Spicing up that pancake

Oatmeal and corn meal in addition to flour and sugar

Berries are the classic, blueberries in particular. Apples or bananas are also great, especially with cinnamon and some nuts, usually walnuts or pecans on top. A little melted butter and a dusting of powdered sugar adds richness without being overly sweet. Whipped cream makes a great light syrup substitute. Add more liquid to thin them and you can make crepes. Lemon and powdered sugar on a thin crisp one can be good as well.

1. Pancakes: half cup each of corn meal and white flour, 2 tsp baking soda, 1/4 teaspoon salt, 1 egg, enough milk (usually 3/4 cup or so), 1 tbsp butter melted in the pan you’ll fry ’em in. Butter the pan between batches. Real grade A dark amber maple syrup. Make ’em that way, then complain to me.
2. Wild Maine blueberries–the intensely flavorful little guys, not the big fat ones.

Crepes work, if you must…

Grated apple, chopped up nuts, chopped up raw cranberries.

Also, bacon goes with everything.

Eszter: Generally, I’d just sneak a slice between the pancakes in a stack… I suppose that’s closer to an ingredient than a side.

Flax is good.

By chance, I checked in here before gearing up to make “breakfast for dinner,” aka one type of traditional American “Sunday night supper.” (Such suppers, I think, stem from the days when families, church-going or not, had filled themselves with a big, well-balanced dinner in the afternoon. Sunday football and Sunday shopping ruined that.) I was thinking blintzes (crepes are indeed a different creature from pancakes, but still, related) until I realized I’d used up the needed cottage cheese for something else. So now it will be pancakes, the plainest kind (mixes really are a waste of time and may explain why some people don’t think pancakes are all that special — though some good buttermilk mixes are nice, for when you don’t have any buttermilk on hand, which I seldom do), though I also like to use cornmeal sometimes, or to make cottage cheese pancakes (I think I must like cottage cheese a lot — 4%, thank you) — all kinds of variations. Sour cream pancakes are also good. (Fanny Farmer or other basic American cookbooks give plenty of examples — or just use the google. German pancakes — baked and all puffy — are also delicious, especially with sauteed apples.) I have some frozen blueberries I’ll warm up (will serve them to be put on top rather than put them in), and there’s maple syrup in the fridge (a staple in these New England parts, and really is best pancake syrup ever) — I’ll warm up the syrup, too (one of the reasons god invented the microwave). Butter for the pancakes, too, of course. I need to use up some bacon, which (like sausages, scrapple, ham slices or Canadian bacon) for some reason goes beautifully alongside pancakes (not in — well, that might work, but). And fry up a couple of eggs, too, I think. I’m getting very hungry writing this.
One last cooking note: you can separate the eggs for pancakes, mix the yolks in with the milk, and beat the egg whites and fold them into the batter, making a lighter, more delicate pancake. Some recipes call for cake flour rather than regular flour, and that makes for a wonderful treat (I have a terrific blueberry pancake recipe that uses cake flour and lots of eggs, with beaten egg whites, and also blueberries, a recipe I make in summer only, when I have fresh local blueberries). Nuts in pancakes are also always good (especially if you roast them briefly first). The best blueberry pancakes are indeed made with wild (aka Maine, though they grow elsewhere, too) blueberries. Fresh.
Really, American pancakes are just another version of the panbreads every cuisine seems to have (just as every cuisine seems to have versions of fried dough). What’s amazing is how similar they all are, and yet how different.

A tad off-topic from homemade pancakes, but since you are in the area – have you been to Walker Bros. on Green Bay Road in Wilmette? http://www.walkerbros.net/
Blueberry, banana, pecan, bacon, apple, chocolate chip, …
I know people who go there whenever they visit the Chicago area.

Walker Brothers has been around for a LONG TIME. And to relate this pancake post to feature films – just because we can – Walker Brothers also has a small role in Redford’s “Ordinary People.”

@ Main Street Muse

I prefer Scott’s solo work, but I fail to see what any of this has to do with pancakes.

To JanieM’s point, my Fannie Farmer cookbook has over 150 entries under “Cookies” (and that doesn’t include, e.g., cookie bars, or all the variations of each kind of cookie).

These recipes are laden with carbohydrates.

There is a great deal of scientific evidence that carbohydrates are unhealthy.
I strongly recommend that one read “Good Calories, Bad Calories” by Gary Taubes. Taubes is a correspondent for Science, the journal of the AAAS, and three time winner of a science writing award.

