Oh So Good Dutch Baby with Lemon Sugar – Lemony Goodness for a Spring Time Breakfast

Some people call this oven baked pancake/popover a Bismark, while others call it a Dutch Baby. Both are baked in a cast iron skilled in a hot oven where they puff up dramatically and make an impressive breakfast dish. The Bismark was one of the most popular recipes in the original Silver Palate Cookbook, one of the best selling cookbooks of all times. Normally it’s served with powdered sugar and fresh lemon wedges, or it can be gussied up with fresh fruit as I did in a previous post several years ago. Click to see my Bismark with fresh raspberries and blueberries. It’s also delicious with sautéed apples and cinnamon.

That particular post with the Bismark topped with fresh seasonal fruit was very popular and I thought you might enjoy reading some of the reader’s comments on how they like to serve this delicious treat:

- “Sometimes we serve it for Sunday morning breakfast, other times as a dessert.”
- “We call is a German baked pancake. It’s my daughter’s favorite and I’ve acquired 4 small cast iron skillets and the next time they visit it will be individual small ones instead of big ones.”
- “Dutch Baby is becoming my easy / fancy weeknight meal – nothing to it, but I’ve also found a savory recipe that uses diced ham and gruyere cheese – delicious!”
- “I’ve been looking for fancy recipes to make while camping. This could easily be adapted to campfire oven cooking.”

This comment was perhaps my favorite: “If every morning started out with one of these, I’d never have a bad time.”

I recently found this recipe in a Gourmet publication Gourmet Comfort and fell head of heels in love with their picture and the lemon sugar. As you can see, it rises up dramatically in the oven, but deflates somewhat after it’s removed. I like to show it off as if comes out of the oven and then I don’t worry about it when it deflates. It tastes so good no one will notice.

Two tips to pass on. Most of the recipes for Dutch Babies and Bismarks call for using somewhere between a half stick of butter to a full stick. If you shutter at that much butter (I do), I assure I’ve made these many times using only 2 tablespoons of butter and you would never know the difference. I also like to grate the nutmeg myself (it’s so much better than the powdered stuff) and it’s super easy if you have a microplane rasp (the same one you use to zest a lemon). Just grab a nutmeg nut and scrape it along the rasp. Voila, freshly grated nutmeg. Now you can throw the powdered stuff way.

If you have house guests for Easter or if it’s just the two of you, pop a Dutch Baby in the oven and “start your day off right.”

Dutch Baby with Lemon Sugar
Gourmet Comfort & Epicurious – serves 4 (or 2 hungry ones)

Printable recipe

Lemon Sugar:
1/3 cup sugar
2 teaspoons grated lemon zest

For Dutch Baby:
3 large eggs, warmed in their shells in very warm water for 5 minutes
2/3 cup whole milk brought to room temperature
2/3 cup all-purpose flour
¼ teaspoon good quality pure vanilla extract
1/8 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/8 teaspoons freshly grated nutmeg
1/8 teaspoon salt
½ stick (4 tablespoons) unsalted butter, cut into pieces (if you are watching your calories, 2 tablespoons works perfectly fine)
Garnishes: Lemon sugar, lemon wedges, your favorite jam, whatever you like

Stir the sugar and lemon zest together in a small bowl and set aside. Put a 10” skillet (preferably cast iron), on the middle rack of an oven and pre-heat the oven to 450 degrees F.

Beat the eggs with an electric mixer at high speed until pale and frothy, then beat in the milk, flour, vanilla, cinnamon, nutmeg and salt. Continue to beat together one minute more (batter will be thin). Set aside.

Remove the hot skillet from the oven and add the butter pieces and melt, swirling to coat. Add batter and immediately return the skillet to the oven. Bake the Dutch baby until puffed and golden brown, 18 to 25 minutes. Serve immediately. Top the Dutch baby with a sprinkle of the lemon sugar. Serve with fresh lemon wedges

Or with your favorite jam.

I will be sharing this recipe with Foodie Friday at Rattlebridge Farms, Miz Helen’s Country Kitchen Full Plate Thursday, On the Menu Monday at Stone Gable, & Food on Friday at Carole's Chatter.

