$404 vs $14 Pancakes: Pro Chef & Home Cook Swap Ingredients

This is it. You gotta do it.

You gotta, whoa!

[pan clattering]

Kind of.

[soft bright music]

[screen popping] Hi, I'm Bill.

I'm a professional chef.

And these are my $404 pancake ingredients.

Hi, I'm Emily. [screen popping]

I'm a home cook. And these are my $14 pancake ingredients.

[soft bright music]

See you later.

Oh, ah, yeah. Okay, bye.

Okay, bananas, chocolate chips and some maple syrup.

To Chef Bill, from Emily.

Hey, oh! Oh, what?

[soft bright music]

So I was planning to make buckwheat pancakes

with yuzu curd, strawberries flambe,

and whipped tupelo honey butter.

For my pancakes, I had buckwheat flour.

I'm aware of it.

[Chef Bill] French unsalted butter.

Fancy butter.

And pasture-raised eggs.

But really, it's all about the toppings.

I was going to make a yuzu curd with yuzu juice and peel.

Kind of smells like gin.

[Chef Bill] Some legendary Oishii strawberries.

These appear to be the extremely fancy strawberries.

[Chef Bill] Flambeed with cognac.

Which means I'll be setting things on fire.

[Chef Bill] And light brown sugar.

And some Tupelo honey butter whipped to perfection.

Tup, Tupelo?

[Chef Bill] And sprinkled with some wildflower bee pollen

just for fun.

Is this gonna be a problem with my allergies?

If you ever come across these pancakes in real life,

don't eat them, they'll ruin you forever.

With Emily's recipe, I have simpler ingredients.

Stuff you might find in your pantry

or at your local grocery store.

But with a little technique, we can make it better.

If I had to guess,

I would think that this costs about 20 bucks.

[cash register ringing]

$14. Okay.

If i were to guess how much this costs,

my guess would be $225.

[cash register ringing]

$404! What, where?

So I have here Chef Bill's notebook.

It looks like Chef Bill gave me

some very basic instructions.

For example, for Tupelo honey butter,

it says, make honey butter.

Thanks, Chef Bill.

So Emily, you're gonna be starting with the yuzu curd.

Holy moly, I got a lot to do.

A curd in this context

is essentially a custard made with citrus juice.

You'll notice I'm wearing a glove.

I cut my finger the other day.

I've been training snapping turtles for the circus.

So as when making any curd,

the first thing you're gonna do is separate your eggs.

You're gonna whisk that with your sugar and your salt.

For this recipe, you're going to be using

both the yuzu juice and the peel.

I love yuzu because it's a complex citrus flavor.

Lime mixed with a grapefruit flavor

mixed with an orange.

Lemon, but with like a complicated history.

[Chef Bill] You're gonna add in your yuzu peel and juice.

[whisk scraping] Eh.

[Chef Bill] And then you're gonna place that

over a double boiler until it reaches 170 degrees.

[Emily] You just gotta give it time.

Make sure that that pot is not boiling,

but it's simmering.

Boiling, it's gonna get too hot.

You're gonna risk curdling your eggs.

Oh, I see a shift occurring. A very shifty shift.

[Chef Bill] Remove from the heat.

Whisk in some of that beautiful butter.

I think the butter like, you know, thins it out,

cools it down, makes it creamy and delicious.

[Chef Bill] And then you're gonna strain it

through a fine mesh sieve.

That's gonna give you a really smooth, creamy curd.

Now if you're gonna stand here

and tell me that's anything but a frigging beautiful curd,

I think you're wrong.

So Emily was planning to make

chocolate chip pancakes with bananas.

It would've taken about 10 minutes.

A classic combo.

I'm gonna use the ingredients that she gave me

to elevate it a little bit

and make Japanese souffle pancakes

with bruleed bananas and chocolate ganache.

It's gonna be delicious.

So first thing, I'm gonna make my chocolate ganache.

Ganache can be thick and whipped and fluffy,

or it can be thin and a sauce.

And we're gonna be using the latter, a sauce.

So, first step, I am going to heat whole milk

and four tablespoons of butter.

And while that heats, I'm just going to weigh out

eight ounces of chocolate chips.

Is there anything more classic

than a Hershey's chocolate chip?

As soon as the butter is melted and it's simmering,

I'll pour it over our chocolate

and we can let it sit for a bit.

If you whisk it too soon,

then you have lumps in your ganache,

and you don't want that.

Ganache is like magic.

It looks terrible until it comes together.

Look at that. I'm just gonna season this with a bit of salt.

