Gluten Free Swedish Pancakes

Traditional Swedish pancakes are like a cross between American pancakes and French crêpes. This gluten free version is brought to you by Erin of Texanerin Baking. Welcome Erin!

I was an exchange student in Sweden twice. The first time was in high school and I lived with a few different host families. One thing they all had in common was a love for pancakes. I probably ate hundreds of pancakes that year.

What’s a little surprising is that they were typically served for dinner. We even had them for lunch every now and then at the school cafeteria. My recipe uses oat flour in place of conventional flour and they’re truly just as delicious as the Swedish pancakes I’ve had in Sweden.

Lingonberry preserves are a traditional topping but I really doubt most Swedes would use lingonberries with strawberry and blueberry season in full swing. I’ve got to say – Swedes, as a whole, love their berries.

Venturing out into the forest to pick wild strawberries and blueberries and then using them on pancakes and waffles later in the evening is just what you do in the summer (at least in the areas I lived!).

Although sauces are usually served on the side, I used this homemade honey-sweetened strawberry jam to fill the pancakes. I just didn’t cook it as long as recommended, which resulted in more of a chunky sauce than a jam.

I definitely recommend serving these with fruit sauce or piling on some fresh fruit at the very least. If you serve these with just maple syrup, they’re not very filling and you could easily polish off half the batch in one sitting.

There are a few key things to Swedish pancake success:

• Make sure that your pan is well-heated. If it takes longer than about a minute to cook the first side of the pancake, the pan isn’t hot enough.
• Don’t skimp on the butter! The butter adds a lot of flavor and it creates a slightly crisp pancake.
• Don’t just pour the pancake batter in the pan and let it cook like you would for American pancakes as they won’t come out properly. You need to very quickly swirl the batter around the pan like you would when making crepes.
• If you use a different sized pan then you’ll need to adjust the amount of batter used for each pancake accordingly. My cast-iron skillet was sold as a 9″ pan, which is the top measurement, but it’s only 7″ across the bottom.
• Give the batter a quick stir before pouring it into the pan. The oat flour tends to settle to the bottom, especially if you mix the batter by hand rather than with a blender.