The Unexpected Shortcut Behind My Scallion Pancake Recipe

I grew up in a very traditional Taiwanese household, and we ate only Chinese and Taiwanese food. As a kid, I didn’t even realize that what we were eating wasn’t what everybody else was eating. I remember going over to a friend’s house once and seeing food I had never had before — meatloaf and mashed potatoes — and being confused about how to eat it. I’d also never not used chopsticks.

I remember asking, “Where’s the rice?” and the mom asking me, “Do you always eat Chinese food at home?” And I said, “No, I just eat regular food.” To me, the food I grew up with was regular food. That’s what we ate until I was about 18.

Scallion pancakes were always something I knew from restaurants. Every now and then my mom would make them at home, but it wasn’t something she made all the time. They weren’t super-easy, so I mostly thought of them as a restaurant dish.

When I was opening and running [James Beard Award–winning bakery] Flour, we had this incredible pizza dough that we used for everything — pizza, focaccia, sandwich loaves. Every day we were making batches and batches of it, and I was always thinking about what else we could do with that dough. I kept thinking about fried dough, like the kind you get at state fairs, and how light and crispy it is. I loved that texture and started thinking about whether we could use pizza dough the way you use scallion pancake dough.

Traditional scallion pancake dough doesn’t have yeast. You mix it, let it rest, roll it out, and fry it, and it’s a little chewier and denser. I wanted to see if I could make a scallion pancake that was light and airy. So I thought, what if we folded scallions, salt, and sesame oil into pizza dough and fried it?

I tried this at Flour before Myers + Chang was even open — before we had even thought about opening Myers + Chang. I was just playing around with what we could do with that dough. And it was delicious.

So when we opened Myers + Chang, I wanted to put a scallion pancake on the menu, but I wanted it to be nontraditional. We take the pizza dough and roll it out into a long oval, then spread a very generous mixture of scallions, salt, and sesame oil over the whole thing. Then you roll it up like a jelly roll into a long skinny snake, coil it into a little ball, and let it rest. Once it’s rested and the gluten has relaxed, you roll it out again into a flat disc and fry it.

When we first opened, we were rolling out each pancake to order. We would get an order, take the little bundle, flour the cutting board, roll it out, gently stretch it, and fry it. Within a couple of days we were like, this is ridiculous. Now we prep them ahead and roll them out partway, so when an order comes in we just stretch and fry.

It’s very popular. When I’m at the restaurant, I’ll see the board with 15 scallion pancakes on it at once, and I’m always shocked, but the kitchen will tell me, “This is totally normal.” People order it all the time, which is great, because I love it.

I think people like it because it’s familiar. And it’s fried dough — there’s really nothing not to like. It comes with a soy-vinegar dipping sauce with a little sugar in it, more scallions on top, and it’s just a great dish to share.

It’s one of those dishes that feels very restaurant-y, but if you can buy pizza dough at the grocery store, you can make this at home. If you want to make the dough yourself, that’s great, but I know that’s more time-consuming than most people want.

They’re good year-round, great for parties, and even if they’re not hot, they’re still really delicious. Of course, hot dough is best, but they hold up well. We’ve put them out on buffets at the restaurant, and they stay crunchy for a while.

They’ve been on the menu for a long time, and we’re really happy that people like them so much, because we think they’re really delicious.

— As told to Audrey Morgan