When your friends know you love to cook—and even worse if they know you do it professionally—you get a lot of “so when are you gonna make me dinner?”. I even got a very specific, "can you make me pancakes?" request last summer from a complete (but cute) stranger in Fire Island. It got me thinking about buttermilk pancakes, which sort of bore me, to be honest. I like food with a lot of flavors, where every bite is a little different. I started playing with a ricotta, blueberry, and lemon pancake recipe, and by this summer, it was perfected. This recipe isn't for boring breakfast, it's a weekend beach brunch, best enjoyed with your new (hot) man (or woman) friend.
Even better, it’s pretty easy. Even though the word "compote" is in the title. The trick to getting all that creamy ricotta into a pancake without turning it into a beach-bod-wrecking gut bomb is whipping egg whites. You basically make a fluffy egg white marshmallow cream—what we in the biz call a meringue—then you fold that into the batter. All that trapped air in the whites makes your pancakes light and airy, while the ricotta gives it a delicious tang.
And blueberries, well we all know they drive men crazy, so why wouldn’t you throw them into a romantic breakfast for two? I’m not talking about sprinkling a few raw berries on top, drop those berries right into the batter as they are cooking on the griddle. And why stop there? I make a quick—and when I say quick I mean under 10 minutes—jammy blueberry and lemon juice sauce (aka compote) to pour over the pancakes along with melting butter and maple syrup. It all melds together in one beautiful swirl, and before you know it, it's disappeared and you're on your way to the beach.