Salt makes everything better,

makes chocolate taste more like chocolate.

And that's it.

I'm just gonna press some plastic wrap over this

and let it sit at room temperature.

As it cools, it'll come to the perfect pourable consistency.

Chocolate ganache.

All right, so the next thing I need to do

is make honey butter.

Uh, let's see what the deal is with this honey.

Tupelo honey comes from a very specific region

in the southeast United States.

Okay, well the bottle says

it's considered the queen of all honeys.

It doesn't really crystallize,

so it's a great thing to use for making whipped butters.

Let's see this fancy butter. Oh, woo, it's very yellow.

And honey. I'm just gonna eyeball this.

But I have a sense of what I think it should be.

Salt. And I'll stir this thing.

[mixer whirring]

So the recipe for Japanese souffle pancakes

calls for powdered sugar.

I didn't have that from Emily, so we're gonna make some.

And let's start it on low

[blender grinding]

and crank it up.

The one thing we wanna avoid is getting this so hot

that the sugar starts to melt and clump together.

[blender whirring loudly]

Powdered sugar comes in grades,

and the one that we typically use is 10x,

which is 10 times finer than standard granulated sugar.

I'm going for something similar to this.

I don't have a microscope,

so we're just gonna play it by sight.

I'm not gonna lie to you. I think that butter's whipped.

It looks good.

It smells like a cake for some reason, which is great.

And there you have it, whipped honey butter. Huh.

[blender grinding]

All right. Looks like powdered sugar.

And now it's time to make my flambeed strawberries.

Emily will be working with Oishii strawberries.

These are very special strawberries.

They come from a farm in New Jersey.

Wait, I always thought

these fancy strawberries were from Japan,

but they're just from New Jersey.

I mean, no offense New Jersey, but what?

Each individual strawberry is supposed to be very perfect.

They're very sweet. They're lovely.

And they're good. They're not bad.

Not the best strawberry I've ever had in my life,

but like they're pretty good.

Oh wow!

These are the best strawberries I've ever had in my life.

[laughing]

[Chef Bill] So the steps for this are simple.

You're gonna cut the strawberries in half.

I'm a big strawberry fan.

I used to go strawberry picking as a girl in Canada.

[Chef Bill] In your skillet,

you're gonna melt your butter,

swirl it with your brown sugar.

[Emily] Boink, [indistinct].

[Chef Bill] Get it very lightly caramelized.

Add in your fresh strawberries.

[skillet sizzling]

Whoa! Hello.

Swirl those until they're just tender.

So Emily gave me some bananas,

and she was going to include them in her batter.

I'm going to do something a little bit different

and I'm going to use a blowtorch.

[flame roaring]

We are going to caramelize some sugar

on top of these bananas, brulee them,

make 'em nice and crispy and crunchy.

It's just going to add another element

of texture and flavor onto our pancakes.

I think it'll play really well with the chocolate

and the soft fluffy pancake.

[flame roaring]

So I'm just going to start

by slicing off the ends of my bananas.

Slice right down the center. Peel them nice and gently.

We wanna keep these together.

And just lay them out on our sheet tray.

So this is some of Emily's just standard granulated sugar.

I'm going to sprinkle a nice layer of this even.

Okay, so these are all nice and gooey now,

and I think it's just about that time.

So now Emily, comes the fun part. The fire.

Fire is cool when it's like, controlled.

Remove it from the heat,

because if you add it while it's cooking

and the pan is super hot,

it's gonna burst into flames right there

and you're gonna lose your eyebrows.

Eyebrows, if this is the last time I see you,

it's been grand.

[cognac splashing]

[dramatic music]

Woo! Ho, ho, kay.

I'm okay. Strawberry flambe, baby.

The thing about bruleeing

is you don't wanna get the flames so close

that you scorch and burn the sugar black.

But you do wanna get the sugar

nice and dark and caramelized.

[flame roaring]

It'll start to melt, clarify,

and then you'll start to get the caramelized color on here.

And we're gonna go one by one, taking our time. There we go.

You want a little bit of this dark color there,

but no darker than that.

And sugar notoriously goes from not being caramelized

to being burnt very quickly.

So these are looking great for now.

I'm gonna set them aside

until our pancakes are ready to plate.

[flame roaring]

Pancake batter. Here we go.

Oh, I need a glove.

And now the star of the show, the buckwheat pancake.

You're gonna melt your butter to start.

I have a secret microwave down here.

You stay where you are. You sit.

You sit, please. This is, you're welcome in my house.

