Jästa pannkakor / Yeast leavened pancakes

I figured I’d throw up an English translation of a recipe I found on Wikibooks for southern Swedish (Scanian?) yeast leavened pancakes.

These take a while to make, mostly due to the time it takes for the batter to rise, but they’re by far the best pancakes I’ve ever made or eaten. They end up a lot fluffier than American style pancakes that use baking soda or baking powder as the raising agent.

Ingredients

This makes about a dozen pancakes, depending on how big you make them.

25 g fresh yeast or 2 teaspoons of dry instant dry yeast
350 ml of milk
350 ml / 210 grams all-purpose flour
2 eggs
1 tablespoon sugar
1 teaspoon powdered vanilla sugar (you can use vanilla extract instead, as this type of vanilla sugar isn’t common outside of the Nordics). Alternatively, vanillin powder, but you might have to experiment to see how much you need, as they’re not all the same.
A touch of salt
Butter (for frying)

Warm the milk to 37 degrees C. Dissolve the fresh yeast in the milk. Whisk in the eggs with the milk. In a mixing bowl, add the flour, sugar, vanilla sugar and salt. Add the wet ingredients and whisk everything together until you have a thick, smooth batter. If you’re using instant dry yeast, mix it with the flour instead of the milk.

Now the batter needs to ferment/rise. This takes about an hour in room temperature, or you can speed it up by putting the mixing bowl in a warm water bath (about 37-40 degrees C). The batter should almost triple in size and be very bubbly at this point. Do not whisk it or stir it unnecessarily at this point, as you want the air in the pancakes to make them as fluffy as possible.

Melt some butter in a medium-hot frying pan. You might have to start a bit hotter and then reduce the temperature as you’re frying the pancakes. You need about 100 ml of batter per pancake. Make sure to add a little knob of butter for every pancake you cook. If you have a large frying pan, you can cook a couple of pancakes at a time.

The original recipe calls for serving these with light beet syrup, but maple syrup works just as well. I tend to add a bit of jam on mine too. If you really want to go fancy, you can also have some whipped cream with them.
Note that these pancakes actually freeze quite well and are easily re-heated in a microwave oven.

Original recipe source in Swedish: Wikibooks jästa pannkakor