14 DAY TRIAL // Everybody loves pancakes, but have you ever wondered how much you'd be willing to pay for one? A special pancake, which contains lobster, caviar and champagne, was created at a Manchester restaurant and went on sale for a whopping £800 ($1,330 / €971).
For this year's Pancake Day, chef Matthew Downes decided to break with tradition and included the finest ingredients in his pancake recipe, such as Scottish lobster, Beluga caviar and Hulle Verge Truffle. The pricey pancake also includes Scottish mussels and langoustines, all sprinkled with Dom Perignon Rose hollandaise sauce.
With this recipe, Downes created the most expensive pancake ever and broke the previous record, held by the same restaurant since 2009. In that occasion, the previous chef created a pancake that cost £144 ($240 / €174) per serving and included Madagascan vanilla pods, organic strawberries and 23-carat edible gold leaf.
Pancake Day was originally invented as a way of using up spare ingredients, like eggs, butter and milk. It marks the last day before Lent – a 40-day period of abstinence. In average, a pancake costs between £3 ($5 /€3,6) and £30 ($50 / €36) depending on the number and type of the toppings used.
This year, diners at the five-star Opus restaurant located inside Radisson Blu Edwardian Hotel, can order the luxury dish if they have some extra cash to spare. Although the dish is not available on the regular menu, clients can request it if they want to taste it.
The chef needs only 20 minutes to prepare this expensive pancake, and he also uses traditional ingredients such as butter, sugar and milk to make the delicious breakfast. His creation is served as a thick triangular wedge with a pink topping.
“We thought of doing a posh pancake because we knew Pancake Day was coming up and we thought we could make something a bit special out of it. We used only the finest ingredients to give it that extra-wow factor. I’m really proud of what we’ve created, the taste certainly lives up to the price tag,” chef Matthew Downes said, according to Daily Mail.
The record for the world's largest pancake is held by the Co-Operative Union, Ltd from Rochdale, Manchester. The huge pancake was created in 1994 and had a diameter of 15.01 m (49 ft 3 in) and a weight of 3 tonnes (6,614 lb).
The record for most people flipping pancakes is 890 and was achieved in Sheffield, South Yorks in February 2012.