Some Æbleskiver Advice for Domku: Give Those Puppies a Turn
As soon as the Æbleskiver hit our table at Domku, Carrie had a flash of déjà vu. For my wife, these Danish balls of pancake dough brought back pleasant memories of her State Department childhood in the Netherlands, where the bite-sized breakfast snacks are known as poffertjes.
Your own Y&H, however, had a flash of horror. These babies in Petworth were practically blackened on one side, which no powdered sugar could hide! (See pic above.)
I asked Carrie if she remembered whether poffertjes were supposed to boast such burn marks. Best she could recall, the poffertjes of her youth were golden brown, free of any such renegade scorching. I looked around us. The folks at a table outside had also ordered Æbleskiver, and their dough balls looked like partial eclipses, too.
For my tastes, the Æbleskiver didn't taste any better than they looked. While half the exterior was burned, the interior was still partially moist and undercooked. I was mumbling to myself and Carrie that the very shape of these fat spheres would make it hard to cook the interior completely before blackening the exterior, particularly at the high heat with which these balls are griddled.
Carrie quickly grabbed her iTouch and started Googling both Æbleskiver and poffertjes. She found this page on Wiki, which included this all-importance sentence: "Restaurant chefs are quite skilled in turning the almost baked poffertjes with a fork."
They apparently haven't learned that skill yet at Domku.
3:14 pm
Those things look misshapen, too. They should be round, like a ball. You let the bottom cook, and when that's crispy you flip them over in the little molds and the liquid batter that hasn't firmed up runs into the bottom of the mold and you get an almost hollow globular pancakey 'skeever'. I always have trouble buttering them, though, since the butter runs off of the roundness. My Dad makes them when I go home to visit - he's German-Irish, not Danish, but I always assumed that the ancestral home in Minnesota was the origins of the cast-iron skeever pan.