Michael Weldon's fluffy ricotta and blueberry pancakes

Today I thought I'd show you one of my favorite ways to use a blueberry in the kitchen. It’s the fluffiest, lightest, most delicious blueberry and ricotta pancakes. From the 8th of September through to the 5th of October, 10 cents from every pack of Eureka blueberries sold at Coles supermarkets is going to go towards Stephanie Alexander Kitchen Garden Foundation to the total of $75,000. So what a perfect time to be eating these beautiful Eureka blueberries. The first thing we're going to do is make the base for our mix. And when I make a pancake mixture, I make a wet and a dry mix, so we'll start by making our wet mix. Into our bowl, we're going to go in with our milk, egg yolks, make sure we get all of them out, some ricotta cheese, now I’m going to go in with most of it but I’m going to keep a little bit just to decorate the top of our pancakes, sugar, you can replace it with maple syrup if you wanted to, but I like the way sugar works into it. And then just some melted butter. We just want to mix this base and kind of break up any bits of ricotta with the back of our spoon and crush them so they're smaller chunks. So we’ve got a little bit of texture through your pancakes but they're not too chunky and they won't cook. Our next step is whisking our egg whites. So to make these pancakes extra fluffy, extra light and have that really nice little puff that I love in a pancake, we're going to add in some egg whites, and we're going to whisk them to stiff peaks. So what we're gonna do, if you have a stand mixer or kitchen mixer, you can use, it’s a lot quicker, but I'm gonna do it by hand to you guys. And all we want to do is in a nice big bowl, back and forth. Try and use the whole bowl, to get as much air into these whites as possible. The more air we get into there, the more air we mix into our batter, the lighter and the fluffy and the thicker our pancakes are going to be. Our egg whites now look light and fluffy, there's loads of air and them - I've got them stiff peaks. And what I mean by stiff peaks is when you give it a bit of a mix, you scoop a little bit of the whites out and you can see that nice peak that holds in the whites. Another great way of testing them is to turn it upside down over your head. If they hold above your head and they maintain that peak and don't fall onto you, you know they're ready to go. Now, these guys are good. So now we're going to add our dry ingredients into our original wet mixture. Dry ingredients here I've got flour, just plain flour, some baking powder, which is going to help with that puff and lift as well. Add some salt. That all goes in. Now I’ve sifted this beforehand so there's no lumps in there. We're going to mix it in carefully to our wet mix. We want to make sure it's all mixed in before we add in our egg whites. All right, that looks really good. The texture in there now you can see is all the chunks of our ricotta cheese which is going to give us a really great texture and flavour through our pancake. Now we're almost ready to start cooking our pancakes. So now's the time to chuck your heat on medium heat. We're going to cook these nice and gently and slowly to get a beautiful golden brown and that really nice puff. Now we can go in, whipped egg whites into our wet mixture we're going to go in three parts. So the first bit in, now admittedly, this pancake batter is already really good, but by adding in the egg whites once they’re whisked to stiff peaks, you're gonna get really lovely light fluffy pancakes. The first one, when you mix in your whites, you can be a little bit rough with it. Not too rough, but you can just make sure you get that white combined into the batter. We don't want any little bits of whites that aren't mixed in because what will happen is you'll get little airy clumps that won't be as nice as the batter. But from now on, we're gonna be really careful and gentle when mixing our whites into our batter. So what we’re gonna do, only use the whisk instead of the spatula. Going in with the next third of our white mix. We're just going to use a whisk and kind of run it underneath the batter and the egg whites and just sort of jiggle it through, and you can see how much air has been mixed into that batter. And it's gone from a rather thick dense batter to really light, fluffy, batter. Last third of our whites and again really gently mixing from underneath, up and out to mix the whites in. You can have a look at this now. It's super light, fluffy and airy. It's time to start making our pancakes. Now pan on the medium heat means you've got a little bit more control. Go with butter, we want to melt that butter. And this is where you decide how big you're making pancakes. Do you make little pikelets? Do you make medium sized pancakes or do you go to the big ones? For me these works as nice medium size pancakes work really well because you can stack them really high and they look beautiful. And that's what we want. We want our butter to melt and bubble but we don't want it to be browning at all. And now I’ve got a ladle and I'm going to go in with my ladle and so we make our pancakes a nice even size, we're going to measure out one ladle of mixture into our pan. For every time you put batter into your pan, you do the same sized ladle you get a really even consistent pancake. Now time for our Eureka blueberries. What we’re going to do here is just dollop a few of these guys in. Now, they’re beautiful, big, plump blueberries. I like to have some in my pancake and then the rest on top because the ones that pancake will cook and go a little bit jammy and the ones on top will be fresh and bursting with that beautiful, juicy flavour. We're going to cook our pancakes, you can see little bubbles coming through from the base and our batter’s cooked halfway through. Then we’ll flip the pancake over, repeat the process on the other side. I’m going to keep doing that until I've got a stack of beautiful pancakes. Then I'm going to come back and I'll show you how to finish it all off. Our last pancake is looking perfect. Now because we've got the blueberries on the bottom I actually flip my pancakes over so you can see the beautiful pops of blueberry all through there. Now to finish these guys off, a little bit more ricotta cheese. Just crumble this kind of over the top, let some fall down on the sides. It's gonna melt, it's going to stain with a little bit of that beautiful cooked blueberry. We want some more about Eureka blueberries. Good handful again. Maple syrup to finish off because I love maple syrup with pancakes. You could go honey, you could go a little sprinkle of sugar. A nice little drizzle of maple syrup just to get that sweet golden vanillary, sugary flavour. Take a look at his pile of happiness. The fluffiest, lightest pancakes you'll ever cook. That's my blueberry and ricotta pancake recipe starring these amazing Eureka blueberries that support the Stephanie Alexander Kitchen Garden Foundation. So make sure you've got loads of them in your shopping trolleys. Now it's time for me to start eating and you need to start cooking.