And what's the essence of a truly excellent buttermilk pancake? Like any scientist worth their salt sorry , I decided to answer this question with a graph. After all, the whole is just the interaction of its parts.
So let's take apart what the web thinks of as the perfect pancake. Above, I plotted the ingredients that go into a buttermilk pancake, according to eight highly rated online recipes. I normalized the recipes so that they all have the same amount of flour.
You'll see that there are certain essentials that you just don't mess with. You definitely need one egg for every cup of flour. And there isn't much variation in how much salt or baking soda you put in. On the other hand, these recipes vary widely in how much butter or sugar they include. What's a good empiricist to do? I decided to take the average of these recipes, and build a pancake that strikes a balance between the excesses of its online progenitors.
So here are the ingredients for my eigen-pancakes. The quantities turned out fairly close to this trustworthy recipe from Serious Eats. And it tastes pretty darn good. But don't take my word for it, try it out yourself. With a little practice, this recipe makes a reliably delicious stack of pancakes. I like playing with my food, and prodding beneath the surface.
One aspect of cooking that's always bothered me is the seeming arbitrariness of recipes. What do the various ingredients do, and why do we need them all? In a way, every recipe hides a story of reactions that create new flavors and textures. The magic begins when you mix the flour with the wet stuff. If you look through a microscope, flour contains two different kinds of proteins called glutenin and gliadin.
When moistened and mixed, these proteins link together to form a sticky molecular mesh known as gluten. Next, you need to add a leavening agent.
This is something that fills the gluten with air. Without it, leavened breads like cakes, muffins and loaves of breads would be pretty inedible. Traditionally, people used biological agents like yeast for this purpose. The yeast munches on sugars, and excretes carbon dioxide, making thousands of little air pockets in the gluten.
Put the dough in the oven, and these air pockets expand. Stack cooked pancakes and douse in maple syrup, butter and enjoy!
Extra Crispy Logo. Rating: Unrated. By Peter Kayaian. Recipe by Extra Crispy. Save Pin Print More. Credit: photos by Alex Tepper. Recipe Summary test cook:. Mix dry ingredients together. Mix buttermilk, eggs, and browned butter together.
Fold the dry into the wet. View Series. Be the first to rate and review! No ratings or reviews yet. If this is a baking powder recipe, consider using only milk instead of any buttermilk or yogurt.
If it is a baking soda recipe, add some more baking soda. If nothing else helps, you can even add a pinch of baking soda to a baking powder recipe, not for leavening but just for browning. If it doesn't, make sure you are only lifting at the proper moment. The pancake will stick first, then become releasy, then burn. If it still sticks during the releasy part, reduce the heat you should still get enough browning after the measures in the last paragraph.
If that does not work either, the last step is to increase the egg. An alternative would be to find a better working recipe and follow it instead of adjusting yours. You might have to test a few until you find a winner.
I had the same problem! My pancakes looked more like tortillas. I fixed it by adding a few things to the batter. I added baking Soda, and more sugar.
Baking soda changed ph to add browning, and sugar adds browning from carmelizing. The first pancakes looked just like yours, and after I modified the batter, they look like this. Baking soda affects browning in a major way because it affects the pH of the batter. The Maillard reaction occurs better in alkaline environments, so that after enough baking soda has been added to a batter to neutralize the acid from buttermilk any additional will work to increase browning.
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