Failure – Wang’s fast food is closed on Tuesdays, which we realized after my daughter’s polite and rational request for chinese food including scallion pancakes, and after I’d decided everything we wanted to order and gotten my mouth watering for our choices.
Completely undeserved success: scallion pancakes are *sooooooo* easy to reproduce at home!
I used Ming Tsai’s recipe here – skipped the resting of the dough, faked the mixing in of the boiling water, to make the dough, and figured so what if the texture was not perfect. Also, we used leeks, which I pre-sauteed a bit (that was the extent of the time my dough rested.) I used half a recipe because it seemed prone to complete disaster – but instead of complete disaster, they tasted like…. scallion pancakes! I somewhat burned 2 out of 3 of them because I was trying to throw together a main course at the same time, but now I know to watch them better.
Er… did you follow the instructions, or just the ingredients? If you followed the instructions, could you explain them to me? Because I love scallion pancakes, but I don’t know how you roll sponge cake (guess: roll into a cylinder), and didn’t follow the twisting and the spirals and whatnot. I’m sure I could make flat circles with it, but I’m curious…
I kind of faked the instructions – I’m not sure precisely what he meant with the shaping, but I got that the idea was to get the scallions all layered into the dough, and then I winged it from there – I rolled the dough flat, painted on the oil, added the leeks… then I did more like pasta maker or flaky pastry folding – maybe 3 or 4 times folding it in half and rolling it flat again, and the last time I mushed it back into a ball so it would be round-ish when I rolled it out.
with that much “uh, yeah, close enough” *and* without bothering to let the dough rest – it still tasted like scallion pancakes!
now if only I’d paid a little more attention to the burning…
Wow those are mediocre instructions. I know how to roll a sponge cake — think bouche de noel — but … wow. I love Cook’s Illustrated because they usually include, well, illustrations for that sort of thing.
I think that Dan A. has a decent recipe for these. I may ask him for his, now that you both have me thinking about scallion pancakes.