Gourmet Fast Food Episode 5: Pancake Stack 🥞

Are you ready for a massive stack of fluffy AF pancakes, served with dulce de leche, bananas foster, toasted peanuts AND whipped mascarpone? Well, we hope you are, and we hope you’re hungry!

For a sweet serving of Gourmet Fast Food: A Maltese Twist, we paid homage to our local honey, where Chef Stephen La Rosa takes this sweet syrup and slaps it on some bananas for, probably (like 98% probability) the best pancakes you’ll ever have in your entire foodie life! 

They’re sweet, they’re fluffy AF and they’re stacked to the heavens for all the foodie gods to gaze their eyes on! We set up for the last round in our Fino kitchen, with all our Lamb Brand products at the ready-to-serve up a breakfast treat or munchie smasher! Let’s take a look at the full recipe!

Recipe

Ingredients

Serves 2

Pancakes:

• 300g plain flour, sifted*
• 5g baking powder*
• 3g baking soda*
• 3g salt *
• 15g sugar*
• 2 eggs 
• 500ml buttermilk 
• 90g yoghurt
• 2.5g vanilla essence*
• 40g butter 

Banana:

• 2 bananas
• 25ml spiced rum 
• 50g sugar* / honey 
• 25g butter 
• ½tsp cinnamon*

Dulche de leche

• 1 can condensed milk 

Mascarope:

• 200g mascarpone
• 50g icing sugar*
• 2 lemon

Toasted Peanuts:

• 100g peanuts*
• Salt*

* all sealed dried ingredients are sponsored Lamb Brand products, each redeemable on the Cook & Exchange Gift Scheme. 

Equipment

• Mixing bowl x3**
• Non-stick pan x2**
• Whisk
• Ladle
• Sieve
• Medium sized pot**
• Weighing scale**
• Measuring cylinder

** these select pieces of equipment were kindly sponsored by Crosscraft for Episode 5 of Gourmet Fast Food

Method

For the pancakes:

1. Start off by separating the eggs and whisking the egg whites till they reach a high peak. 
2. Add buttermilk, yoghurt and vanilla essence to your yolks. Mix it up!
3. Melt the butter and add that to the wet bowl containing your yolks too. Incorporate all together well.
4. Add your wet ingredients bowl to a dry bowl featuring your sifted flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt and sugar.
5. Whisk in the eggs until a light batter is formed. Leave no lumps, you’ll regret it later!
6. While this is resting, roast some peanuts in the oven, make sure they don’t burn to avoid a bitter aftertaste.

The core ingredients to this weeks recipe, supplied by Lamb Brand!

For the bananas:

1. Heat your butter in non-stick pan and stir in the rum, sugar, vanilla and cinnamon.
2. Allow to cook until bubbles start to appear in your caramel. 
3. Throw in the bananas and some roasted peanuts and cook until they’re nice and brown.

Bananas foster in the making - we can hardly contain ourselves!

For the dulce leche:

1. Place a large pot of water on the stove and place your can inside. 
2. Turn the heat up to medium-high and allow it to come up to the gentlest of simmers (if you have a thermometer try to gauge for roughly 90C) and hold that temperature there for 3 hours while occasionally topping off the water level in the pot and making sure that nothing is boiling too vigorously.  
3. Make sure there’s always several inches of water covering the can, you do not want to forget about this over high heat and have the water evaporate as you can risk damaging the can which can lead to it bursting. Ouchies!
4. Turn off the heat after 3 hours and allow the water to cool down considerably before pulling out the can. 
5. Dry off the can well with paper towels and allow it to come to room temperature for a few hours before opening.  Do not open before it’s completely cooled down.

Pass the spoon, quick!

For the mascarpone:

1. Add the icing sugar to your mascarpone and whisk until fluffy!
2. Fold in the lemon zest. 
3. Set aside.

The lemon makes this healthy, right?

Final Steps:

All the components for your dish are pretty much ready. You’ve got your toasted peanuts, bananas foster a creamy mascarpone and sweet AF dulce de leche waiting to sit atop… oh wait a minute! The pancakes!

Even though we’re sure you all know how to cook up a pancake or two - and even know that the first one is usually the most frustrating oily mess, here’s a foolproof way on how to do it. 

Step 1: heat your non-stick pan and add a little bit of oil or butter, whatever floats your boat. Butter will burn faster, but it’s so much tastier. Rub your pan with a paper towel to remove the excess.

Step 2: ladle in your pancake batter and allow it to cook on the bottom. You’ll notice its cooking when teeny little bubbles start to form on the wet surface. Don’t be overzealous and try to flip your pancakes earlier, you’ll end up with one hot mess!

Step 3: Get ready to flip. Use a wide spatula, tuck it underneath the bottom of the pancake, pray to the food gods and flip. The first one might give you some trouble, but it’s all uphill from there. Your pancake should be golden brown when it’s done.

Once you’ve prepared a hearty stack, prepare your portion (read: all of them) and layer with your dulce de leche. Top with the bananas foster, sprinkle some peanuts on top and crown the stack with a splatter of mascarpone!

Grab your cutlery and dig in!

Thank you for all your hard work and dedication to this project Chef Stephen! You rock!

Isn't this the sweetest ending... or is it? 🤔 We may or may not have one more treat for you... stay tuned to FoodBlog Network or check us out on Instagram and Facebook - you don't want to miss out on any delish recipes by the super Chef Stephen La Rosa!