Bacon & Cheese Fritters/Hotcakes

[highlyeccentric]

I made a nom. I made it twice. I may yet make it again.


Diet: contains dairy and bacon and gluten. Other fritter recipes which do not contain the first two are widely available online. Re: gluten I suspect that the light / gluey nature of gluten-free flour mixes would be a problem; I don't recommend adapting this recipe, go find a GF tried-and-tested one and then add things to it.
Accessibility: frying things! Lots of things! But it's pretty quick, and actually these keep pretty well for a pancake-like item.



2/3 cup (Australian cup) self-raising flour
125ml milk
2 x 1 tbsp canola oil (ish - not relevant whether you use aus or US tbsp)
100g bacon chunks / lardons / whatever you have around
1/3 to 1/2 cup of grated cheddar cheese
POSSIBLY some butter

What you do

1. Fry up the bacon chunks in 1 tbsp of the oil
2. While that is happening, mix together flour, milk, and remaining oil
3. When bacon is fried, scoop out with a slotted spoon and mix it, and the cheese, through the batter. You will need to use some intuition / personal taste about exactly how much cheese and/or bacon the mix can support. (This will affect size, consistency, and whether you end up with a hotcake or a fritter type thing)
4. Prepare to fry the fritters. If you want a more frittery type, fry them in the oil/bacon fat mix. If you want something more like a pancake/hotcake, use a separate pan and a small amount of butter.
5. Fry palm-sized dollops of batter over medium heat until both sides are browned. If your batter is vr chunky, you won't see bubbles rise as you would with a pancake. If you're frying in bacon fat, you'll get a golden-crispy brown coating; otherwise aim for something that resembles a pancake. The amount of cheese might also affect the outer colour.
6. Nom. If feeling Canadian, nom with maple syrup on top.

Comments

[monksandbones]

#6 - I can attest from my pre-vegetarian days that maple syrup and bacon is a good combination (maple syrup and sausages even better)!

But I have to say the thing that continues to boggle my mind as a North American is the self-raising flour. I know it's a thing, and I think it's even a thing you can get here, but recipes rarely call for it! It seems like it would be convenient to bake with if your recipes were set up for it, but to me it's brain-meltingly weird that it seems to exist on one side of a cultural divide in the Anglophone world that splits between types of baking flour.

Different-sized baking measurements are infinitely less weird to me.

[highlyeccentric]

SR flour isn't available in switzerland, either, but a great deal of my pancake failures in the last year turn out to have been due to not adding levure chimique! It helps.

[monksandbones]

Ah yes, most pancake recipes I've seen call for baking powder, which is my English for levure chimique (poudre à pâte au Québec and on Canadian packages). My go-to pancake recipe calls for a teaspoon of baking powder and three-quarters of a teaspoon of baking soda (bicarbonate of soda/bicarbonate de sodium) to a cup of flour. I think most North American cake/muffin/quick bread recipes call for one or both where your recipes would call for self-raising flour instead!

My year in France was a sadly pancakeless one, though, because I didn't want to acquire a whole bunch of baking supplies that I wasn't going to use up. But I have pancakes for breakfast often (I make a batch on Sunday and continue to eat them until I run out of them, usually around Wednesday).

[highlyeccentric]

Yeah, I'm used to seeing flour + bp and translating to SR flour. Now I'm getting used to going the other way! For pancakes I don't actually measure out my bp, I just... throw some at the batter and call it done. Levure chimique only comes in these packages of about 3 tps, and the weight ratios recommended are for a whole pack to a large amount of flour, so I think they expect people to mix up their SR flour at home.

[monksandbones]

Oh, that's fascinating about the pre-mixing the levure chimique with the flour ahead of time. Clearly I should have dabbled more in French baking supplies! I only got as far as the different French and Quebecois words for starch (amidon versus fécule, which is the word I'm used to).

[highlyeccentric]

I mean, it doesn't say that's what you're supposed to do, but if not, why not sell either larger boxes, or sachets the right size for one cup of flour? VERY ODD.