Recipe for Vegan Squash and Seaweed Pancakes by Lisette Kreischer

Far removed from the popular sweet pancakes that are eaten covered with maple syrup, Lisette Kreisher offers a savoury, vegan version. They contain no trace of milk, nor any other ingredient of animal origin. 

The main ingredients in this recipe are squash and kombu, a type of seaweed notably grown in the Hokkaido region in northern Japan and primarily used to make dashi. These healthy ingredients in no way take away from the indulgent nature of this dish, which can be enjoyed as a starter or main, accompanied by a green salad. 

Makes 10 pancakes

Ingredients

For the pancakes:

20 g fresh kombu

1 small Hokkaido squash or other winter squash

350 g spelt flour

1 tablespoon baking powder

1½ teaspoons dried rosemary

1 teaspoon paprika

½ teaspoon curry powder

1 tablespoon olive oil, plus more for cooking

250 ml warm water

Fine sea salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste

Extras:

25 g ‘pesto from the sea’

150 g winter purslane, rinsed and dried

Extra virgin olive oil

Lemon juice

Everything Goes ‘Weed mix (see book for recipe)

Method

Thoroughly rinse the kombu to remove all the brine. Dab dry and chop. Peel the squash, remove the seeds, and cube the flesh.

Bring a pot of water to a boil and add the squash cubes; boil until tender, for about eight minutes. Drain and blend in a food processor into a smooth puree. Separate 400 g of puree for the pancakes. If there’s extra, you can freeze it for later.

Combine the flour, baking powder, rosemary, paprika, and curry powder in a bowl. In another bowl, mix the squash puree with the oil, kombu, and warm water and then add this to the flour. Whisk thoroughly until you have a thick, smooth pancake batter. Season with salt and pepper.

Heat a splash of olive oil in a skillet and pour some batter in the pan. Rotate the pan so you get a small, thick, and round pancake about 10 cm in diameter. Cook until golden brown on both sides, for about six minutes, flipping after three minutes. You can use a greased ring in the pan so that all pancakes are evenly sized and perfectly round. Keep the pancakes warm by setting them on a plate that’s resting on a pot of simmering water.

Top the pancakes with pesto from the sea and fresh winter purslane. Sprinkle the purslane with some olive oil and lemon juice and garnish with Everything Goes ’Weed Mix.

Ocean Greens (2016), by Lisette Kreisher and Marcel Schuttelaar, is published by The Experiment and is currently only available in English.

In her book Ocean Greens, co-written with Marcel Schuttelaar, nutrition engineer and founder of the North Sea Farm Foundation, the driving force behind seaweed cultivation in the North Sea, Lisette Kreisher shares over 50 seaweed-based recipes. However, the pioneer of the vegan movement in the Netherlands and co-founder of Dutch Weed Burger also offers much more. Her book is interspersed with interviews with seaweed specialists and offers, as an introduction, several pages on the different species of seaweed, their health benefits and flavours…

Ocean Greens is not her first cookbook; Lisette Kreischer has also written Ecofabulous and Man Eat Plant, among others.