Mix together all of your dry ingredients.

Flour, buckwheat flour, baking powder,

sugar, salt, mixaroni.

So you're using two types of flour for this.

Your buckwheat flour and all-purpose flour.

You want the flavor of the buckwheat,

but you also want to keep the pancakes

kind of tender and nice and not too buckwheaty.

So now it's time to make the pancake batter.

I'm going to take all of these standard pancake ingredients,

and with a little bit of a difference in technique,

I'm gonna change them into Japanese-style souffle pancakes

instead of just, you know, your standard flapjack.

I'm gonna start by just separating my eggs.

I'm gonna keep two of the yolks for the batter.

Four egg whites total.

I'm going to beat the sugar that I powdered

with two of the yolks until it's nice and light and creamy.

I don't have to worry about making this super fluffy.

I just want it nice and incorporated.

I'm gonna set this aside and work on my dries for a second.

All-purpose flour,

[knife clanking]

kosher salt, baking powder.

I'm just gonna incorporate this together real fast.

Back into the eggs,

I'm gonna put the whole milk that Emily gave me.

Whisk that together.

Now I'm gonna do. Buttermilk.

[Emily] Wow, that is so much chunky buttermilk.

[Chef Bill] Eggs, vanilla. It's from Tonga.

It's cold press. It's award-winning.

It's delicious. You're melted butter.

Whisk that until smooth.

Wet. Wet.

Add all those wet ingredients into your dry ingredients

and just be sure not to over mix it.

A couple lumps, that's great.

I don't have a family pancake recipe

but my husband's family does,

and they're all about leaving it lumpy and letting it sit.

[Chef Bill] If you over mix your pancakes,

they're just gonna be rubbery and tough.

[Emily] But I think that's probably as much as I wanna do.

And I'm gonna whisk in my dries to this.

Now, unlike what I told Emily

about there being lumps in her batter

and that that's gonna be a good thing here,

I wanna make sure with this style of pancake

that the batter is totally smooth

and everything is really incorporated together.

I'm gonna set this aside

and bring my egg whites to a stiff peak.

Now when beating egg whites,

I always start off at a slow speed

and gradually bring it up.

You're gonna create finer air bubbles in the egg whites

and it's gonna be a more stable finished product.

Let it start to get frothy at this kind of medium low speed,

and then we'll start to bring it up.

And now that they're no longer clear

and totally frothy and white,

I'm gonna kick it up a little bit more,

and a little bit more.

Now they're starting to look pillowy.

And then all the way up.

And so when it starts to look like shaving cream

is when I feel like they're getting there.

Let's see, that's a stiff peak.

So this right here,

is gonna make the big difference in these pancakes.

It's a very simple change,

but it's gonna make a totally different end product.

I'm gonna fold in

about a third of this to start to our batter.

Now the goal here is to fully incorporate this,

but without crushing down all of our egg whites

and losing all that air that I built into it.

Now I don't want any clumps of egg white in here

'cause that will bake differently than the rest of it

when we're griddling this later.

All right, I'm just gonna let this sit

for about 15 minutes.

Nice and homogenous. No more egg clumps.

And there is our souffle pancake batter.

Time to go from batter to pancake using hot.

The key here is even heat,

and figuring out

what heat is going to not burn your pancake,

but get it nice and golden brown

and cooked all the way through.

I'm gonna use a ton of oil,

because a cast iron is not non-stick,

and in fact is quite stick.

Cooking these souffle pancakes,

I'm gonna use a ring mold, which is just a steel round mold.

I'm just gonna use a little neutral oil

to grease the insides of these pancake rings.

And the same for my pan.

I turned this on medium low

and I'm gonna let the pan come to temp.

I don't want the pan to be too hot

so that it cooks the outside really dark

before the whole souffle gets cooked inside.

I'm gonna use a cookie scoop to do this

so that I get the exact same amount of batter

in each one of these pancake molds.

I'm gonna put the lid on

and let this steam for about four minutes.

The trick with these

is getting the temperature exactly right.

So it's just a game of guessing and working through

and figuring out what works on your stove.

[Emily] Using the scooper here,

create moderately uniform pancakes.

[Chef Bill] Add in about a quarter cup of your batter

and let that start to cook.

You're gonna see bubbles start to form

on the top of the pancake

and the edges are gonna start to look dry

and a little bit crispy,

and that is the perfect time to flip your pancake.

So the first thing about pancakes, Emily,

is the first one outta the pan is always for the dog.

All right, I'm gonna try and flip it.