The book is not a diet book, nor is it a nutritional science book. Rather, it is a history of nutritional science, and it is probably the most important book regarding nutrition and the politics of nutritional science published in the last 100 years.

On a personal note, I went on a low carb diet and, among other benefits, 40 years of gastric reflux ended and my blood pressure dropped to normal.

@JanieM Bad wording. What I meant to say is that “biscuit” in Australia encompasses cookies (though the variety of these is much more limited) and shortbreads (though not scones) but that the term is most closely associated with commercial products including equivalents of the Fig Newton (closest Oz equivalent is Spicy Fruit Roll) and Oreo (Delta Cream) but with dozens more. Archetypal examples are TimTams, Iced VoVos and Ginger Nuts.

I am a bit late to this party, but I’d like to put in for a different approach. I find white-flour based batters too insubstantial and prefer whole grain. My base recipe is the venerable Tassajara version, but I have tweaked it over the decades. I use about 75% whole wheat and smaller amounts of rye and buckwheat. I beat eggwhites separately, as Meredith also suggests, and fold them in gingerly. A tiny bit of cinnamon rounds out the basic batter. As for mix-ins, what I most love is ripe, in-season peaches, cut in dice. Tart berries are nice, as are sweeter sliced strawberries. Or on a really cold winter morning the combination of sliced bananas and chopped walnuts. (This can be very filling though.) Fruit compotes for topping are possible as a variation on maple syrup. Others sometimes dab some ricotta on their cakes, but that has never worked for me.

As others have said, there’s no point to using mixes; it takes just an extra minute or two to prepare your own, and you can do it just the way you like.

Buttermilk. Pecans. Basta.

Who tastes anything until noon?

Dessert crepes, otoh, are for the wonderful simple combination of chambord combined with either whipped cream or flamed w/ a little sugar. I don’t make crepes often enough for that combination to get boring, and like Feynman and vanilla ice cream, I know I like it a lot so why worry.

Hugh @ 28.
Gary Taubes : nutrition :: Dean Chambers : polling.

But, in the spirit of sharing recipies, here you go: low-carb pancakes.

Pancakes: 1/2 c. non-fat cottage cheese, 1/2 c. egg whites, 1 scoop (30g or so) unflavored whey protein power, pinch salt, dash cinnamon. Mix in food processor. Cook in teflon skillet with a millisecond spritz of “fat free” cooking spray.

These have a texture somewhere between wallpaper paste and a kitchen sponge. But, if they are served with a dollop of delusion and a dash of dietary self-righteousness, are good enough for the true believers.

Cook your pancakes in bacon grease and you’ll be glad you did.

You want to restrict carbohydrates in your diet? Read the labels of all that prepared, processed stuff (a euphemism) you eat. Stop snacking all day on junk. Use high fructose corn syrup for greasing speedometer cables. Eat fewer calories in general. Exercise once in a while. Think about how bread, the staff of life, and pancakes, a cousin, have been around for a few millennia before the ban-carbs folks, that potatoes and bananas and beans and wheat and rice have sustained most human beings since agriculture was invented, and recall that type II diabetes and obesity were not synonymous with developed (sic) economies until rather recently.

And pass the pancakes…

Completely off-topic, so feel free to moderate this comment into oblivion, but I must mention: this is a gold mine.

And sparkling cider (slightly hard).

For once I’m with Bloix, though I’d stop short of agreeing that maple syrup is better than chocolate.

Being lucky enough to live in Maine, and having sugaring happen right where I live every year, I can say that within the connoisseurship of maple syrup, the top tier of heaven is to have a spoon in your hand when syrup from the first sap of the season comes hot out of the boiling pan. Forget the pancakes. :)

(I’ve never been a big fan of pancakes anyhow, but when I eat them I’m with Katherine – I like them savory. Cottage cheese pancakes with nothing but a little garlic salt on top – much better than all that sugary glop. )

Which brings us round to the OP in a way. If you were making pancakes (sensu UK) and accidentally put chocolate chips in the mixture, you’d sling the whole mess out and start again, once you’d got the pan clean. On the other hand, if you were making scones and forgot to put in the cheese or the dried fruit and cake spices, you’d end up with something you could only salvage by making a white sauce and claiming that you’d always wanted to try “biscuits and gravy” – and even then nobody would believe you.

