Bill’s ricotta hotcakes

December 27, 2009 at 11:33 pm (breakfast, F (0 stars, inedible), Necessarily nonvegan, Other)

Derek has very fond memories of eating Bill Granger’s  ricotta hotcakes when he ate at Bill’s in Sydney.  We finally got around to trying to make them ourselves last week. The recipe is all over the web, along with a huge number of really beautiful pictures of stacks and stacks of hotcakes.  Derek even tried to make the “sugar honeycomb” that’s used to make the crunchy “honeycomb butter”.  However, the recipe he used wasn’t very precise about heat or timing, and the honeycomb never crystallized.  It just ended up a big, hard slab of sticky sugary goo.  So we ended up eating our hotcakes with regular old maple syrup.

I thought the hotcakes were fine, but nothing special.  They tasted like good but not particularly unusual white-flour pancakes.  We used store-bought ricotta from the German grocery store.  Maybe the pancakes would have been significantly different if we would have had really fine, freshly-made ricotta.  As they were, however, they were simply okay.  I don’t think they were worth the calories.  I actually prefer a slightly heartier pancake, with a little more heft.  These were quite light and fluffy and “white” tasting. Rating: B-.

Derek thought that the texture was good, but the pancakes themselves were kind of bland, and undersalted.  He suspects that the honeycomb butter (and the crystallized crunch it adds) is the truly stellar part of the recipe.  Derek’s rating:  B-.