I hope everyone has a happy Easter and Passover and it doesn’t rain on your parade. I’ll be wearing my Easter bonnet. Will you?

What to serve house guests for breakfast

This past weekend my husband’s brother and his wife flew down from Long Island and were our house guests. They came to take a look at our beautiful western North Carolina mountains to see if it’s a place they might like to live when they retire. If you watched the news over the weekend, you know that the entire southeast was drenched with rain and flooding. We live about a hundred miles north of Atlanta and within a fifteen minute drive of the northwest Georgia border and about the same distance from eastern Tennessee.

When we woke up Monday morning and watched the news from Chattanooga, the weather was so bad they listed the schools that were open rather than the ones that were closed because there were so many more closed than open. Knowing they didn’t want to miss their flight from Chattanooga that stopped briefly in Atlanta (where there was massive flooding) on the way back to New York, I decided to make something quick that we could eat for breakfast before we left for the airport.

I choose Ina Garten’s Breakfast Fruit Crunch which I adopted from her Barefoot Contessa at Home cookbook. I used purchased granola, but Ina made her own and served her fruit crunch in parfait glasses. Since I didn’t have parfait glasses, I substituted martini glasses. I’ve never eaten granola with pineapple, but I found it quite refreshing. Feel free to substitute different fruit combinations, such as apples, pears, bananas and red grapes in the winter. Peaches or nectarines with blueberries, strawberries and kiwi would also be pretty. This recipe is my favorite breakfast for a guest in a hurry.

Breakfast Fruit Crunch

Adapted from Barefoot Contessa at Home by Ina Garten

8 to 10 strawberries, diced

½ cup blueberries

½ cup raspberries

¼ fresh pineapple, diced

1 teaspoon grated lemon zest

2 cups plain Greek yogurt

1 teaspoon cinnamon

2 cups purchased granola, preferably flavored with vanilla

Combine the strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, pineapple and lemon zest in a bowl. Add 1 teaspoon cinnamon to the yogurt. If your granola isn’t flavored with vanilla, you might want add a little good vanilla extract, such as Nielsen-Massey’s Madagascar Bourbon, to the yogurt.

In four martini glasses alternately layer half the fruit, then the yogurt and sprinkle with granola. Top with remaining fruit and a few sprinkles of granola and a small dollop of yogurt. If you’re using parfait glasses which Ina used, you’ll be able to have two layers. In that case, alternately layer half the fruit, then half the yogurt and sprinkle with granola. Repeat with the second layer of fruit, yogurt and granola. Serves four.

Printable recipe

Oven Baked Pancake / Popover – so easy it practically makes itself

Some people call this oven baked pancake / popover a Bismarck while others call it a Dutch Baby Pancake. Both are baked in a black cast iron skillet in a hot oven where they puff up dramatically in a few minutes and make an impressive breakfast dish. The Bismarck was one of the most popular recipes in the original Silver Palate Cookbook, one of the best selling cookbooks of all time which has recently issued a 25th anniversary addition. It can be served plain with powdered sugar and fresh lemon wedges or gussied up with fresh fruit or sautéed sliced apples.

The first time we ate a Bismarck was in 1995 when we lived in the Abaco Islands in the Bahamas. One evening good friends invited us for an elaborate gourmet dinner at their home and extended an invitation to stay over for the night. Nasty weather was predicted and they didn’t want us driving the boat home in the dark. How could we decline an invitation such as that? Besides, our friend Tony was the Julia Child of our crowd. The next morning his wife Diane, also a fine cook, prepared their favorite breakfast – a Bismarck straight out of The Silver Palate Cookbook. We watched as Dianne quickly whirled flour, milk and eggs in a blender until she had a smooth batter. Meanwhile Tony melted some butter in a black cast iron skillet and, when it was melted, poured the batter in the pan and popped it in a hot oven for ten minutes or so. It rose like a popover and we instantly fell in love until we realized Tony had used a whole stick of butter for one pancake.

