar.



This is a great pancake.  Despite being gluten-free, it has a very fluffy fine texture. It is slightly sweet and because of the chestnut flour, it has a hint of chestnut flavor as well. Amazingly we were surprised that the pancake seemed to have a “chocolate” flavor. If we did not know how it was made we would have sworn that it included coco powder; although it clearly did not. Because of the special flours, this tends to be a rather expensive pancake to make but we really liked this and we will definitely make it again.