Sourdough Aebleskiver Recipe (With a Super Amateurish Video!)

I wanted to post this the first week in December, as I hear this is a popular Danish holiday food. However, it turned out that making a stop motion animation super low-budget video is a lot more effort than one would think. I had fun with it though, I laughed out loud at how cheesy it was more than once. I do wish I had a better microphone, but I’m quite happy with the graphics. Yes, you heard me. I actually like how it turned out.

You will need an aebleskiver pan, and a pastry brush. You will need to know how to make clarified butter or ghee. You need a sourdough starter and if you don’t have one yet, I had great results with the pineapple juice starter (scroll down for a day by day breakdown). You need to know how to fold egg whites into batter, and if you don’t believe me about the necessity of whipping the egg whites, you should. Take a look at 2:30 on the same video, he’ll show you. In aebleskiver, that puff on flipping the pancake translates into the aebleskiver becoming nice and round.

If you don’t want to follow my recipe and would rather not do sourdough, there are plenty of recipes for aebleskiver online (or check out the book Ebelskivers by Kevin Crafts). You’ll still need everything else but the starter though.

My recipe for aebleskiver (makes between 18 and 25 ‘skivers):

2 cups (500g) sourdough starter
2 eggs (separated)
1 tsp (7g) salt
1/2 cup (125g) water or milk (if using powdered milk add 1/8 cup or 15g powder)
2 Tbsp (30g) sugar
2 Tbsp (18g) oil, ghee, or bacon drippings (in addition to the ghee to oil the wells)
1 tsp baking soda

These really are a wonderful treat, I haven’t yet found anyone who didn’t prefer them to pancakes. They go fast, but if you wish to make a large amount of them, they do freeze well (or so I hear). I keep my extras in the refrigerator and warm them up at about 300°F in the oven, they don’t hang around long enough to need freezing in this home.

This recipe is nothing more than my usual sourdough pancake recipe, but I do have a cookbook full of seriously tasty looking recipes (that I mentioned earlier). I’ve made a few of his recipes, including lemon poppy seed and peanut butter and jelly. The chocolate chip ones are good as well, though I found it works better to dump the chips in the center as a filling and not to mix them into the batter. One of these days I’ll try more of his suggestions (especially garlic bread with a mozzarella filling and a mariana dipping sauce).

I’ve also seen recipes around the web that suggest fillings such as jam, flavored cream cheese, nutella, custard, and various berries. I’ve heard of people making muffins, cake or brownies in them as well, though I don’t know if they used the stove top or the oven. I’ve heard that cake balls made in this pan are good to dip in icing.

You certainly don’t have to just make aebleskiver in this skillet. This is what happens when you hand me two boxes of Jiffy cornbread mix. One of these days I’m going to make a more savory cornbread from scratch and make these filled with cheese. I’ve also heard of making popovers in this skillet, hush puppies, jalapeno poppers, crab cakes, salmon cakes, and meatballs. If the thought of meatballs appeals to you, try doing a search on kofta recipes (there are so many versions from various cultures, I just don’t trust myself to pick one out for you!)

The list of other foods that can be made in this skillet is probably way beyond my ability to list. Perhaps if I was an avid student of worldwide culinary culture, I might be able to tell you more. For one thing, aebleskiver may be the same thing or just very similar to poffertjes, I’m not entirely sure.

When I purchased mine, I browsed through the comments on Amazon and quickly saw that several cultures have their own versions of round breads, often made in very similar pans. The Japanese have takoyaki (filled with octopus, tempura, pickled ginger, and green onion). The Vietnamese have bánh khọt, which isn’t a round bread but can be made in this pan, and it looks like it would make an excellent appetizer that would serve as a conversation piece for us uncultured Americans, with rice flour, coconut milk, saffron, shrimp, pork, mung beans and a dipping sauce (here’s another page with a different recipe that includes beer, and a video).

Thailand has kanom krok, which is a coconut bread with rice flour and may include onions, corn, or cilantro as a filling. Several Indian recipes include bonda (with black pepper and curry in the rice flour and dipped in a coconut chutney),  ponganalu (filled with onions or corn and dipped in peanut chutney), and unni appam (which looks good and includes rice, banana, coconut, and sesame).

There is a Tamil (India, Sri Lanka, and South Asia) dish called kuzhi paniyaram that uses the same batter for dosa and idli, which is super fabulous news for me as my new copy of Wild Fermentation totally has this fermented lentil/rice batter given as a recipe, and a large part of my diet is already made up of lentils and rice. I already was thinking of making dosas soon, but knowing that I can use my nifty aebleskiver pan for my new fermented food kick is giving me quite a thrill. It’s nice to be so easily entertained, it really is.

Plus, if you have a super fancy grocery budget (can I come over for dinner?) I hear that the escargot pans are similar (though usually made of copper). I hear you put butter and perhaps a bit of garlic in the wells and sautée the little snails. I’ve never tried them, but I tend to be fairly adventurous with my foods and would certainly like to sample the recipe, though I doubt it will be in my near future.

Anyway, as you can see, this pan is no more a “one trick gadget” than a muffin tin is. Sure, I mostly use my muffin tin for muffins, but I’ve also made potato stacks in them and I know there’s a popular trend to use muffin tins for a variety of tiny casserole-type foods. And yes, I’ve only made aebleskiver and cornbread in my little skillet, but I know the potential is there to make more if I wish to break out of a culinary rut (and I so will be making trying that kuzhi paniyaram soon).  Get you one of these pans, use it, enjoy it, and your family will thank you for it :).

Related pages:

The Care and Feeding of Cast Iron

Ebelskivers: Danish-Style Filled Pancakes and Other Sweet and Savory Treats by Kevin Crafts.