Gluten-free Buckwheat-oat crepes

I miss my porch. For the past two summers, I have lived in houses with amazing porches perfect for lazy morning brunches. In the summer, I have all the time in the world to do whatever I want, so I often make elaborate feasts to start off the day. Last summer, crepes were a staple of my morning brunches. In addition to fresh yogurt, berries, maple syrup, and honey, I would often make homemade blueberry sauce or apple compote to fill the crepes with. They were delicious :)

I woke up very early this morning to work on a pattern to make fabric poi, and decided that it would be a perfect morning to come up with a gluten-free crepe recipe. I bought some oat flour yesterday at Greenstar, and had some buckwheat flour lying around, so I decided to experiment...

At first, I took out the white rice, tapioca, potato starch, buckwheat, and oat flours, but decided against using the rice, tapioca, and potato. After all, crepes don't rise, so I didn't really need to come up with a fancy mixture of gluten-free flours in an attempt to create the binding powers of gluten. I choose buckwheat and oat because I felt like they would compliment each other very well.

I decided to make sweet crepes (I am not a fan of savory crepes), so I added a little brown sugar and maple syrup to the batter- just enough to subtly sweeten it without being too nauseating and overpowering.

The hardest part about making crepes is cooking them. You need to make sure your skillet is at the perfect temperature (medium-low), use the perfect amount of butter (seriously just a tiny dab if you have a non-stick pan), and need to perfect the technique of evenly distributing the batter in the pan.

When I went to Montreal over Thanksgiving, I picked up some crepe-making tips from Stephan, the French immigrant we stayed with via couchsurfing: #1. Make sure there are NO CLUMPS in the batter! He actually blended his crepe batter in a magic bullet #2. Actually pick up the pan from the stove when you are pouring the batter in and swirl the batter around in the pan to coat it evenly

Gluten-free Buckwheat-oat crepes

1/2 cup oat flour
1/2 cup buckwheat flour
2 teaspoons dark brown sugar (packed)
1/8 teaspoon salt
2 tbsp butter, melted
1 1/2 cups milk
3 eggs
1 tablespoon maple syrup


Measure out flours into a bowl. Add packed dark brown sugar, salt, & stir. Add melted butter, maple syrup, milk, and eggs, one at a time. Whisk everything in a large bowl, then pour batter in a blender and puree for about 20 seconds to get all of the clumps out (I used the 'puree' setting on my housemate's Blendtec blender).

Heat up a skillet on medium-low heat, and add a tiny little dab of butter. The butter should sizzle when you put it on, but not turn brown or burn. Pick up the skillet and pour about 1/4 cup batter into it, swirling the batter around to evenly coat the bottom. Put on heat, and heat until one the side that is facing down has cooked just enough to turn it over (about a minute). Turn the crepe over, cook for a brief time on second side, and you are done! Make sure to not overcook these! They are meant to be soft and pliable, NOT crunchy and hard (although they are actually pretty good crunchy- the edges of some of my crepes were a little thin and crunchy... yum!).

These crepes are DELICIOUS. They are seriously better than any of the crepes I made last summer, and the combination of dark brown sugar and maple syrup gives them a hint of rich sweetness. YUMMY! GREAT SUCCESS!