Back in September, I backed a Kickstarter project for “Captain Crepe Pan“, a guy raising money to make cast iron crepe pans on a larger scale than he could do at home. I think Cam pointed it out to me originally, and hinted that it might be a good Christmas present, what with us collecting manhole covers and enjoying crepes, and this basically being a small manhole cover you could cook on. The project made five times its funding goal, and our pan arrived on the morning of Christmas Eve, just in time to be a present, hooray! The creator had offered a seasoned and non-seasoned version of the pan, and I asked for non-seasoned so I could give the method Sheryl Canter posted about a try.
Well, first I got a 60-grit sanding wheel for the drill and spent half an hour sanding the cooking surface smoother. The maker had ground off the casting flash and the worst of the roughness from sand casting, but it was still a pretty pebbled surface, and while I’m sure it would have worked just fine if I’d seasoned it as it came, I wanted to start off smoother. So half an hour with a sanding wheel later, it felt pretty smooth and I started seasoning it.
Wow, flax oil is definitely the way to go for seasoning cast iron. I’m tempted to get some oven cleaner and un-season most of our other cast iron objects so I can re-season them with flax oil. (Although if I do that I’ll also want to borrow an angle grinder so I can smooth the bottoms of the Lodge pans we have — they’re ok, but they’re no Griswold.) Six very thin coats of flax oil later, the surface of the crepe pan is very, very slick. I fried an egg on it as a test, and had no issues with sticking whatsoever.
In fact, it might be a little too slick — during the first test batch of crepes I made tonight, I lost one crepe off the side of the pan when I underestimated how easy it would be to rotate the crepe with my fingers. I gave it what I thought was a little push to get it un-stuck, and it shot right off the side. I guess it hadn’t been stuck at all to begin with. Oops.
It’ll take a while to get the motion with the batter spreader down, but around the fourth or fifth crepe I made, I think I was starting to get it. (The spreader, incidentally, was difficult to find at retail — the clerk at the restaurant supply store suggested I try Sur La Table, but I didn’t feel like going down there, so I went to Rockler and got some cherry dowels and made my own.)
The pan is 13 inches in diameter, so it’s smaller than a commercial crepe machine (which are 15 3/4″ in diameter, and cost upwards of $650) but larger than any other home crepe pan I’ve seen (which seem to all be 11″ or smaller). About four ounces of batter seems to be the right amount to spread right out to the edges without spilling over (which should tell you something about the size of the finished crepe — Alton Brown’s recipe calls for one ounce of batter per crepe). It heats pretty evenly, possibly thanks to the design on the non-cooking side, and I suspect would heat even more evenly if I cleaned the burner on the stove. There are no handles, so you have to let it cool before taking it off the stove, unless you’ve got welder’s gloves and a heatproof place to store it.
I’m looking forward to putting it to a lot more use. Once we’ve got the technique down and the house cleaned up, I hope we can have friends over for a crepe party. If you’re interested in getting your own pan, he’s taking pre-orders for a post-Kickstarter round of pans at CaptainCrepe.com.
