Buck the trend

This pancake day, why settle for cr¿pes when you can have blinis, tortillas, or, best of all, buckwheat galettes? Michael Bateman flips out

Limbering up for Shrove Tuesday, I've just made my best pancake ever. Correction: galette. A speciality of Brittany, the galette is a superior pancake, prized throughout France. And quite unlike the more familiar crêpe, it is made with buckwheat flour.

In Britain we flip over pancakes, but only once a year. Meanwhile, around the world pancakes of every sort are eaten on a daily basis; as tortillas in Mexico, blinis in Russia, chapatis in India and steamed with Peking duck in China (see box overleaf). If you think about it, making pancakes is the oldest form of baking. It requires no more than a griddle or hearthstone and a thin batter of flour and water (or milk) – though in Europe and America eggs are often used too.

Surely no one has raised pancake-making to greater heights than the French. Or so I now believe, having emerged from a masterclass at La Galette, the restaurant in Marylebone, central London, where you can have a veritable feast of pancakes with a range of savoury or sweet fillings.

La Galette, which opened two years ago, has been acclaimed as the best – "a perfect crêpe is exactly what you get at La Galette," said our own Terry Durack. This may not be surprising, since the owner, 32-year-old Joe McDermott, actually went to Brittany to learn how to make these delicious delicacies.

McDermott, a graduate in economics, had been running a restaurant in Leeds with his father when he went on holiday to the south of France. He deliberately avoided eating in local crêperies – remembering with horror the rash of high-street imitations that had sprung up in this country when he was younger. But at the end of his holiday, short of funds, he popped into a crêperie. He was so delighted by the experience that he took a detour to Brittany on his way home to check out the real thing. He was instantly converted.

Inspired to make his own pancakes, he later returned to Brittany to take a course at a cookery school. "A galette is only a mixture of buckwheat flour and water," says McDermott. "But it takes practice to get exactly the right texture of the batter, the right heat on the griddle and the right amount of fat." And he should know, almost everything he now cooks comes in a pancake.

La Galette's kitchen consists of a bank of circular, gas-fired iron griddles, 40cm across. Jugs of thick, viscous batter are to hand, along with bowls of melted butter and a table of toppings and fillings: grated Emmenthal (the best melting cheese), organic ham, mixtures of wild and cultivated mushrooms (for the forestière galette), chorizo and piquillo peppers (for a Spanish flavour), smoked salmon and crème fraîche, and, for vegetarians, spinach and ricotta, or ratatouille.

First McDermott demonstrates the simple Normandy butter galette which is the basis of his most popular dishes, the Galette Complète and the Super-Complète. The Complète uses a very thin buckwheat pancake, cooked on one side only. As the galette cooks, Marcio, McDermott's sous-chef, loosens the base with a spatula, and when it is crisp underneath and still soft on top, he sprinkles on it a circle of grated cheese, lays a few judicious thin slices of ham on that, and breaks an egg into the middle.

Like an origami master (the galette can be folded in many ways) Marcio flips the round edges towards the centre over the filling, making four straight sides, boxing in the egg so that the yolk shines through the middle. Within a minute, the white of the egg has set and the cheese has melted. It is served with a runny yolk. (For the Super-Complète, softly fried onion and mushrooms are added.)

McDermott talks me through the batter mixture, which he started the night before. Buckwheat flour can be bought in Waitrose and Sainsbury's and in health-food stores – produced by Dove's, the West Country millers. Unlike wheat flour, it doesn't contain gluten (which makes ordinary pancakes and crêpes so elastic), so the galettes can be prone to breaking up if you don't give the batter a long rest to thicken it.

The batter is made in two stages. First an equal volume of flour and water, say one kilogram of buckwheat flour to one litre of water (better still, half water and half sparkling cider) is mixed together with 20g of salt. McDermott blends it in a food mixer on the lowest speed for 10 minutes: "You'll end up with a mixture like cement – but you let it down [dilute it] later." He puts this mixture in the fridge and leaves it for at least four hours, or better still, overnight.

When he's ready to cook, McDermott dilutes the batter with another litre of water, blending it in the food mixer on slow for five minutes. He adds the last 200ml carefully. "You have to judge the consistency exactly – it's a fine thing," he says. "It should be between that of single cream and double cream."

The next stage is to get the griddle to the right heat – it should be very, very hot.

Using kitchen paper, McDermott brushes a thin film of oil on the surface of the griddle (a wide, shallow-sided non-stick pan will be fine). Using a jug (you can use a ladle), he pours out a circle of batter thinly, and spreads it evenly with a special spreader (at home, you can simply tilt the pan). If the galette is too thick, just pour the surplus back into the jug.

He lets it cook for 30 seconds until the underside stiffens up, and uses a spatula to loosen it. No need to toss a galette, says McDermott. He brushes it generously with melted, slightly-salted Normandy butter, folds it or rolls it, and it's ready to eat. It's crunchy and delicious. The buckwheat has a rich, nutty, earthy, warming taste. You're going to want another.

For pudding even La Galette serves crêpes, the French version of our Shrove Tuesday pancakes. These are made in the same way but with wheat flour, eggs and milk, and cooked over a moderate heat.

Choose whichever type you fancy this Tuesday, but, beware, once you've tasted a galette, pancake day will come more than once a year.