Master the flip

If you’ve never flipped a pancake, this recipe makes it worth learning

I’ve been getting Chinese chives at the farmers market from a vendor named Nancy. She told me how to make a pancake, as she calls it, with egg, sesame oil and her scallion-sized chives.

Chive pancakes usually have some glutenous form of starch like flour or pancake mix. But Nancy’s version — from “northern China,” as she is — has none. While technically more an omelet than pancake, when it comes to Chinese chives, I do what Nancy says.

The only problem is the thing is so large, fragile and all-around floppy that a spatula alone can’t flip this disc.

I missed my chance to ask Nancy how she turns her pancake; probably something impossible with chopsticks. Before

I knew it, I found myself with a sizzling pancake that I needed to invert, and I realized I had to take matters into my own wrists.

Flipping things in pans always seemed too risky, especially given the lack of any reward in my life before chive pancake, when every other round thing in a pan that I’d ever needed to turn over was small or sturdy enough that I could do it with a spatula or two. The chive pancake was different. Too big and delicate to turn, and too important to screw up.

When I realized as much, I knew that the time had finally come. There was no way around this moment but through it. The next thing I knew, I was cackling with surprise with a flipped chive pancake in my pan.

The trick, with pancake flipping as well as managing any other object in front of you that might be falling, is to bend your knees. Quickly.

Dropping down stops the clock for a moment, allowing you to keep the object in front of you and in reach, even as it accelerates toward earth. It allows you to wait for the pancake to rotate a full 180 degrees, before you stick that landing in your non-stick pan.

While a perfectly flipped chive pancake is a beautiful, impressive sight to behold, the most important thing is to simply catch the thing, even if it lands awkwardly on an edge, collapsing into a pile of chive scramble. Once you get the general feel for chive pancake, it will always be close to perfect.

In order to flip the pancake you need a round, relatively light pan with gently curved sides. A nonstick omelet pan is the lightest option, and makes it really easy. My stainless steel saucepan is almost as manageable.