Carefree Cooking

Green Onion Pancake Taco

Is it a pancake or is it a taco? I hope you are not confused. As part of the fusion cooking (the type of cooking I like to associate my style with), I like to create western dishes using completely traditional chinese ingredients.

So how do we make a "chinese taco"? I always keep some green onion pancake in the freezer since it is one of those emergency food items that is good to have. Today was the day when I needed the service of my emergency food. To cook the green onion pancake, I learned that skimping on the oil is not a good idea. Since it is flour based, you can expect the pancake to soak some oil. Here's the technique that I use to get the best result (in my opinion).

Put just enough oil on the pan to coat the surface. You can put more oil if you want, but for health reason, I wouldn't recommend it. A few seconds after you drop the pancake, flip it immediately. This way, both sides of the pancake gets a nice coating of oil. The oil is required to make the pancake golden brown and crispy. If you do not do this (with the small amount of oil that I suggested), the side of the pancake that was initially facing down will absorb all the oil from the pan. When it's time to flip it, there will be no oil left to brown that side. The end result is that the pancake will burn quickly. Of course if you put a lot of oil in the pan, you don't care too much about the lack of oil so you don't need to do this technique.

To do the filling for the taco, I browned some ground pork, and put some dark and light soy to give it a salty flavour. I learned this recipe from my parents since they like to eat this with plain congee. The full recipe requires oil, garlic, and green onions. I didn't want to put some oil, and didn't have garlic and green onions so my taco filling only consisted with ground pork. It would have been nice to add some shredded lettuce, but I didn't have that either. As I said, today was the day I had to call in my emergency food :)

You can also use green onion pancake to make a chinese pizza. I made this for my wife last year and she liked it. Too bad I didn't take any photos of it but I will try to make that dish some time in the future and share with you how to make it and what it looks like.

posted by carefreecooking @ 11:08 PM