Experimental Studies in Brown: Chestnut Crepes with Coffee-Sausage Gravy

The experimental part was not the coffee gravy -- we've been doing that occasionally for the better part of a year, ever since we discovered that bechamel with coffee works (quite well, really).  The experimental bit was the chestnut flour that Lauren decided we needed to buy at the Coop (one of the 2 large supermarkets in Florence) yesterday.  Like, I imagine, most Americans, I've never used chestnut flour before.  I know some of the things Italian's use it for, but while they look quite pretty most of the ones I've tried taste rather less so.  Not that my tasting has been that extensive, but the point is that we had almost no idea what to do with the stuff.  Which is why we tried crepes -- ok, we tried pasta first, but with only a 1/4 cup of flour added to our normal 00/semiola mix.  It turns out that chestnut flour works fairly well for crepes (and didn't seem to make a huge difference for the pasta).  The texture is a bit different from wheat or buckwheat, but not too far into the rubbery and they end up having a nice light sweetness.  They also went very well with the sausage and coffee gravy.



 Crepes:  Make these essentially the same as you would any crepe but use chestnut flour in the place of wheat.  We were out of milk and thus failed to do this.  Here's what I did: mix together 1 C. chestnut flour, 1 egg, some (1/3 cup?) yogurt and enough water to make the batter fairly liquid.  Lightly butter your pan, heat (fairly hot) and then pour in half a ladle full of batter or so, swirling it around the pan so the crepe is nice and thin.  The chestnut crepes are a little bit more gelatinous than normal ones, so I found they needed a slightly hotter pan and longer cooking times than one would usually use, but other than that proceed as if you were making any other crepe.  Which is to say, throw away (or eat) the first one, adjust the thickness of the batter and the temperature of the pan and make a pile of them, hitting your skillet with just a bit of butter in between each round. 

Gravy:  The basic concept here is the diner.  As in, biscuits and gravy, with coffee!  One of those natural progressions that I'm surprised didn't take over the world sometime in the 50's.  Obviously we came up with this during the brainstorming for our coffee dinner.  We made this particular version using cooking cream, which is somewhere between heavy cream and butter, but more or less any white sauce base will work.  We also used instant coffee this time (which, by the way, we inherited when a friend left the country) because in addition to being out of milk we were also out of coffee.   Normally, we use espresso from our moka pot.  And so, instructions for this edition:  saute 1 onion and a sausage, without the skin.  Add cooking cream.  Add water when the cooking cream turns out to be rather close to the butter side of the force.  Add instant coffee and salt to taste, turn off the heat when the consistency is right.  Apply sauce to crepe, eat.

Pairing:  We had this with a rather smooth thick brown beer (unfortunately available for a limited time only, and only in our kitchen) which was excellent.  Sure, it sounds like breakfast food, but this time it was lunch.  Something like a dogfishhead 90 min. should work too, or even an oatmeal stout.