[pancake splattering]

I don't know what the rule is

if the first pancake turns out okay.

Are all the other pancakes gonna be bad?

Alright, so these have been steaming here

for a couple minutes,

and I'm gonna go ahead and flip these over.

Ooh, yes. Okay, all right.

A little smush on that one, but not too bad.

We got a little dark on one side, but like I told Emily,

your first one's always the worst one.

[scoop clicking]

[lid clattering]

Okay, well I think I'm gonna take this one off

and make more pancakes.

I'm gonna flip these. Da, do, da.

No, no, no, no, no, no!

Oh!

These are lookin' pretty good.

They're puffed up. I'm gonna try and flip them.

[laughing]

There.

Okay, I'm gonna move this to a plate

and take the ring mold off.

Perfect. One successful.

We'll keep going until we have all four.

[soft bright music]

There we go.

All right, and that is a stack of pancakes.

See, they look better and better as I do this.

That's the philosophy of a pancake, I suppose.

And there are the souffle pancakes.

Let's plate. Let's give Chef Bill my best pancake.

I'm gonna go this one. Curd.

I chose my four favorite pancakes.

The prettiest of the bunch.

Start with a little dusting of powdered sugar,

'cause why not?

[Emily] The second. Curd.

Pancake, the third. Little curd on top.

[Chef Bill] The chocolate ganache.

So I'm just gonna give that a drizzle

over the top of these pancakes.

[Emily] Strawberries. Oh, still warm.

Beautiful bit of butter.

[Chef Bill] Lay a few of these bananas on.

And then last but certainly not least,

sprinkle a little bee pollen on.

It just looks nice on there.

It's one of those like chefy ingredients

that you don't actually need,

but it is nice and fun to have sometimes.

[Emily] I think it looks pretty good!

And there we have it, Japanese souffle pancakes

with bruleed bananas and chocolate ganache.

It's looking delicious.

I hope Chef Bill likes it

and I can't wait to see what he did with my ingredients.

[soft bright music]

[Chef Bill chuckling quietly]

Hey, how's it going? Hi. Good.

Good to see you. Nice to see you.

How did it go?

[both laughing]

Really good. I think.

I'm excited to try it all together and also to show you.

I'm excited to see it

and I'm excited for you to see these.

Oh! Wow! Beautiful.

Look at this.

What is this? A souffle pancake?

Yeah, it is a souffle pancake.

It looks good. It smells good.

[Chef Bill] Yours smells really good.

You gotta try what I made.

Yeah, I'm so excited to dig in. Let's do it.

So what exactly did you do here?

I took your chocolate chips and your milk

and I made a little ganache.

The pancakes are Japanese souffle pancakes.

So they have whipped egg white mixed into them.

[Emily] All right. I'm gonna just grab one of these guys.

I've never had a souffle pancake actually.

[soft bright music]

Mm. Um-huh.

It's like all the same flavors,

but just like remixed and then so fluffy.

Yeah, they're so fluffy.

And the ganache is like, really, really great.

Really great. You're really good.

Oh, thank you. Thank you very much.

We should try what you've made.

Yeah. Oh yeah, absolutely.

Let's do that.

But first, you know what I think these need?

What?

A little bit of your maple syrup.

Maple syrup. Yes, absolutely.

I wasn't gonna say it.

There's some for you. Thank you.

Thank you so much.

And some for me. Gorgeous.

That's a pancake.

Mm, mm, [indistinct].

That's a pancake.

All right, so here you have your buckwheat pancakes

with yuzu curd, flambeed strawberries,

and very fancy honey butter

with a sprinkling of bee pollen.

It's beautiful. Well, thank you.

I couldn't have done it better myself.

Oh no. Stop.

I'll get all the pieces in one.

That curd is perfect.

And the little crunchy bee pollen is good too.

This is so good. Yum.

Your recipe frigging rocks.

Well, it turned out great. You did a great job.

Thank you so much. Mm.

Okay, I have a dark secret.

What?

The middle pancake was my first pancake.

Oh! It was,

it ended up being one of my good ones.

Good. I was like shocked.

I did not expect that.

My first one did not come out well.

[both chuckling]

That's never happened to me before.

I was like, this either bodes very well or very poorly.

Souffle pancakes are not super easy.

Yes, oh my gosh, yes. So, I wasn't making it

easy on myself. [chuckling]

I've always been like,

I would love to try making those at home,

but I won't because they looked so difficult.

I think you absolutely could.

[both laughing]

Just give the first one to your dog.

Right, yes.

[soft bright music]