A curveball is being thrown next weekend by Vermont’s finest band, Phish, and we are lucky enough to be part of it. Seriously people, SERIOUSLY, we are SO excited about this, it’s just silly.

It all started this spring when we heard rumors of Phish throwing another magical summer festival at Watkins Glen, the giant speedway in upstate New York. So we reached out to their production team to get in on the fun. They got back to us: “Dream big, let’s do this.”

There is the feeling of excited when you’re kind of excited… and then there is a whole other kind of HOLY S#*T THIS IS AWESOME kind of excited that we felt at that moment. So we immediately got to work. We dreamt, we planned, and we collaborated with the best, most creative logistics team we could find. Fast forward to this moment right now, our amazing building team is driving across the great state of New York with 3 huge flatbed trailers full of too many things to describe, which we will be putting together into a 100 seat restaurant complete with shaded hammocks under pergolas, a big beer garden with lawn games and Fiddlehead Brewery suds, as well as a farmer’s market with local organic meats, vegetables and even Jasper Hill Farms cheese.

When we say this has been a long time coming for us, we meen a loooooonnnggg time coming. We here in Pancakia are anything but alone in our love for Phish. I believe Winston Churchill once said something like, “Never before was so much awesome created by so few.” OK, he didn’t say that, but you get the point: love for the good time Phish creates goes way back. In the case of Pancakia, it harkens back to one of our first shows: the world famous New Years’ ‘95 Show at Madison Square Garden. 8 years (and many many shows) later, in our first week of operations as a little cart on Church St, bassist Mike Gordon cruised by on his Segway, bought a crepe, and then (we swear) five minutes later cruised by again and bought another. We’d like to think that Mike’s first bites of Skinny goodness still lingered in his memory nearly twenty years later when we got invited to this festival.

There is at least one thing that we here at the Skinny would like to think we share in common with Phish: they are through-and-through Vermont. They started here, they love it here, and they work together with other Vermonters like Russ Bennett to share their fun wackiness with the whole world (who else remembers the World’s Largest Cowbell Ensemble?).

Fun fact: Phish started playing at Nectars; the first commercial kitchen we ever used was Nectar’s. Burlington had a rich culture and a great music scene before Phish came into the fold, but it is inarguable that their giant cultural contribution is part of why we now punch so far above our weight as a city, both musically and otherwise.

Here’s what we can tell you about next weekend: the surprises will never end and the ridiculousness will never stop.  No band could singularly get so many people to come out and keep all of them entertained 24 hours a day. We are lucky to be part of it, and we hope that we can put just a little bit more curve in this year’s curveball. Hope to see you there!

This upcoming Sunday, 4/22 is Earth Day. Every day is Earth Day, as far as we’re concerned, but Sunday really really is ACTUAL Earth Day. In our crepe-addled minds, we believe Earth Day should be one of the biggest holidays of the year. After all, most holidays are just one country’s holiday, or one religion’s holiday, but Earth Day is everyone’s holiday and this beautiful planet of ours really needs some tender loving care.

This Earth Day, we hope you can join us to celebrate and support this one and only planet we have. This year we decided to keep it super local, to a place literally right outside our front door that certainly deserves some attention: the one and only Lake Champlain. This amazingly beautiful body of water is under threat from, among other things, phosphorus, pollution, and surface runoff, and has taken a good 150-year beating from various industrial activities on her shores. Luckily there are some amazing organizations out there trying to help clean up the Lake, and others that help get us out on and around the lake. This Earth Day we’re focusing on the latter.

How does getting us out on Lake Champlain help preserve it? The more people choose to hang out in the lake’s glorious embrace, the more they will come to enjoy it, the more they will care to protect it. This year we have decided to focus our support on 2 organizations that get people out on and around Champ’s waters: Local Motion and The Community Sailing Center. For 4/22, we’re giving away up to $422 to these amazing non-profits that love our Lake: for every $10 donated to these groups, we will donate $4.22!

Here’s a little bit about what they do and how they help the lake:

The Lake Champlain Community Sailing Center: this place is like no other. Most cities have an exclusive country club on their shores, but uur great city has a community center that affordably gets people of all ages and income brackets out onto the lake. They offer summer camps, sailing instruction and racing, paddle boarding, canoeing, kayaking, and yoga. They’ve got “Leader Ship” programs for kids, women’s programs, and adaptive sports programs. Lake Champlain is a gift, and the Community Sailing Center makes sure everyone can take part in unwrapping it.  Donate $10 here and we’ll match it with $4.22!

