Buckwheat Crepes

2024 has been a year for trying new things--some voluntary, like learning French, and some involuntary, like removing dairy from my cooking and baking repertoire for a while. If I may say so myself, I rose to the occasion and made some great dairy-free food, but mon Dieu! I missed le fromage. I missed it a LOT.

So when a doctor gave us the green light to resume eating dairy, boy, did we! I gleefully added five different kinds of cheeses to my first grocery list after the lifting of the dairy restriction.

One of those cheeses was gruyere, because in honor of the Paris Olympics and my French studies, I decided to make "Galettes Complètes (Buckwheat Crepes)" (NYT Cooking). Despite its name, buckwheat contains no wheat, making it a good choice if you can't have gluten. 

But the recipe includes ham, and for environmental reasons, I try to keep my meat consumption to a minimum. Our World In Data notes that the agriculture sector is the world's "leading driver of deforestation, biodiversity loss, land use, freshwater withdrawals, and water pollution," and that animal-based foods generally contribute more to climate change and other environmental ills than plant-based foods.

I found a recipe for vegan ham (Vegan Dollhouse) and decided to give it a whirl. I used a mandolin to slice my tofu because I thought it might be easier to cut even pieces, but the results weren't better than what I'd have gotten with a knife. But it was an easy recipe in any case. I was very pleased with how my "ham" pieces turned out, but (perhaps because I cooked them in a sheet pan) they needed less than 40 minutes in the oven. I'll try 30 next time.

Making the crepes wasn't difficult, and I even managed to coax them into the suggested square shape. The yolks remained too runny for our taste, though, so after cooking the crepes for a few minutes, I flipped them over and cooked on the other side for a minute or two. This solved the problem but made them less pretty. In Olympic terms, you could say that their technical score was high, but they took a deduction on the artistic score.

We were pleased with the taste. Overall, one judge and I gave them 7 points out of a possible 10. Had I not overcooked the "ham," I do believe these crepes might have been gold-medal-worthy. I served them with corn because I serve everything with corn in August.

I'm acutely aware that as much as I missed cheese when it was off the menu, skipping dairy is a win for Planet Earth, just like skipping meat (and eggs, though farming chickens is less environmentally problematic than farming cows). Once the initial excitement of returning to mozzarellas and bries and goudas has worn off, I'll go back to my prior philosophy of minimization.