No conversation, however off-topic, about the international biscuit/cake divide is complete without discussion of the whole 1991 Jaffa Cake imbroglio, wherein the VAT eligibility of small chocolate-covered sponge discs that looked like biscuits, and were sold in biscuit-like packets on shelves of other biscuits, but had the word “cake” in the name, rested on their definition as one or the other.

After tense proceedings and impassioned debate, including the entering into evidence of giant cake-sized biscuits, the court eventually ruled “cake”, on the basis that biscuits are things that go soft, and cakes are things that go hard. A clear decision, but one that hit the public purse.

the court eventually ruled “cake”, on the basis that biscuits are things that go soft, and cakes are things that go hard.

One of my favourite legal decisions ever. A Solomon come to judgement.

The pro-biscuit argument was that, whether they were by nature a cake, they were by use a biscuit – commonly eaten from a packet with a cup of tea. Which also has its points. If I were to employ Bertrand Russell to clean my kitchen, does he become a cleaner?

My attempts to find the text of the decision have failed, but led me to the sentence “That Teacake is a dagger in the heart of Judicial Review.” http://www.mcgarrsolicitors.ie/2008/01/03/is-this-a-teacake-i-see-before-me/

I have been depressed ever since I read recently that pancakes have “zero nutritional value.”

You cheered me up.

go away from sweet altogether. Chopped scallions, peppers, corn, grated cheese of any sort. Very good with European style butter.

I feel very strongly about pancakes, waffles, biscuits, muffins, cookies. Bread, too (another story). I will be short here, I promise.
Simple is good. Depends on fresh, good ingredients. And serving fresh and hot.
Pancakes (cf. Bloix @55 on cookies, milk, and mom): am I alone in feeling a special affection for them because my father used to make the pancakes, on Saturday mornings (when my mother did all the other cooking, including, of course, cookies)? And my husband often made pancakes for our children and me (he should have done more of the other cooking, too, but that’s another story). Pancakes’ appeal for me may lie, in part, in their particular gender/parental associations re home-cooking.
An American biscuit, btw, is to die for. Really. I am torn between biscuits and scalloped potatoes for dinner tonight (I have time for the potatoes, but the biscuits do appeal), to accompany a ham slice and brussel sprouts.

Jesus Christ. I’m gonna regret making that.

For one thing, the resulting color combo can’t possibly be meant for consumption.

…never, ever, ever Google image search for “Superman ice cream”

Yikes. Let’s try that again: the archetypal biscuit

If you want spice in your pancake, why in heavens name aren’t you eating dosas?

Mmmmm, with the carmelized milk solids from making ghee smeared on and some curry leaf podi sprinkled on . . . mmmmm . . .

… and let’s not even get into the pronunciation of “scone”.

#64 – js, go to a Popeye’s and order chicken and a biscuit. It won’t measure up to Meredith’s home cooking, but you’ll get the idea.

Meredith, thanks. I guess I sort of knew that — just wasn’t sure if “biscuit” (Am.) always and only picked out what you linked to.

I’ve seen biscuits and gravy served – and I’m pretty sure they were the real thing, from the reaction of the Southern USAn behind me in the queue – and as far as I could tell the gravy was what I’d call a white sauce, with bits of some unidentified meat in (I think this was ‘chipped beef’). Don’t think it was a cheese sauce. I wasn’t tempted. (I have had a biscuit, though – I’ve had a burger in a biscuit, to be precise. Prefer bun.)

Anyway, I’m sure somebody here actually knows.

Gravy: flour, meat drippings, slowly add water/broth while stirring constantly to avoid lumps forming.

To me, the image of gravy that pops into my mind when you say the word is a lot like Phil’s picture. It’s a brown glop made from pan drippings, usually from beef, or once a year from turkey that has been roasting for hours. As you might guess from the word “glop,” I’m not much of a fan. I’d rather have butter on my biscuits or mashed potatoes, and just some unthickened broth on the meat if it’s a little dry.

I thought Phil’s pair of pictures was meant as a joke, because the gravy looked more or less like gravy to me, but the biscuits looked like cookies. ;)

In my experience, the “gravy” that is more often served with chicken and biscuits is more yellowy, because of the color of the drippings it’s made from, I suppose. I really don’t like that stuff, especially when it’s made from some kind of mix instead of from scratch, so my experience is limited. (Maybe also, but I’m too lazy to look it up, the thickener tends to be cornstarch instead of wheat flour, which might account for the texture being a little different from that of beef gravy.)

