Savoury Souffle Pancake

There’s this tiny souffle pancake shop in Asakusa that serves up flavours so memorable, I wanted to encapsulate it in a ceramic jar. The only savoury option of the menu was a breakfast hollandaise souffle pancake which ended up being our favourite.

When coming up with ideas for jars, I made some rough sketches that would inspire the set of three pancake jars I would make this month. Out of the three wheel thrown jars, I chose the tallest and largest one to make the savoury souffle pancake so that all the intricate details could be larger in scale.

When trimming the jar, the lid wasn’t a perfect fit. So after the first bisque firing, it was already getting stuck. I was worried that my attempts at tapping open the bisque jar would shatter it. Since the lid only fits correctly at a specific orientation, I sculpted a some sauce to drip all the way down to the base which helped with aligning the lid correctly every time.

Sculpting the bacon, eggs and hollandaise sauce took time. For the sauce drips, I needed to imagine how I would paint the wavy line and position each accordingly. I also adjust the width and volume of each blob of clay to match up to adjacent drips such that when I paint in the yellow colour, it creates an illusion of oozing sauce.

The fried egg is the star of the show. To create the drooping egg white, I cut out an asymmetrical blob shape and attached it to the top. I might’ve even left the middle empty by only attaching a border of clay around the top to hide how the top pancake layer is the tallest.

When painting it, I made the bottom and edges of the egg whites look slightly burnt, achieved with different shades of brown and orange. Almost all the underglaze colours here were mixed rather than used straight out of the jar. I could’ve made test tiles to guarantee how the colours would look but I just hoped for the best.

The bacon strips were the most intricate to paint because I needed to make sure the two colours didn’t overlap despite having thin wavy stripes on both sides of the bacon (which also matched up).

There was also a very last minute cleanup of the brown underglaze from the lid’s contact points before the second bisque firing. Otherwise I’d have a nightmare of a time trying to open up the jar after the glaze firing since this underglaze has a tendency to fuse to itself.

I’m really happy with the final result of this jar. Things I would change for next time would be to mix a better shade of pale yellow that doesn’t lean towards green. And perhaps add another fried egg that is sticking out from the bottom layer just like in the real life photo of this dish. I hope one day I’d get to go back and try out this dish again!