Local Motion: right now, you may be thinking, OK, Mr. Pancake, you said this was a lake-centered thing, Local Motion is a bike-centered thing.  Bikes don’t go on lakes. Oooohhh but they do, thanks to the good folks at Local Motion. They run the bike ferry across the gap on the Lake Champlain Causeway, making the crucial connection between the Lake Champlain Islands and the Burlington Bike Path. And this is just one spoke in Local Motion’s proverbial wheel: they are among the most prominent advocates for Bike Path rehabilitation, they help businesses become bike-supportive, they help make our streets safely bike-friendly, and they provide valet bike parking at major events all summer. Donate $10 here and we’ll match it with $4.22.

Combining your love with our love, we’ll raise $1422 for these amazing organizations, $14.22 at a time. Please join us, and from all of us in Pancakia, HAPPY EARTH DAY!

Support the work of Salvation Farms by ordering some Hash Purples!

Have you tried these deliciously deep-fried wonders? Hash Purples are made with local beets and carrots, a magical rarity in our Vermont food system as they can be enjoyed and stored year round. Among the most nutritious veggies we grow in VT, beets and carrots also showcase the hard work of Salvation Farms, a non-profit working hard to glean, process, store, and redistribute produce to those who need it most.

Last year they gleaned more than 1700 lbs of beautiful beets in the state of Vermont. So to help support their awesome work, we will donate $1 for every order of Hash Purples to Salvation Farms this spring until we have transformed 25% (425 lbs) of their bounty into our delicious fried purple munchies.

So right now, you’re probably thinking: why would hundreds of pounds of quality local food go unsold? The truth is, fresh, wholesome food stays on farms all of the time—and a lot of it. In the US, it is estimated that 10 MILLION TONS (ReFED report) of food is lost on farms annually and more than 14 MILLION POUNDS (SF study) in Vermont alone.

Farms in Vermont experience a booming lush of harvest every summer and fall – sometimes so overwhelming they run out of time to harvest crops like beets, cabbage, and carrots; or they try to sell into an already saturated market. In addition, some produce is simply not pretty enough for retail shelves, “ugly” produce so to speak. With more than 10% of Vermonters living in food insecure households, Salvation Farms saw all this under utilized bounty as an opportunity for change.

Working with volunteers and training a small team of professionals, this scrappy, hardworking organization based out of Morrisville redistributed nearly 200,000 lbs of not perfect, but perfectly good produce from Vermont farms to consumers in 2017. The team gets down and dirty gleaning on farms and also receives produce from farmers and gleaning programs statewide. In a packroom in Winooski, SF washes, organizes, processes and packs produce to distribute to nutritionally insecure Vermonters, working with organizations such as The Vermont Foodbank and the Chittenden County Department of Corrections.

This little team has already fed thousands of people, saved millions of servings of quality produce from remaining uneaten on farms, and helped develop a talented local food workforce of people who might have otherwise had trouble finding work.  All of this has been accomplished by just a 4-person full time team of hard-working visionaries and many, many volunteers. It’s a model for how the country can help feed our citizens, maximize local resources, and support farmers. So, come down to the Skinny Pancake, enjoy some hash purples, and know that $1 of your purchase goes right to a group who will receive every penny of that donation doing amazing work for our environment and our neighbors who need it most.

sources:

https://www.hungerfreevt.org/hungerinvermont/

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/07/american-food-waste/491513/

To learn more about SF and food waste, watch episode 6 of the Local Motive!

Howdy folks,

We are getting rid of Nutella.

Now, before you start throwing crepe batter at me, hear me out…

Yep, we know you love Nutella. Heck, we made about 40,000 crepes with Nutella in 2017 alone…that’s approximately 7207 pounds of gooey chocolate and hazelnut nom-nom goodness. 

But there’s a deep, dark secret that y’all may not be aware of: the second ingredient in Nutella is modified palm oil, which is what gives Nutella its silky, spreadable texture. As far as our one and only Planet Earth is concerned: palm oil sucks.

