Paul's Basil Pancakes with Cherry Tomato Ragout (San Francisco)

Our (now quite sad looking)
basil plant

This recipe sounded so interesting we had to give it a go sooner rather than later.  Personally, I love Caprese salad and this was a twist on that, using basil pancakes and a warm tomato ragout. Although the ingredients themselves weren't going to cause any problems, there was concern over the combination.  

The ragout wasn't an issue for me but the basil pancakes seemed like such an odd idea that I was a little dubious about this recipe. I had spoken to a friend of mine who said that she'd had basil pancakes in Santorini and they were delicious but, since this recipe came from the San Francisco chapter of the book, we weren't convinced that we would like them. But then that's the fun of this challenge.  

We did have to make some slight alterations to the recipe though. Firstly, the recipe calls for shallots and, whilst you can usually get them here, we couldn't find them in the store when we did our weekly shop so we used a mixture of white and red onions instead. 

Other than that, all of the ingredients for the ragout and the process to make it were quite simple (I did accidentally burn the onions a little but I can hardly blame the recipe for that).  So, as recipe indicates, once we got to the point where all we needed to do was wait for the tomato skins to split, we turned the heat down and began work on the basil pancakes.   

Mixing up the bread and
cream for the pancake batter

Paul's recipe says that brioche and spinach should be used to make the pancakes.  Unfortunately, we forgot to pick up both of these ingredients. Instead of these ingredients, we used slightly sweet sliced bread and mache leaves. 

This didn't appear to have any impact on the texture though, and it all whizzed up in the processor rather nicely. 
Once we'd managed to get a smooth, batter-like consistency, we started frying the pancakes. 

The finished, light green
pancake batter

As you can see from the photos, there was quite a lot of butter involved in doing this. At first I was shocked to see how much there was but, by the end, there was very  little fat left in the pan so it was clearly just the right amount. 

After spending about 20 minutes frying the pancakes, they were ready to serve.  The recipe book said that they should be served warm.  Unfortunately, our plan for using the salad necessitated that it would be  served cold. 

We had a friend over  for dinner so while, sadly, the baby didn't get to try these pancakes, we did have 4 adult opinions to go off. 

The end result was actually quite delicious. As expected, it tasted quite like a Caprese salad  so I was very happy.  I have to say, I think mixing the pancakes with the mozzerella and the ragout rather overpowered the taste of the pancakes. I suppose this is likely due to the fact that they didn't has as strong a flavour as they would if they had had spinach in them.  

Soph wasn't particularly keen on the outcome but my brother-in-law and our guest both enjoyed it very much.  We were even told by our guest that our version was better than the one's she'd had in Sardinia, so I call that a win.  

The main down side of this dish for me is that it's quite time consuming and complicated. Having to swap between making the ragout and the pancakes was quite challenging and, as a result, I forgot to include the balsamic vinager in the ragout until after we'd served it. It also resulted in a large amount of washing up - something we usually try to avoid.    

Since we don't know the effect that including spinach and brioche would have had, we'll perhaps try this  recipe again as it was written, but only when we have ample time.