This episode is a little different…and a whole lot yummier! Sergio and Mimsy roll up their sleeves to cook real German pancakes with their friend Ms. Simone. But there’s a twist… something about this recipe might surprise you. 👀 As they crack eggs, stir batter, and laugh through the steps, they discover how food isn’t just delicious…it can tell stories and connect us to faraway places. There’s plenty of delicious discovery in this cozy kitchen adventure. Come cook, laugh, and listen your way through the tasty sounds of Germany! Download the Pfannkuchen Recipe HERE: https://storage.googleapis.com/mailerlite-uploads-prod/1493709/Z3iREpdK2K9Sj9vI2RB4fIawyKlg0TL4874O5v37.pdf
Download the Pfannkuchen Recipe HERE!
This episode is a little different…and a whole lot yummier! Sergio and Mimsy roll up their sleeves to cook real German pancakes with their friend Ms. Simone. But there’s a twist… something about this recipe might surprise you. 👀
As they crack eggs, stir batter, and laugh through the steps, they discover how food isn’t just delicious…it can tell stories and connect us to faraway places.
There’s plenty of delicious discovery in this cozy kitchen adventure. Come cook, laugh, and listen your way through the tasty sounds of Germany!
SERGIO: Hi There. It’s me, Sergio. The Accent Explorer.
I hope you have had a fun week filled with listening and discovery. Have you tried saying anything in a new accent lately? Maybe even gone on your own little adventure?
Well, I want to hear all about it! Ask your grown up to send me a message on Instagram @TheAccentExplorer, or e-mail me (they’ll find my address in the episode description).
Now…We have something deliciously fun for you today. Remember last week when my German friend, Ms Simone, invited Mimsy and me to cook a special dish from her country called pfannkuchen? Well, today is the day we cook it!
Pfannkuchen might look like pancakes. But here is the twist… in Germany, they are not for breakfast. Nope! They’re for, can you guess?....Dinner! Imagine eating pancakes and cauliflower on a Friday night. That’s what Ms. Simone grew up doing in her little home town of Schwabenheim.
And today she is sharing her recipe—and a few fun facts about Germany too. Let’s go say hi!
SIMONE: Hallo! I’m Ms Simone. I’m so excited to teach you a little bit about Germany, and about one of my favorite German dishes; pfannkuchen. If you don’t know where Germany is on the map, have your grown up point it out. It’s a big country on the Western side of Europe that shares its borders with nine other countries—like France, Denmark, Switzerland, and Belgium. Only three other countries in the whole world have more neighbors than Germany!
SERGIO: Wow! Nine neighbors? That’s like living next to nine different sound playgrounds—each with their own voices, music, and languages to explore!
Now, you may have never been to Germany, or eaten any German food yet, but I bet you already know a bunch of German words: noodle, hamburger, pretzel, bratwurst, schnitzel, apple strudel…oh boy, this is making me reeeally hungry. Let’s get to the kitchen, shall we?
And remember, you can find the full recipe by clicking the link in the episode description. That way, you can cook it with your grown ups whenever you want! Take it away, Ms Simone… and her special sous chef of the day, Mimsy!
SIMONE/MIMSY: All right, let's make some pfunnkuchen. Are you ready to help me? Okay, so the ingredients are milk. Which is MILCH in German. Can you say Milch? Milch! And Salt. And that is Flour. Flour is MEHL. And good old pepper. And pepper is PFEFFER in German.
SERGIO: Along with the milk, flour, salt, and pepper, you’ll need some eggs and baking soda handy. And that’s really it! Easy peasy! Your grown-ups probably already have all of those ingredients in your kitchen. Now, back to Ms Simone, who was just explaining the first steps: pouring milk into a measuring cup.
SIMONE/MIMSY: So now what we do is we take the milk, help me pour it. Now, what do you think comes next? What would make sense? How about eggs? Yeah. Would you like to crack the eggs? All right. Let's get some cracking on the eggs. Egg in German is EIER.
SERGIO: There’s another German word for you. Eier. Say it with me: EIER. (Pause) Did you hear that? That’s a great sound. It means you’re doing an awesome job - training your ears, your mouth, and your brain. Way to go, explorer. Are you good at cracking eggs? Let’s see you practice on your knee. Go on!
SIMONE/MIMSY: Good crack, perfect. Woah, that splashes! That’s perfect! We're gonna crack a lot of eggs. And no shell. No eggshell. Those are really good eggs too. Free range eggs. That reminds me, when I grew up in Germany, we grew up on a farm and we had lots of chickens and lots of pigs. Pigs make maccaroni. No, no. They make pepperoni. Pepperoni!? They do, don’t they? After we crack the eggs we have to always wash our hands. Yes always.
