One Thing I Ate: Mama’s Scallion Pancakes 2.0 🥞
New and improved, now with easier cleanup and reference photos!
Hello and welcome back to Five Things I Ate! This week, we bring you Part I in our “bing chilling” series, where I teach you how to make Chinese flatbread, or bing. For photos, please follow my Instagram, @fivethingsiate.
There are as many ways to make scallion pancakes as there are Chinese people. You might be used to the Chinese takeout version – double fried, crispy, and flat – but they range from the texture of a thin tortilla to chubby, like a pancake, with lots of moist layers of scallions inside. There is no wrong way to make a scallion pancake, but there are preferred ways 😉
This is my favorite recipe, which is based on my Mama’s (my very first recipe post!) , which uses half hot-water dough and half regular dough.
Hot water dough is a similar concept to tangzhong, which I feel everyone knows about nowadays because of the popularity of milk bread. Using half hot-water dough makes these scallion pancakes soft inside, and not dry, but haters may say it’s slightly gummy. Personally I love that texture, because it guarantees a crispy-outside, soft-inside texture.
Additionally, there are all sorts of ways people like to make the scallion filing (for example with flour paste, so the filling doesn’t leak) but I keep it simple and traditional with just very thinly sliced scallions, plenty of salt, white pepper, and oil. To deal with the issues of scallions leaking out, simply roll the dough between two sheets of parchment — a life changing tip I just discovered!
As a bonus, if you want to make ahead and freeze the scallion pancakes, you can simply freeze them between the parchment and fry in hot oil later.
Growing up we didn’t fry the pancakes — we “lao”-d them, in the style of Old Beijing, which means we griddled them on a hot skillet with no oil. That’s how my mom makes them, and how I’m used to it. I know that deep-frying makes everything taste good, but a well-made scallion pancake should not need it – it should really highlight the flavor of fresh dough and scallions.
But if you really want restaurant style crispy exterior and soft interiors, fry them.
Mama’s Scallion Pancakes 2.0
Makes 2 large pancakes – which you can cut into 4 large or 8 small wedges each. For videos, check out my Instagram post.
For the dough, you will need:
2 cups all purpose flour (divided in half)
Pinch salt
Boiling water
Cold water
For the scallion filling, you will need:
1 bunch scallions
plenty of salt
white pepper
Oil
Other tools:
Parchment paper, for rolling
Large skillet, for frying
First, make the cold water dough:
To start, put a kettle of water to boil on the stove for the hot water dough.
In a medium mixing bowl, combine 1 cup of flour and a pinch of salt.
Slowly pour in cold water, furiously stirring with chopsticks.
Stop when you reach the “snowflake” stage, or the dough starts to clump up.
Knead by hand until you form a smooth dough, and cover and set aside.
Meanwhile, make the hot water dough:
In a medium mixing bowl, combine 1 cup of flour and a pinch of salt.
Slowly stream in the hot water, which should just be off the boil, furiously stirring with chopsticks.
Stop when you reach the “snowflake” stage, or the dough starts to clump up. The dough will sort of “cook” due
Knead by hand until you form a smooth dough, and cover and set aside.
Finished cold water dough, and hot water dough in “snowflake” state.
Now, combine the two doughs:
Put the hot water and cold water dough together in the same large mixing bowl, or a lightly floured surface.
Knead till combined – this is going to take some elbow grease!
You can set aside until ready to use, covered and at room temperature (resting is actually nice for the dough, so this might be a nice time to take a break, if you need it).
Meanwhile, make the filling:
Clean and dry a bunch of fresh scallions. Cut very thinly.
Transfer to a small bowl, sprinkle generously with salt, and then add oil to completely coat.
To shape the scallion pancakes:
Dust your surface with flour.
Take out the dough and cut it in half with a bench scraper. Set half the dough aside in the mixing bowl, and cover with a kitchen towel.
Roll the cut dough into a large rectangle, about the size of a large wooden cutting board, or 14x8 inches.
Spread the surface with scallion filling, leaving a half inch border, like so:
Now for the fun part:
Roll the dough up cinnamon-roll style.
Tightly pinch any edges to seal all the filling inside.
Then roll it up into a swirly snail:
Put the swirly snail between two sheets of parchment paper, and gently roll out with a rolling pin (or wine bottle or jar). Roll until as thin as you’d like – maybe ¼ inch. The parchment paper prevents a sticky mess from occurring, and all the scallions stay in place!
At this point, you can throw the pancake and parchment paper together into a very large freezer Ziploc, if you’d like for later frying.
Otherwise, fry your pancakes:
Heat a large skillet over medium flame. You can lao, or just griddle them dry, or you can add a tablespoon of vegetable oil for frying. You can also lao them first, and double fry them for extra crispy.
Slide the pancake from the parchment sheet to the frying pan.
Cook until firm and golden brown spots appear on one side, then flip and cook until it starts to brown on the other side:
Cut into 4 large or 8 small wedges, and enjoy immediately.
Reheat leftovers on the skillet, or in the toaster oven. It’s best to cook from frozen.
XOXO,
Soph
P.S. If you make this recipe, please let me know how it turned out! And feel free to reply to this email for questions or to let me know how it went.