A Left-Over Pancake: the Almighty Beans Osakayakidashi

Since Osakayakidashi sounds complicated and long, I’ll simply call it the Japanese pancake here from now on. I am not sure if I could say this recipe is one of my originals, but I haven’t seen anyone posted similar recipes like this one yet. And instead of “inventing” it, I was just trying to clean out my “too packed to the edge of a possible explosion” refrigerator in the first place. So this recipe, or this pancake, is actually no more than a creative and bold use of all my left overs. But that is exactly why I’d like to call it “the Almighty Pancake ever”. You basically have no chance of NOT making it better than its ingredients. Sounds not had huh?

So what ingredients or left overs did I end up using? The first time was a real experiment, and I happened to have some boiled beans left from the red bean and pearl barley congee/porridge that I made the day before. So the bean paste was used in replace of the flour that a traditional Japanese pancake would call for. I also have a few exceptionally soggy lettuce leaves that have been sitting in my refrigerator for days, so I simply chopped up the leaves and tossed them into the mixing bowl. And then I added an egg into the mixture, a pinch of salt, and, a few drips of grapeseed oil, well that’s it! You can add more flour if you prefer a chewy and crispy texture but it’s really up to you. Just make sure the mixture is well-evenly-mixed and neither too liquid nor too dry (in those two extreme cases they wouldn’t form a pancake shape in the pan). It takes about three-to-five minutes of medium heat to do one side and then you can simply flip it around and do the other side the same way. If you still remember the sauce I made for the grilled rice balls in my earlier post, voila! It’s a perfect sauce (together with Kewpie Mayonnaise) for this pancake as well if you, like me, live in a small town where one simply couldn’t find the traditional Osakayakidashi sauce anywhere.

I didn’t know it would come out so good: as you can tell from this picture, it was supposed to be a five-minute-quick lunch that I eat while working. But my left-over bean paste turned out to be the key! It softened the texture of this whole pancake and made it surprisingly creamy. So I made it again the next day and felt the urge to share the recipe here.