No more lumps: Let physics be your guide to making the perfect crepe

Enlarge / Batter must be distributed evenly to get uniform thickness in a perfect crepe. (credit: Mark Boster/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images)

Order a crepe from a professional vendor and they’ll likely cook it on a blade, a flat heated surface that distributes the batter evenly to get just the right consistency in the final crepe: uniform thickness with no unsightly lumps. But home cooks typically make crepes in a frying pan, which can make the process a wee bit trickier.

Still, no worries, all you home-cooking crepe lovers—physics has come to the rescue. According to the latest experiment results of two scientists, the trick is all in the wrist. They described their research in a recent paper published in Physical Review Fluids.

It all started when co-author Mathieu Sellier of the University of Canterbury in New Zealand expressed frustration to his wife that he could never get his homemade crepes to come out just right. “My wife said, ‘Being a fluid dynamicist, you should be able to fix this problem,'” he told New Scientist. He found a willing collaborator in Edouard Boujo, a physicist at the Ecole Polytechnique in France. They set out to investigate, conducting multiple experiments making yummy crepes for their respective daughters, who were naturally delighted to participate in the scientific process.