But other Americans can chime in — there’s a lot of regional variation in the US as to food traditions and vocabulary, obviously. Biscuits and gravy aren’t a specialty where I grew up, though they’re not unknown.

Chicken fried steak: breaded, then fried in a pan. Why you would bread it is a mystery to me, but then I grew up in the north central US with an Italian grandma who could cook.

Then again again, one of the unpleasant surprises of my life was to be served, in the cafeteria in grad school (in New England) — fried clams (so far so good, I loved ‘em) — in a sandwich. What, more bread?

Deep fried chicken won’t make much in the way of drippings, I’d think. The good barbecue place (which closed last month, unfortunately) serves it with buttermilk gravy, which is good, but probably not healthy.

I’ve heard Italian Americans refer to tomato sauce as “gravy,” but that might be regional.

The cheesy pancakes sound very tasty.

Also, most scones that I’ve seen are at least twice the size of a typical biscuit, even cut into wedges. I think I’d class a biscuit as a kind of dinner roll.

Deep fried chicken won’t make much in the way of drippings, I’d think.

True. I was thinking of baked chicken, although I don’t suppose that’s the classic dish for biscuits. It’s not a tradition I have much experience with.

I’ve heard Italian Americans refer to tomato sauce as “gravy,” but that might be regional.

My Italian Americans called tomato sauce “sauce” as if there weren’t any other kind. “Cheese” meant grated parmesan. Those were generic terms. Any other kind of sauce or cheese required specification.

Pesticides are making us allergic to bread, possibly.

And a lot of other things, I suspect, though maybe it’s not just pesticides, either.

I miss bread the most; I don’t care all that much about other foods that contain wheat. But there’s a huge convenience factor: convenience in terms of preparation (pasta!) and convenience in that it gets harder and harder to eat out happily with so many food sensitivities, and more expensive to eat at home as far as that goes.

Pumpkin spice. I was out somewhere and they served this and I said, “Hey, I can do this!” I tried it and it makes winter a little more fun.

My sympathies to JanieM. Life without (good) bread….

SamChevre gets the basics right on the gravy for chicken and biscuits, seems to me. I like to make it with some fat and bits from the fry pan (use slotted spoon, or empty most of the fat from the fry pan — and advantage of pan over deep frying ) — and I prefer bacon fat though seldom have enough for the whole shebang, so just use up what I have and then add shortening or oil — plus flour, of course (whisk makes it easy to avoid lumps and, as JanieM notes, add liquid slowly at first; make sure the roux is cooked long enough, to avoid floury-taste), chicken stock, and then some cream or (butter)milk added at the end. Don’t know if that’s traditional southern or not (sounds kinda French, actually). My Virginia grandmother came to prefer “Maryland” or “baked” chicken, even though she’d been raised on fried — she did make a to-die-for baked. Frankly, I don’t actually want gravy with a nice crisp fried chicken, but I make it for others.

The Neapolitan Italians in my NJ neighborhood growing up (a long time ago now) called tomato sauce “sauce,” the Sicilians called it “gravy.” Don’t know if that was mere chance or reflects sub-groups of Italian Americans or what.(I have fond memories of Natalie P. leaving conversation at my mother’s kitchen table to go home and “make the gravy,” a daily routine for her.)

My former colleague, a Piedmontese to the core, insisted strongly on ‘gravy’ as against ‘sauce’, while explaining that the cuisine in the north is not as tomato-based as that in the south. So, interestingly, the opposite of what Meredith recalls. But certainly as a biscuits and gravy bred Anglo Canadian, the Northern Italian sauce served to me at my former colleagues house reminded me of gravy rather than tomato sauce, in its brown color if not in its much milder and more subtle flavor.

And also pancakes too (just to get back on topic!).

Made apple pancakes today. Quite delish…

“Since Sylvia @91 brought up Swedish pancakes, I’d also like to mention Svea in Andersonville (Chicago) as their Swedish pancakes with lingonberries are delicious.”

Is Taste of Heaven still around in Andersonville (on Clark)? They had great scones. And were the focus of a really interesting NY Times story some years ago.. http://nyti.ms/U4GZqO

i’m with samchevre, i always add cinnamon, nutmeg and a dash of vanilla. also, if you don’t have maple syrup, honey and/or jams of any sort will top them off quite nicely.