Even though it’s an easy recipe, it’s only been in the last five or six years that I’ve mustered up the courage to give it a try. Why you ask…well, the original recipe called for 8 tablespoons of butter, in other words an entire stick. One day I read that if you have a well-seasoned cast iron skillet, it can double as a non-stick pan. A light went on in my head. By gosh, they are right. So I decided to reduce the butter in the original Bismarck recipe to two tablespoons and give it a try. I didn’t have much to lose and the basic ingredients were cheap – eggs, flour and milk. The results produced a success and we didn’t miss the other 6 tablespoons of fat. I also added a pinch of salt and some freshly grated nutmeg to the batter. We served it with confectioner’s sugar and lemon wedges, just like we’d always done with popovers. I also added some fresh raspberries and strawberries and it was an instant hit. In the winter we like to sauté apples, season them with cinnamon and sugar and use them in place of the fresh berries.

It’s funny how things can happen in your life that parallel other people’s experiences and you don’t even realize it at the time. (I would love to hear if it’s ever happened to you.) Molly Wizenberg, author of A Homemade Life and the immensely popular blog Orangette, tells a similar story about the first time she had the pancake at the home of friends in Seattle. Her pancake was called a Dutch Baby instead of a Bismarck and she too decreased the butter in her version. Molly’s recipe calls for four eggs instead of two and she uses half-and-half in place of the low fat milk we like.

Martha Stewart calls the Bismarck a Dutch Baby Pancake as well but adds sugar and vanilla extract in her recipe which appeared in the March 2009 issue of Everyday Food. As you can see, this pancake has made the rounds and adaptations abound. No matter what you call it or how you vary the ingredients, it's a winner.

Oven Baked Pancake / Popover

Adapted from the Bismarck in The Silver Palate Cookbook

2 large eggs

½ cup all-purpose flour

½ cup 2% milk

Pinch of salt

Pinch of freshly grated nutmeg

2 or more tablespoons sweet butter

Fresh lemon juice + a few lemon wedges

Confectioner’s sugar

Fresh raspberries and blueberries, optional

Heat oven to 450 degrees F. Whisk together 2 large eggs, lightly beaten, with ½ cup flour, ½ cup milk, pinch of salt and a pinch of freshly grated nutmeg.

Melt 2 tablespoons of sweet butter in a 10” cast-iron skillet over medium heat. Pour batter into skillet; place in oven. Bake until the pancake is golden and fluffy, about 10 to 12 minutes.

Remove from oven. Quickly remove the pancake from the pan and on to a serving plate. Sprinkle with fresh lemon juice and confectioner’s sugar. Add a few raspberries and blueberries, if using. Roll loosely jelly-roll fashion, slice and dust with more confectioners’ sugar. Garnish with more berries, if using. Pass lemon wedges at the table. Serves 4, unless you love it; then it only serves 2.

Variation: In the winter we like to sauté sliced apples with a little cinnamon and sugar in a skillet until desired degree of doneness and serve in place of the fresh fruit.

Printable Recipe

Update – Saturday, May 16, 2009

Yesterday when I did this post there was a nagging thought in the back of my mind that I was leaving something out of this post. Now I know what it is thanks to T. W Barritt. He left a comment that triggered my memory. His fabulous blog, Culinary Types, featured a savory Dutch Baby this past February. Savory ingredients such as gruyere and ham bring a whole new dimension to these pancakes. Thanks T. W. for reminding me. I urge everyone to click over to Culinary Types to see his pancake dinner and the savory Dutch baby.

Award

Martha from Lines from Linderhof has graciously presented me with the “One Lovely Blog Award” and I am very grateful. Martha and I both have a lot in common as we both write a food column for our local newspapers. She lives on the prairie in Kansas in a lovely 1920’s home. Her blog is filled with great recipes as well as gardening and decorating ideas. Be sure to drop by and say hello.

I would like to pass the “One Lovely Blog Award” on to my friends and readers who visit my kitchen and leave their comments, which I enjoy reading immensely. Please feel free to post the award on your blog and, if you wish, nominate 10 other blogs and link to them. Send some love back to the person who bestowed the award on you by telling them who gave you gave it to and posting a link to their site. Let your nominees know that they’ve received the award. If you do pass the award along, please let me know. I would appreciate it.

Hugs to you all.

Sam