Green Pancakes with Lime Butter

These pancakes work as an appetizer or as a starchy side to your beef steak, chicken or fish. You can even put a dollop of the lime butter on the protein. This recipe hails from Plenty by Ottolenghi. I modified it slightly to use less dishes, swapped out green onions for leeks, and changed the green chiles to serrano peppers (easier to find).

If you’re serving these guys to guests, think about the type of atmosphere you want for the evening. Are you the kind of person that everyone stands in the kitchen and pitches in? If so, you can use these as a side dish. If you’re the person who likes to visit with your guests in a living room and then have a multi course dinner that magically appears on the table, give these to your guests as soon as they enter your door.

For easy entertaining, make the butter a few days in advance and wilt the spinach and leeks the day before the dinner. The day of the dinner, mix your dry ingredients together and measure out your wet ones. Begin mixing everything about 30 minutes before your guests arrive and cook them immediately. They keep well in the oven on the lowest setting on a rack for about 15-20 minutes. If you’re new to hosting, hold off on using these for a bit. Timing the pancakes perfectly can add unnecessary stress.

Lime Butter Ingredients
8 Tbl unsalted butter
1 t grated lime zest
1.5 T lime juice
1/8 tsp salt
1/2 tsp ground black pepper
1 Tbl chopped cilantro
3/4 tsp smashed and minced garlic
1/4 tsp chile flakes

Lime Butter Directions
Let the butter soften. Zest the lime. If you don’t have a citrus zester, use the smallest holes on a cheese grater. Be careful to only grate the green part. The white part of the lime is bitter.

Take the lime that was already zested, put downward pressure and roll under the palm of your hand a few times. This will make the lime easier to juice. Add the zest, juice and remaining ingredients to the butter. Take a fork with the wide side parallel to the bottom of the bottom, and quickly move the fork left to right. You have two goals here: 1) fully incorporate the lime juice 2) make the butter fluffy. By the time the lime juice is one with the butter, the butter should be airy.

Green Pancakes Ingredients
8 ounce of baby spinach
1 leek
3 serano peppers
3/4 c whole wheat flour
4 tsp baking powder
1 tsp ground cumin
1/2 tsp salt
2 eggs
4 Tbl unsalted butter, melted
2/3 cup buttermilk
butter for frying

Green Pancakes Directions
In a 3.5 quart saute pan, add the washed spinach and place on medium heat. The spinach will mound over a little, if that makes you nervous, press the leaves down.

Wash the leek well. Slice off the roots and discard. Slice the white portion as thin as possible. As you make you way towards the green end, your knife will have more resistance. When you feel that, peel the outer layer of green off and slice the white part again until you feel the resistance. Repeat until no more tender bits.

After the spinach is wilted, remove it from the pan. You have a choice here, you can leave the spinach as i or you can chop it. Chopping it will yield a greener pancake. The whole leaf spinach adds visual interest to the pancake. My preference it to leave it whole. Add the sliced leeks and cook until it softens but doesn’t brown. Remove the leeks and add them to the spinach.

Finely chop the serano peppers.

In a large mixing bowl, mix the dry ingredients. Push the ingredients to the edges so you have a well with the bottom of the bowl exposed. Add the two eggs into the well and whisk lightly with a fork. Add the buttermilk and butter to the eggs and whisk it. Some of the dry ingredients will get mixed in, don’t worry about it. Whisk the dry ingredients with the wet ones. Add the spinach, leek, and serano peppers to the batter and mix until evenly distributed.

Heat a cast iron pan on medium low heat. When it’s hot, add the butter. When it’s melted drop 3 Tbl of the batter in the pan and gently flatten it with the back of the spoon. These pancakes have oomph to them so you want to use a lower heat than a typical breakfast pancake or the exterior will burn before the interior cooks.

When the sides set, flip the pancakes. If you go to flip them and you wonder how they’ll stay intact, let them cook a little while longer. When the underside browns, remove them from heat. Top them with the lime butter. If you want to go fancy, you can garnish it with micro greens.

Notes
You can substitute most any green for the spinach. The one green I caution you not to use is my beloved collards. They have more bite than the other greens and are too tough for the pancake.

While these pancakes have serrano and chile in them, they are not peppery. If you’re extremely sensitive to pepper, you can remove the veins of the serranos.

I tried cooking the pancakes in a saute pan, frying pan and a cast iron pan. The frying pan isn’t worth getting dirty (you already used the saute pan). The saute pan did have a little sticking. The higher sides of the saute pan did not get in the way with flipping. After 4 rounds of pancake cooking, the bottom of the pan did get fairly brown. The higher sides of the saute pan did not get in the way with flipping. The cast iron worked really well and the pancakes slid right out. It’s also extremely easy to clean so I didn’t mind having two dirty pans. If you don’t have cast iron, go with the saute pan.