Sasha's Kitchen: Crepes With Banana & Nutella

Last night, my husband and I prepared banana-nutella crepes.  After years of hearing about the amazing crepes my husband had years ago on a trip to Paris, and tasting some inexpensive but delicious crepes at the Crooked Tree Creperie in Manhattan, we decided to prepare our own.  The trickiest part of the recipe for crepes is, sure enough, preparing the crepe batter.  I have done this twice, and the mistake I made last night, was not carefully and patiently following the instructions like I did the first time.  They were still very tasty, but the batter for the crepes was a bit thick, resulting in thicker crepes than I intended.  I think the second stop where some trouble shooting could be done was that we should have chilled the batter a bit longer after preparing it, and poured the crepes a bit thinner.  So much for not waiting two hours as Martha Stewart suggested; I guess occasionally it pays to exercise a bit of patience!  Thus, my crepes were delicious, but a bit on the heavy or thick side.  In the post below, I am going to include my suggestions for making the crepes more how I hoped they would turn out (and the way they did when I made this recipe about a year ago).

Crepe Batter (using Martha Stewart's Recipe, here)

1 3/4 cup flour

1/2 tsp salt

three eggs

5 T melted unsalted butter, plus more for skillet

Sift flour, beat eggs and whisk together the ingredients.  I am going to recommend the step I ignored and allow to chill for at least two hours (or overnight, if you prefer).  I did this the first time, and my crepes came out much thinner and perfectly. By allowing it to chill, this will thin the batter somewhat, and correct for the problem I encountered.

To prepare the crepes, heat about 1/2 a tablespoon of butter in a 8 or 12 inch pan.  Pour in about a 1/3 of a cup of batter.  We tried to make larger crepes using a bit more of the batter, but it just made them a bit on the thick side.  Cook like you would prepare a pancake, until golden brown in spots and lifted by pockets of air.  You should only need to cook for about one minute on each side, although obviously it took our somewhat thicker crepes a bit longer.

I filled the crepes with some diced bananas and melted nutella.  Even though they were a bit thicker than the first time, they still tasted great and looked pretty.  We enjoyed our crepes with a taste of Vidal Ice Wine from my trip to Inniskillin (article on Inniskillin wine-tasting here) which provided a lovely, sweet complement to the bananas and hazelnut cream.

Margie in Boston has also written about crepes, using a different approach - check out her article.  She presents some good ideas about swirling the pan in a circular motion, using a tilt.  I did not do this using my recipe, but I think doing so would improve the crepes by thinning out the batter.  I will try her technique next time.