Poffertjes!

(Nederlandstalige versie)

When I included a picture of poffertjes in a MoFo post last week, I got a few requests for the recipe. I couldn’t exactly remember how I made them, so I thought this was the perfect excuse to make them again. Today’s pictures are a bit more gloomy than the one I took last summer, but I guess it’s fitting since poffertjes are excellent cold weather food.

I started with this basic poffertjes recipe from the Dutch Wikipedia article, veganised it, and made a few changes. Here’s my version:

Ingredients:
500 ml (2 generous cups) soy milk
2 tablespoons sugar or keukenstroop
1 1/2 teaspoons instant yeast
1 tablespoon sunflower oil (or other neutral-tasting oil or melted margarine), plus more to grease the pan
140 g (1 cup) plain flour
130 g (1 cup) buckwheat flour
1/2 teaspoon salt

1. In a large bowl, mix together the soy milk, sugar, yeast, and oil. Add the flour, buckwheat flour, and salt and mix into a smooth batter. Cover the bowl with a tea towel and let sit for about an hour or so to rest.

2. Just before the batter has finished resting (it won’t rise very much), put your greased poffertjespan (see below) on the stove over low heat (Wikipedia says high heat, but I prefer to start with low…) until it’s very hot. If you’re cooking the poffertjes in a waffle iron, you may want to follow the instruction manual, but I just cooked mine at the middle setting and that worked fine.

3. Scoop the batter into the indentations in the pan: I use a measuring spoon and use about a tablespoon of batter per poffertje. Flip the poffertjes when the tops are dry and the bottoms are browned — this can go very quickly, so make sure you watch them. If they stick to the pan, just use the corner of your spatula and gently try to pull them out.

4. Once the poffertjes have been cooked on both sides, remove them from the pan, add a new coating of oil if necessary and repeat the process with the remaining batter.

5. Serve with margarine, powdered sugar, and/or keukenstroop. Eet smakelijk!

I used this cast-iron pan to make the poffertjes. (Molly wanted to be in the picture, which rarely happens, so of course I let her!). I’m not entirely sure where it came from, only that my parents have had it for a long time and it says “Koopmans” on the bottom. Apart from the pan, I also have a waffle iron that makes poffertjes:

My Grandma gave it to me to make waffles, but it has removable plates so you can use it for toasties as well, and the ones pictured above look like they’d be perfect for poffertjes. (Update: they are!).

However, if you don’t have a poffertjespan or a poffertjes iron, don’t worry! I tried making the poffertjes in a regular frying pan today by just dropping little blobs of batter into it and they were fine:

They’re a bit flatter and not as evenly shaped, but they’re almost just as tasty.