Why? The equivalent of 300 football fields of rainforests are deforested every hour to make way for palm oil plantations and demand is projected to double by 2030 and triple by 2050. Rainforests, on the other hand, are essential to our climate’s health and stability: sucking up climate-change-causing carbon dioxide, providing habitat for more than 10 million species of flora and fauna, and producing more than 20% of our world’s oxygen. There’s no way around it: palm oil is the enemy of the rainforest and Nutella is dependent on palm oil. And while Nutella and its parent company have made efforts to reduce their environmental impact, those words on the ingredient list just never sat easily with us. 

If you’re hip to the ways of the Pancake than you know we are on a mission to change the world by building a safer, healthier and more delicious foodshed. So while wildly popular, Nutella has been this unspoken black eye on our mission all along. Surprisingly, we have never gotten a single guest complaint about it. But we knew and we care. So what were we to do? Do we stay loyal to our Nutella-loving guests or remain committed to our mission? 

The great Alan Newman solved this riddle for us. You may know Alan as the co-founder of Magic Hat Brewery, Seventh Generation and Gardener’s Supply. Holy moly, right? We asked Alan, “Please, font of wisdom…help us?!?” Ask and ye shall receive: in a transmogrification of Yoda and Gandolf, Alan sniggled, “Make not the mistake in choosing the tyranny of the ‘or’, when the genius of the ‘and’ can be at hand.”  Preach on, brother!!! Our Nutella conundrum need not be a binary choice between our values OR our guests!  We can pursue our mission AND improve the tastes our guests have come to love. 

So, with those words in mind, we set out on a quest of Odyssean proportions. We would find a higher quality, BETTER TASTING, and much more sustainable chocolate hazelnut spread. We were nearly shipwrecked and left for lost several times over…and yet like Ernest Shackleton, we never gave up and eventually found our Elephant Island: this palm oil free chocolate hazelnut spread we now present to you, our eager crepe-eaters.

The second we passed this savior of a spread across our lips, we just…knew. We knew it was better. Richer. Nuttier. Rounder than Nutella….and as smooth as this blog post. And the icing on this “NEWtella” cake: it’s a more sustainable product because it does not depend on Palm Oil. No ingredients destroy the rainforest. And it wasn’t just the palm oil that concerned us about Nutella. Nutella also uses soy lecithin (from GMO soy) and vanillin, which is an artificial vanilla flavor used instead of real vanilla extract. Our new product contains no artificial flavors. This magical goop is better for the planet, better for the body, and better for the taste receptors.   

So for all you Nutella fans out there: #SorryNotSorry. We got rid of a product that many of you loved, cherished and some even bathed in….but the earth is grateful, and we think you’ll love this stuff too.

-Benjy Pancake

Hi there! On Monday, June 19th our flagship location on the Burlington waterfront turns 10 years old. As we reflect on 10 years of this restaurant, and 14 years in business, we thought we’d share the tale of how we learned to love and source local. We figure we ought to air some dirty laundry in hopes to inspire others that they can do it too.

As of our last audit in October, we source over 70% of our raw and value-added products are locally sourced, but it was not always that way. In fact, when we first opened as a cart on Burlington’s Church Street Marketplace in 2003, exactly 0.0% of our food was sourced locally. Yup, you read that right. We were single source shoppers, and Costco had everything we needed: flour, butter, sugar, salt, vanilla extract, eggs, milk, strawberries, Nutella, ham, shredded cheddar cheese….and the prices were great. We didn’t do much business that first summer. In fact, companywide today, we will do more business in a good hour now than we did that entire year. Even though we sourced from just one location, and even with only a modest amount of business, it was hard. When you’re a one-man show, you do all the showing yourself. You wear all the hats. Sales, service, prep, cooking, accounting, repairs, and maintenance. And if something breaks, there’s no money to throw at the problem…it’s Yankee ingenuity (re: duct tape) followed by time and as a last gasp, money…

That first summer was so tough, in fact, that we rented the business to a friend for the summer of 2004. The cost: buy us a new trailer to replace the one I flipped over while driving our handmade cart to its storage for the winter. Well, thank goodness for that friend, Michael Rimoin, because he saw the light. He had fun out there and managed to nearly double our sales in year two. He had so much fun that he convinced me I had to come back…and thus began the process of long term crepe dreams.

In 2005, the local food movement was starting to heat up, especially in Vermont. We still sourced just about everything from Costco but had enough awareness to go to The Intervale and enjoy Pick Your Own berries from Adam’s Berry Farm one afternoon. We brought a few pints back to our cart and sold them as a novelty. That said, we had FUN! We had some very basic systems and enough sales to modestly pay ourselves that year. The Skinny Pancake’s reputation was growing!

