: how to cook many crepes/pancakes “at the same time” *in a microwave*? [closed]

Question

Making a single pancake in a microwave is easy: just take a Tefal round pan (no sharp corner no sparks), drop your dough, wait 2.5 minutes (it also work on any eating plates, but the first one is quite hard to unstick). But it's not really efficient in terms of time and energy. There should be a way to make several pancakes at once, and (optional) maybe even while using the same energy, or just a little more.

Using several layers of Tefal cooking plates won't be efficient since the microwaves don't pass through the metal.

So there are 2 challenges to solve:

1. Finding the right material to cook the crepe: it must be 1) food-safe (also under microwaves: so no plastic to be sure) 2) transparent to microwaves (or low loss). (What about using a thin sheet of glass? Cheap and safe.)

2. Finding the best vertical structure: what shape, how tall, how many layers? (Knowing that it should be rechargeable with dough quickly and also disassembled to clean it)

It's an engineering challenge, but that's the kind of hack that could really be a turning point for humankind.

Any advice is welcome.

PS: once again the question is about cooking pancakes IN MICROWAVE

EDIT: the question was suddenly closed (after some weeks/upvotes, and several answers) just when I dared to tell the people that their answer is off-topic. (I said to @virolino what does it have to do with microwave cooking? he replied I do not like the tone of your question-comment.

If you also believe it was unjustifiably closed, please signal it (eg. upvote my last comment).

Answer 1

Note: I never even thought about using microwaves for cooking pancakes, so my answer will ignore that route (unfortunately).

In a home environment you are limited mostly by the... home environment. That means that it is difficult to run a successful business making huge amounts of pancakes. One of the biggest joys of cooking pancakes at home was the flipping - and I cannot imagine how one can successfully flip like 5 pancakes at once.

In a business environment, as well as at home, you might try the following hack. Use a big and flat (and thick) cast-iron board (that is significantly heavy, and you might need to have it custom made). Depending on the size of the pancakes you want to get, you can cook several pancakes at once. If you choose to make them rectangular / square, you can bake even more. The benefit of this hack is that one source of heat will be enough for all pancakes at once - the cast-iron is a very good heat-storage and heat-disperal material.

Answer 2

I very much doubt you can make crepes in a microwave. The essence of it is that you need to "sear" each side (not sure it's the best word) on a very hot plate. A microwave will instead warm the dough up gradually, or in other words, boil.

Crepes require very high heat, but they cook in seconds. This is not necessarily inefficient: I haven't done calculations, but in engineering this state of affairs (high power / quick action) is often the most efficient way of doing things.

The reason crepes need high heat is similar to why soldering iron is often heated to some >350°C while the solder melts at below 200°C: the dough cools the plate quickly (by rapid evaporation as well as by direct absorption), and it needs an excess of energy to stay hot. For this reason a good crepe pan is necessarily thick. I doubt a household microwave can make a thin sheet of dough absorb enough energy rapidly and evenly enough.

By the way, microwave is not even particularly efficient: a typical 700 W rated microwave actually consumes about 1.1 kW. In terms of efficiency, an induction cooktop must be the best for crepes (and most other things).

So, to answer the question: the practical way to make many crepes/pancakes “at the same time” is just to have many crepe pans. This, of course, hardly qualifies as "lifehack" because that's what most people do already.

How many one can handle depends on experience, and you'd need to time it and adjust the heat such that you'd have continuous action of pouring dough, flipping and removing crepes with minimum idle time. The thicker the pancakes, the more you can handle at the same time. For very thin crepes, I can manage four, and it's a practical limit at home anyway. Making 2-3 is more practical and comfortable if it's not a race.