Last week I made J. Kenji Lopez-Alt’s Panfried “Garlic Knot” Pancakes from his The Wok cookbook.

This recipe takes the same roll out, fill, roll up, spiral, re-roll out technique as the Chinese-Style Scallion Pancakes, but with pizza dough for the dough and a butter, olive oil, garlic, parsley mixture for the filling.

I was not confident as I made the pancakes. I used the store-bought pizza dough from Publix’s deli. (We use this regularly for our home-made pizzas. It is better than I’ve ever been able to make myself and certainly easier.) The gluten made the dough much harder to roll out than the hot water dough for the Chinese-style pancakes. Once the greasy mixture had been applied, it was even more difficult. I’m not a baker, but maybe it could’ve used a longer rest time?

Once I got cooking, though, things went fine. Both pancakes got brushed with remaining mixture and sprinkled with Parmesan. Kenji instructs to cut into wedges and serve with marinara sauce, which I did.

I didn’t know how to incorporate this into a meal, so we just had it as a random snack on Sunday afternoon. It was very good. By far the best of these pancake recipes. All of the fussiness with the dough was worth it.

Highly recommend. I will make these again.

I am cooking my way through J. Kenji Lopez-Alt’s The Wok cookbook. Read more about it.