5 Tasty Pancake Recommendations

The pancake is a weirdly deceitful dish. Despite being made of simple ingredients, they are oddly hard to cook. TV chefs make pancakes look easy. All you do is throw some batter in a pan, flip it and boom, pancake. But in reality, pancakes are crazy beasts that take on many shapes and forms. It’s all too easy to mess up a pancake.

Luckily, there are ways to improve pancakes that don’t involve too much hassle.

Take your time

The first big step to making pancakes that are edible is to take your time. There’s no need to rush a pancake. Take your time on each pancake, don’t hurry to flip them over. A slightly over-cooked pancake is better than an under-cooked pancake that blobs all over the place when you try to flip it. Speaking of flipping, don’t try to fling your pancakes. Slowly scoop them up with a spatula or spoon and then slowly flip them over. It saves you from a lot of mess.

However the biggest rush is doing more than one pancake at once. Just, well, don’t. One pancake per pan is good enough! Otherwise you just risk everything merging together, and multiple pancakes are awkward to flip. Doing multiple pancakes in a pan also leads to cooking inconsistencies, as one pancake is cooked faster than the other, especially when you factor in flipping times.

Pancake thickness is directly related to batter thickness

How thick your pancake is all depends on the batter. If your batter is thin and runny, then you’ll be making crepes. If it’s thick? Well, you won’t be making jiggly pancakes, but the pancakes will definitely be chunky. And potentially chewy. Luckily, altering the thickness of batter is really easy. For runnier batters, you just add more milk. If you want a thicker batter, then you add more flour, then whisk the batter REALLY well to get rid of any lumps. If you’re adding more than the same again of either milk or flour, you might want to add an extra egg too. Otherwise you kinda don’t have enough egg.

The first pancake is always wrong

Pans don’t always heat evenly or quickly. Even if you pre-heat your pan, the first pancake will always seem a bit off. But you shouldn’t worry about this. The first pancake should always be treated as a test pancake, to make sure you’ve got the right temperature. Really, the second pancake should be a test pancake too. But by the time the first pancake is done, the pan will probably be at the right temperature anyway.

However the first pancake also gives other, more useful insights, aside from temperature. If the first pancake sticks to the pan, then you can abort early, clean up and better grease the pan, before ruining more pancakes.

Get a non-stick pan and a great spatula

Normally, you can just cook with whatever you have. But a non-stick pan takes out so much of the stress of cooking. For pancakes in particular though, a large, flat spatula is also incredibly useful. I have a large, red, guitar-shaped silicon spatula which has a smooth edge, perfect for getting underneath a pancake.

Silicon stuff in general is also really good because they’re very easy to clean. This is doubly the case when it comes to spatulas, since silicon is also remarkably non-stick. A word of warning though: avoid silicon “oven mitts” and similar items. They just don’t disperse heat as well as a good old fabric tea towel will.

Do those weird fluffy pancakes in the oven

Ann Reardon on How to Cook That does a great breakdown on weird, fluffy pancakes. Simply put, they are very tricky to make and will often sink. But that’s often because these fluffy pancakes are shown in crappy “life hack” videos, where style matters more than the hack actually working. With a lot of experimentation, Ann Reardon found that the cause is actually because a step is often skipped out. These pancakes are more than just flour, egg and milk, they often have an extra ingredient to give them more stability, like bicarbonate of soda or, in Ann’s case, egg white powder.

But, more importantly, it’s best to cook fluffy pancakes in the oven, since you get a more even and controllable temperature. At that point though, they’re no longer pancakes.

Still, I’d recommend nailing normal, flat pancakes first, before trying to make fluffy ones.