Oatcakes take various forms depending on which side of the Anglo-Scottish border you call home. The Scots make theirs as baked, savoury biscuits which can be served on a cheeseboard or with smoked salmon, but the English have a very different take on the oatcake. Even these vary from region-to-region but the ones I’ve taken on hail from Staffordshire in the English West Midlands.

Staffordshire Oatcakes are very much like English pancakes, except they contain oatmeal and some use wholemeal flour either instead of plain flour or a combination of the two, and they’re no eggs in there, oh and they’ve got yeast in. But apart from this they are very much like English pancakes. Okay, so they look a bit like English pancakes… if you’re standing quite far away. Sheesh!

My good friend DrMike, who resides only a stone’s throw from North Staffordshire, gave me a fascinating bit of insight into the Staffy Oatcake. For many folks around there, oatcakes have replaced (or more likely were never displaced by) today’s fashionable fast food items; grilled paninis, deli wraps and the like. Why have your lunch-on-the-fly filling stuffed into a corn tortilla when you can have it rolled up in an oaty pancake? The traditional filling would be practically any combination of ingredients from an ‘all-day breakfast’ but anything goes these days. Chicken tikka, chilli con carne and coronation chicken are now quite the norm amongst the oatcake avant-garde.

As for my filling, well I had a bit of an epiphany. There’s a breakfast dish from Southern India called Masala Dosa which consists of pancakes made from ground daal or rice and stuffed with mildly spiced potatoes. Why not bring the taste of Chennai to The Potteries? So I fried some finely chopped onion, garlic and ginger in oil with cumin and mustard seeds for a few minutes before adding some chopped, deseeded green chillis. I mixed a spoonful of tamarind paste with a little hot water and added this to the pan along with turmeric and brown sugar. Finally, I stirred in plenty of cooked, diced potatoes coating them well with the spices and aromatics before finishing with chopped coriander leaves.

I rolled up a good portion of the spicy potatoes in my Staffy Oatcake, sat back and enjoyed my tasty, East-meets-West Midlands lunch. Here’s an oatcake recipe… > > Read on > >