2006 was a big year for local food and for the Skinny Pancake. Michael Pollan’s “The Omnivore’s Delima” came out that April and spread like wildfire. That summer, the Skinny Pancake operated out of its first commercial kitchen: Nectar’s was kind enough to share their space with us. With commercial grade mixers, refrigeration, dish machines and more, we were much more efficient. Our fledgeling systems were growing stronger, and actually, legitimate, as was our following of crepe eaters. That year, we became the first ever cart to join the Vermont Fresh Network. We hung their plaque proudly and chased down what local food we could manage. We still shopped at Costco, but we bought King Arthur Flour and local dairy. We made a more regular habit of PYO berries. The experience of being able to source from down the road was incredible.

In 2007, we opened our first brick-and-mortar location at 60 Lake Street on the Burlington waterfront. Our building was LEED-certified. It housed Seventh Generation and Vermont Businesses for Social Responsibility. We looked up to our heroes at Ben & Jerry’s and American Flatbread and said, “If they can do it, so can we.” Bill McKibben’s Deep Economy came out that spring, following on the heels of The Omnivore’s Dilemma. We felt inspired and stepped it up. Our local food sourcing increased dramatically to include bacon, apples, whipped cream, honey, tofu, coffee, beer and more. Conspicuously missing, though: most proteins…

Business has a hierarchy of needs. Survival comes first. After making a trip around the sun, we gained confidence…we were saving a smidge of money. In 2008, we took a big, expensive step forward by adding local chicken to the menu. The difference in price between commodity chicken and local chicken is staggering. At five times the price, we watched our food margin fray by nearly 2% from our choice in chicken alone. But we managed it…

Every year since then we have continued to improve our local sourcing one item at a time. When we did our first local food audit in 2009, we were just barely over 50% local. Since then, our local sourcing has increased to upwards of 70%…that’s a 50% increase! In an effort to afford to source more locally, we focused on reducing the costs of our commodity foods. We worked with our teams on controlling their waste. We used every tool in the box, and some laying around outside the box.

As our local sourcing grew, as did our scale, and we discovered new challenges. It was no longer sufficient to just call up our farmers and buy without planning. We began to develop growing contracts that forecasted our demand for the entire season. Contracts allow our farmers to plant reliably without having to spend money on marketing or absorb waste. As a result, we have been able to get better pricing. But buyer beware: when we overcommitted on our basil for our pesto, for example, it led to $1000 in waste as we could not process it fast enough. We can still remember the daunting image of a literal ton of raw basil filling our commissary kitchen. Lessons were learned one at a time. For the pesto, we learned that we needed to move beyond a table top commercial food processor. We needed a large object called a ‘Verticle Chopper Mixer’ to get through it all. That VCM is now vital to our ability to freeze local pesto in season and thaw as needed year round.

Today we estimate that we source about $2,000,000 in local raw and value-added products annually. In order to manage the complex forecasting, contract, and communication process, we hired a full-time Local Food Coordinator, a recent UVM Food Systems Major graduate. We have picked the “low hanging fruit” in the local foodshed…and most of the middle hanging fruit too. There are still some elusive local foods that we just can not afford or can not get at scale. But we’re always working on it.

Hopefully the moral of this story is clear…but just in case, we’ll spell it out for you: ‘going local’ is a journey, not a destination. And it takes one foot in front of the other to get anywhere with it. If you’re an aspiring food entrepreneur intimidated by local sourcing, just take it one step at a time. You’ll get there.

One doesn’t forget the first time they witness the female powerhouse that is Steady Betty. For me, it was the Magic Hat Mardi Gras party in 2016 (Just a year ago? Sinful, I know). Kicking off that weekend by dancing to the 8-piece rocksteady band of all women is one heck of a way to kick off the annual March celebration. And as we welcome the ladies back to our Skinny Pancake Burlington stage this week, let’s dive a bit deeper into this crew.

Steady Betty has a hold over the Burlington area. From early sets at Radio Bean to bigger stages at Nectar’s and Higher Ground, to big outdoor shows at Grand Point North and Waking Windows. From the first minute the stew of bass, drums, and horns hit your ears, the aural impact works its way to your toes, and soon thereafter into a full on groove. Their reggae infused with dance and funk can get anyone on their feet – you see this from their long-time fans and first-time listeners alike.

