Essential Pepin: Crepes Suzette

Gah!  I so wish I could tell you that I loved this recipe. Especially since I also failed at the crepes from The Cake Bible a long time ago. At least here, I thought, I was making a quintessential French recipe from a quintessential French man and I was in good hands. And it’s not as if it was an unmitigated disaster. They were fine. They just weren’t great and I had problems with the recipe.

Number one: as written, with 1/2 cup of milk (and I used skim), I found the batter to be way too thick.  In the side note Jacques says “the quantity of liquid in the batter can be changed to make the crepes thicker or thinner” but this was not a matter of preference. I had to add probably another 1/4 cup to get it to where I had a batter I could move around the pan properly. I also didn’t find that 3 tablespoons was enough to get a good swirl going and produce a reasonably-sized crepe and I ended up using 4 tablespoons (1/4 cup) per pancake.

Secondly, there’s just a plain old error. You are told to add ”melted butter” to the batter but it is not listed in the ingredients. It was only by reading the next recipe (Crepes with Jam) that I was able to deduce that you need 3 tablespoons.

Then there’s the Suzette problem. I processed the butter, sugar and grated orange rind in the KitchenAid as instructed but even adding the orange juice veeerrrryyy slowly I was not able to get it to incorporate. Oh well, it was all just going to be spread on the crepes so it really didn’t matter in the end. But it bugged me, can you tell? 

I did not have an “ovenproof platter” for finishing these in the oven so I used a half-sheet pan. Partly because of this I did not attempt the dramatic table-side immolation of the crepes. I did it in the kitchen where, admittedly, it was kind of a wasted spectacle.  Well, I enjoyed it.

As you can see, they looked lovely and were not bad by any means.  Just underwhelming for all their trouble.  Crepes should be easier than this and most are.  Skip this one.