SERGIO: So now that you’ve cracked the eggs into a bowl and washed your hands reeeally well with soap, do you know what’s next? You pour the milk into the bowl with the eggs and MIX it all together! OR as they say in Germany— “MIXEN (mih-shuhn). Can you say “Mixen”? (Pause) Right again! Once you do all that, you add a pinch of salt, a dash of baking soda, and the flour!
SIMONE/MIMSY: Now you get to mix this. And stir it really good! Look how yellow it is. You do it. Until we don’t see any flour? That’s right!
You know who really liked eating this meal? My father. Why? Because when he was little way way, way back in the days when he was little, they lived on a farm and all they had was flour, eggs and milk. That's all that had. And so, so his mother made pancakes out of it and he's always liked that.
SERGIO: How cool is that! The dish we are cooking today helps us learn about someone who lived almost one hundred years ago! Back to Ms Simone and Mimsy.
SIMONE/MIMSY: Now, we put some salt in it. I'm gonna put some salt in your hand. Kind of take the whole hand, very good. Okay, and then I stir it in there. You drop it in there. Let's do the same with the pepper. Pepper we don't use so much because we don't want it to be too peppery.
SERGIO: This is also where you can add some parsley if you want. It’s not necessary but it’s great for a little extra flavor. Just remember, to keep giving that mixture a Mixen (mih-shuhn)! Once your egg mixture is completely mixed, have your grown-up help you get a pan and put it on the stove. Then, go ahead and melt some butter on it.
SIMONE/MIMSY: It has to be very high temperature. All right, here comes next step. So, what we do is we don't want to put too much of this in here because we want it really thin.
SERGIO: By “this”, Ms Simone means the ooey gooey egg mixture that she and Mimsy have been working so hard on mixing.
SIMONE/MIMSY: Okay, so I'm gonna get this very hot, okay. The stove is very hot, here we go. Now watch what it does. So what I'm doing is I put a little bit on the bottom, and then I swirl the pan around and you'll see bubbles coming in just a minute.
What are we cooking? Pfannkuchen. Pancakes, yes. Very good. The first pfannkuchen always takes a little bit longer because the pan is not quite hot yet and then sometimes if it's too runny, I have to add flour, make it a little thicker.
I think it's going to taste yummy. See how brown it gets on the bottom? Yeah. Well, we need to get it a little bit browner and then we flip it one time. Kind of like a pizza. Not with our hands though. Yeah, I know. It's too hot.
All right, let's see this one might be ready. So I lift the pan and I'll flip it and shake the pan.
What do you think? I like it! Tastes like egg to me. Tastes like egg. It does, doesn’t it. I’m going to keep trying this. I’m going to see if I still like it….
SERGIO: [amused] Haha that’s a handy trick, Mimsy. I’ll have to try that next time I want a second helping.
SIMONE/MIMSY: I like it a lot! Good. In German, you say “es schmeckt gut.”
SERGIO: So now that you’ve cooked your pfannkuchen, you can top it with whatever sauce you’d like. A traditional German white sauce? Strawberry jam? Applesauce? It’s totally up to you!
And that, my friend, is how you make a traditional German dish. If you try making it at home, ask your grown-up to tell us how it went! We’d love to hear what you thought—and maybe even see a photo of your pancake masterpiece.
So Mimsy, now that you’re an expert at cooking pfannkuchen, what do you think of the taste? Did you love it?
MIMSY: I loved it too much. I loved it a lot. It tasted so good. It tasted kind of like dinner. It didn’t taste like a real pancake and it was because it was like a dinner pancake. We put some toppings on it. We put like a kind of sauce and cauliflower, apple sauce, jam, a lot of things.
SERGIO: So not only did we get to eat a really yummy meal, we also learned a whole lot of German words along the way. Let’s see how many we remember. Ready, Mimsy?
MIMSY: Yes, I’m sure ready!
SERGIO: Alright, Explorer! Can you shout out the words before Mimsy? Here we go:
How do you say “milk” in German?
MIMSY: MIlch!
SERGIO: Very good. What about flour?
MIMSY: Meil!
SERGIO: Very good. And Pepper?
MIMSY: Pfeffer!
SERGIO: Eggs?
MIMSY: Eier!
SERGIO: And lastly, what did we cook?
MIMSY: Pfannkuchen!
SERGIO: Great job! You’ll be speaking fluent German in no time!
SERGIO: Hey Mimsy, guess what! I just received a postcard from one of my friends. Except this friend doesn’t live in Green Ridge like you, me, or Ms Simone. This friend lives far, far away,across the Pacific Ocean…in a land of golden beaches and amazing animals.
Who could it be? Ooh, I can’t wait to tell you! But you will have to listen to the next episode to find out! I’m so excited to keep this adventure going with you. And remember—new episodes land every Friday! So make sure you subscribe to the show so you never miss an adventure.
Until then, keep exploring!