Breakfast
Breakfast
Cooking pancakes on a cast iron griddle creates a crispy outside, with a soft inside. Using buttermilk in your pancakes recipes give the pancake a lot more flavor. Variations on this recipe include cinnamon and apples, blueberries, chocolate chips--whatever strikes your fancy. or just stick with the classic buttermilk version. Regardless, this recipe is way better than the store bought pancake mixes, and almost as easy.
I was given this recipe by the folks at the Little River Inn, just outside of Mendocino. If possible, make the batter the night before and store in the refrigerator. That way, the next morning, simply heat your griddle, and ladle on the batter. These are the best pancakes of any kind I have ever tasted!
Being from San Francisco, I love sourdough. I also love pancakes. So, when I ran across this recipe in NY Times Cooking, I had to give it a try. I made it with apples. If you don’t have sourdough starter, you can get some here.
My local neighborhood restaurant makes fantastic lemon ricotta pancakes. While looking for a good recipe for them, I ran across this recipe in Food & Wine Magazine for Blueberry ricotta pancakes. Both lemon and blueberry ricotta pancakes sounded good to me so I combined the two into this recipe by adapting the Food & Wine recipe to include fresh Myers lemon zest and lemon juice to get the best of both worlds! Yum.
My mother made these for us every Sunday morning. She called them “German pancakes”. I still make them for my kids on Sundays, served with candied bacon and fresh squeezed orange juice. This is probably my family’s favorite breakfast.
This recipe has evolved for me over the years. Just as important as using the right ingredients is using the right bread. I’ve found brioche bread works best, although I’ve had good luck with Challah bread and good quality croissants as well.
A family friend served these to our daughter who claimed they were the best waffles ever. I tracked down this recipe in NY Times and gave it a try. She was right. If you don’t have sourdough starter, you can get some here.
You have a lot of cast iron options when it comes to making crepes. An obvious option is a griddle, which is what I used to use. Recently I tried a 6" skillet with good success. With a skillet you can swirl the pan and easily get the batter layer nice and thin, and the cast iron holds the heat at a steady temperature.
While hunting around for a cinnamon roll recipe I could adapt to cast iron, I ran across an image of a single cinnamon roll filling an entire full size cast pan on the Tasty. I had to give it a try. It’s worth the effort and has quite a “wow” factor when it comes out of the oven!
🥞 Café Beaujolais Coffee Cake (coming soon!)
I used to live in Mendocino, about 500 feet from Café Beaujolais. I used to eat breakfast just for the coffee cake. I can’t even tell you what else they had on the menu. I’ve had a lot of coffee cakes in my life, but nothing that comes as close as a warm piece of Café Beaujolais Coffee Cake, a fresh squeezed orange juice and a good cup of coffee.
As you will see in this cookbook, I have a thing for blackberries. When I lived in Mendocino, we had a path down to the beach that was filled with blackberry bushes. This blackberry scones recipe is the latest, and maybe the best, blackberry recipe of them all. For these scones, I use an English recipe, which creates lighter and fluffier scones than the American style.
Biscuits are just one of those dishes that needs to be made in cast iron. Either serve it as a side dish with any meal, or with my biscuits and gravy recipe. I use my Griswold #1108 “Cookie Sheet” for these.
I briefly lived with my aunt while I was in high school, and she would make this gravy and serve it with a grilled pork chop. I adapted her gravy recipe for biscuits and gravy. If you want to jazz it up a little you can top the biscuits with poached eggs before slathering them in gravy to make the famous “Redneck Benedict” served by Alice's Restaurant in Skylonda, California.
A great example of a dish where cast iron just makes it better. The skillet creates a nice golden crust on the hash browns. This is a great side dish when making a big breakfast. The key to good hash browns is the first step, where you rinse the shredded potatoes under cold water, and then squeeze out the water prior to seasoning and cooking.
I should have made this the first recipe I posted on The Cast Iron Chef. I have probably had more questions about frying eggs using cast iron than all my other recipes combined. If you have a well seasoned pan, and follow these steps, with a little practice, frying eggs with a cast pan can be a breeze.
My wife Katie has adapted this from a recipe from her mother. Sometimes she will quadruple the recipe so it’s big enough for the whole family. Somehow she can flip it. If this was the only omelet I ever ate, I’d be just fine with that.
I adapted this recipe from an asparagus skillet quiche on Tasty website. I took my quiche lorraine recipe I learned at Le Cordon Bleu and modified it for baking it in cast iron. I like making this on weekends because the family can warm it up and eat it for breakfast, lunch or dinner.
I was watching an episode of Sam the Cooking Guy on breakfast skillets, where he made a skillet breakfast using hash browns and pulled pork. All I could think about is how good this would be with a chorizo and a Mexican 4-cheese blend...
This dish is served at one of my favorite brunch spots, The Redwood Grill. I was experimenting on recreating it myself when I found this recipe on a food blogging site called the striped spatula. It’s pretty close to the Redwood Grill’s dish. I love corned beef hash and highly recommend this if you like savory breakfast skillets breakfasts.
