The Little-Known Secret of Spelt Pancakes at the Roadhouse
Made with freshly milled flour from the Bakehouse
As you likely know, I love to look here at the ways we’re actively striving to make our food better at Zingerman’s. From the first week we opened our doors 44 years ago, we have worked with the mindset that is now documented in #8 on the list of 12 Natural Laws of Business (see Zingerman’s Guide to Good Leading, Part 1): “To get to greatness, you’ve got to keep getting better all the time!” It’s a rare week that we aren’t doing something to raise the bar on a recipe or source a more flavorful, more traditionally crafted ingredient.
This approach is, of course, a big part of our point of view around food. In the belief that we can find ways to improve on everything we do, we have long worked to invest in more flavorful ingredients to yield more flavorful food.
A few years back, we began to make pancakes at the Roadhouse using the spelt that we mill fresh at the Bakehouse. They are—to the standard-issue white-flour pancakes most of us had as kids—what great Bakehouse bread is to sliced white bread at the supermarket.
If you don’t know it, spelt is an ancient grain that’s in the same family as wheat. Greek mythology says it was a gift from the goddess Demeter. Spelt has been grown in Central Asia for over 9,000 years and came to North America only at the end of the 19th century. It’s related to farro and has been called farro grande (as opposed to the farro piccolo we serve at the Roadhouse that comes from Anson Mills). Compared to standard wheat varieties, spelt has a harder husk, a lower yield, and a more positive nutritional profile—good for heart health, blood pressure, and digestion, it’s high in vitamins, like zinc and magnesium, and reduces the risk of diabetes. St. Hildegard of Bingen, an 11th-century mystic, painter, poet, and composer who was putting her visions in writing a thousand years ago, said, “Spelt is the best of grains. It is rich and nourishing and milder than other grains. It produces a strong body and healthy blood to those who eat it, and it makes the spirit of man light and cheerful.”
A millennium later, the folks at the Bakehouse share:
Our organic spelt berries come from Michigan and the surrounding Midwest region. When we mill them on our stone mill, it produces a beautiful cream-colored silky flour with large flakes of nutritious bran. Compared to whole wheat flour, it’s softer, not as absorbent, and produces a very extensible dough. Given its delicious flavor and strong baking qualities, we use freshly milled whole spelt flour in a number of our breads, including Country Miche and Dinkelbrot.
The latter are two of my favorite breads: The Miche, which also now comes in a smaller size, is a magical blend of spelt, wheat, buckwheat, and rye that we bake in big, beautiful two-kilo loaves with lovely dark crusts, and the Dinkelbrot is a dense, delicious German-style spelt bread made with a bit of mashed potato, honey, and a lot of sunflower seeds. The fresh milling itself has been a huge improvement for us as well, offering better flavor and much better nutrition. In the last five years, we’ve rolled it (literally and figuratively) into most of our breads and an increasing number of our pastries. Everything we use it in is enhanced by its addition!
Connecting culinary dots, the Roadhouse crew had the thought to make use of the Bakehouse’s fresh-milled grains in the Roadhouse’s pancakes. Pancakes have long been a staple on the morning menu, and for years we’ve used all-purpose flour. After a series of experiments, we enthusiastically chose the spelt. Swapping in the spelt for the standard wheat flour has boosted the flavor by something like a factor of 50! Creamy on the tongue, gently nutty, still mellow but marvelously flavorful, the pancakes are very delicious on their own. Personally, I love them with some Vermont Creamery Cultured Butter and thin slices of smoked salmon on top. (If you want an impassioned point of view about these pancakes, see if Sous-Chef Jess Forbes is working—she has a strongly held perspective on just how amazingly good they are!)
Add in a glass of orange juice, freshly squeezed on-site (the juice equivalent of fresh milling for grain); some Roadhouse Joe coffee from the Coffee Company; free Wi-Fi; and Roadhouse Park out front … and there are more and more reasons to make your way to the west side in the morning!
