Bill Granger's Ricotta Hotcakes

Ricotta Hotcakes
Home Cooking



A strange feeling came over me last Friday and it lead to me making hotcakes. I remembered about ricotta in my fridge and I remembered Bill Granger's ricotta hotcakes. I actually ate them at his cafe in Sydney. They were delish but I never made them myself before.


A quick Googling unveiled the recipe, which seemed very straight forward. I didn't want to make the whole lot and use 4 eggs and in any case, I didn't have enough ricotta for that.


I halved the recipe when I made my hotcakes but for the original, click here. I also chose to use self-raising flour instead of plain flour plus baking powder

Ricotta Hotcakes
Serves 2-3

Ingredients:

• 1/2 cup ricotta
• 1/3 cup milk (I used full cream)
• 2 eggs, separated
• 1/2 cup self-raising flour
• small pinch of salt
• 20g butter

Procedure:

1. Mix together the ricotta, milk and egg yolks.2. Sift the flour and add to the milk and ricotta. Mix until just combined. It doesn't matter if the ricotta is lumpy.3. Beat the egg whites until stiff peaks form.
4. Fold the egg whites gently through the batter.
5. Heat a fry pan to medium high and dollop a bit of butter on. I like to then wipe the excess butter off with a bit of paper towel because I find that pancake-type things don't finish well if there's too much grease in the pan.
6. Drop 2 tablespoons of batter per pan. Bill Granger reackons you shouldn't try more than 3 per fry pan and I think that's a good rule. Cook each side for about 1-2min (he says 2min on medium-low but I did 1min on medium-high) or until it's golden and flip.7. Serve hot!


Most recipes I found suggested serving the hotcakes with honeycomb butter. I didn't bother with that but instead whipped up a butterscotch sauce with butter, brown sugar and Phily's cooking cream (actually cream cheese). I also dolloped some vanilla ice-cream on but whipped cream would have been good too.


The texture of these hotcakes were unbelievable. I had left the mixture lumpy so it had nice areas of melty ricotta (like the ones I tried at Bill's cafe). I usually make pancakes without a recipe and I think I'm getting to be quite the gun at it but these were much better than my usual.


At the time, I thought I was wasting energy beating eggwhites and folding it into the batter but I think it really makes a difference. Give it a go yourself.