While many folks originally associated Steady Betty with their early champion and occasional participant, Kat Wright, the roster of talent in this crew runs deep. With sound tech extraordinaire, Rachel Capobianco (who’s spent some time on the road with Mike Gordon), the incredible pipes of Mariam Bernardo (with her own album in the works), exceptional rocksteady guitar playing from Linda Bassick (of a weekly Radio Bean kids show among other projects), and an absolutely kick-ass collection of horns players – it’s very easy to throw the work SuperGroup at this collective.

Coming up with a variety of pieces with so many influences only makes the creative process that much more intriguing. Rocksteady inspiration comes from Dawn Penn, Judy Mowat and Phyllis Dillon. Linda Bassik sources support from other female musicians as an influence of encouragement and growth during her time with Steady Betty over the last five years. “I feel freer in my musical expression than I ever have before.”

So how would one support females artists here in Vermont? First off, don’t make any assumptions. “Don’t limit girls wanting to play instruments by telling them certain ones are for boys are certain ones are for girls,” says Bassik. Being inclusive just the beginning. Involvement in the Burlington area comes easy when there are so many fantastic venues around. Volunteering time at the Flynn or Higher Ground, or you can spend some time with the artists themselves – you can find many of them hanging out on any given night enjoying another local musician’s show.

Supporting organizations like Girls Rock Vermont is one way Steady Betty influences younger females with an interest in music. One of the Girls Rock mottos is “we build each other up” which is exactly what women must do. No judgment, no comparisons. Linda explains “contrary to what our culture is telling you, there can be more than one female in a band! And she doesn’t have to be the singer!” So come support these fantastically badass females Friday, March 24th!

Band:

Linda Bassick – Guitar & Vocals

Miriam Bernardo – Vocals

Rachel Capobianco – Drums & Vocals

Caroline O’Connor – Bass

Zoe Harris – Alto Sax

Margot VanHorne – Trumpet

Allison Frazier – Baritone Sax

Megan Waterhouse – Tenor Sax
Sometimes Kat Wright on vocals (when she is not busy with her band!)

These days it would appear that just about everyone and everything has their own ‘day.’ Some of these are super essential: Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Wine WednesDAY. Others can be downright head-scratching: Watermelon Day, Wiggle Your Toes Day, National Underwear Day (all actual Days). But if there’s one minor obscurity that sure as sin deserves its own day, it’s the Official Food of Pancakia: The Crepes.

Yes, friends. There is, in fact, a crepe day. Because of the cosmopolitan nature of the skinny pancakes we enjoy, this day isn’t just national, it’s international!

While at first glance this would appear to be a marketing ploy that we made up in order to generate some business in the cold Winter months, let me assure, that we are truly not that clever. While we’ve been celebrating Punxsutawney Phil all these years, Francophiles have been flipping crepes on February 2nd on what they call La Chandeleur: a holy day celebrating Jesus Christ being presented at a church 40 days after his birth.

It may sound like this is a day to prance around ornate overhead lighting fixtures, but in fact, the day is celebrated with crepes. Why crepes? Good question. One theory suggests the magnanimous nature of one Pope Gelase began the custom, as he would feed crepes to pilgrims traveling to his church on February 2nd. Others say that eating lots of crepes has simply become customary during the Mardi Gras season and a day emerged in particular. But the theory we’ll choose to run with this year is that the form and color of crepes call to mind images of the sun.

Ah, yes, the sun. That magical orb in the sky that so often eludes us in the winter months. Alas, much like our friend the groundhog, one might even say that a crepe could just as accurately predict when exactly we will see our spring, but we won’t go there.

Legend has it that while preparing crepes for La Chandeleur, one must hold the crepe pan in one hand, and a single coin in the other. While making a wish, simultaneously flip both the coin and the crepe. If you’re able to catch the coin and somehow avoid burning yourself, CONGRATULATIONS, for wealth and prosperity await you the rest of the year.

We imagine that many folks on this side of the pond probably won’t celebrate this somewhat dangerous custom, but, we’d still like to give you an opportunity to eat crepes at least, and we’d like to think there’s some good luck granted to those who do. So while we won’t be flipping coins on International Crepe Day, we will be flipping crepes, and free ones at that. To celebrate our day of days, free Nutella, Pure & Simple, or Pooh Bear crepes for those who join in on the holiday.
HAPPY LA CHANDELUER.