Does anyone actually like pancakes?
I mean, just infromally, do you like them enough to eat just pancakes?
Pancakes, to me, are merely a delivery vehicle for yummy maple syrup and whipped butter. If they independantly have any flavor I am unaware of it. I remember eating a bite of plain pancake once, and I’m damned if I’m gonna do THAT again.
Popcorn, I can see, yeah it has very little flavor unless you doctor it, but at least eating a wad of popcorn will keep the mail moving along. Still, the best use of popcorn is to be coated with molasses flavored candy and mixed with peanuts.
25 comments Og | Uncategorized
Pancakes must have some flavor because, even smothered in butter and syrup, I can taste the difference between scratch-made and just-add-water types. BTW, I like ’em cold with orange marmalade, too; and that’s when I can really tell the difference.
Yep, ordinary flour pancakes are bland, but make them with sourdough, and they are special enough to eat without anything on them, though I prefer them with butter.
Make them in the German/Polish-style with grated potatoes, fry them in goose grease, and they are DEE-lightful, and shrug off every condiment save a good marmalade.
Of course, it goes without saying that a good side of smoked meat of some sort goes best with pancakes.
Yup… I like pancakes. There’s no reason one can’t give them flavor. As example, I often make mine with French Vanilla creamer instead of water. Or I toss a can of creamed corn into the mix and serve with maple on the side.
Ever since I began using Krustez I have enjoyed them just warm by themselves. Especially when I use buttermilk instead of water, but it’s not required. And I have added fresh blueberries too at times; however the berries can get way too hot or, when allowed to cool, the cakes are then too cool. Then I have to eat them like you do, traditionally.
Bottom line: I occasionally have eaten them like fresh bread slices and liked them.
I ate pancakes once, plain. Just once. And I did that because they were supposed to be “So good you wanted to eat them by themselves”
They weren’t. They tasted like a cellulose sponge. And I have eaten things that most would not consider food.
Corn? Blueberries? Potatoes? Sourdough? Sound good. Not pancakes, though, in my book.
Home-made hot out of the pan. Just a little bit crispy around the edges. Plain, except for the little butter used to keep them from sticking. Love-em.
If you have to put flavorings on as a masking agent, you might as well eat cardboard.
Regarding popcorn, even movie-style oil poppers gave more flavor to popcorn than the air poppers that were popular during the early 1980’s. I took an air popper to sea with me on one Navy deployment, thinking that we could be snacking like kings on freshly-popped popcorn, and the reaction to the air-popped, no-flavor popcorn was…meh. The popper was retired after a day or so.
And remember rice cakes, those styrofoam snacks from the late 1980’s/early 1990’s?
Really, most foods are just delivery systems, for if you also include what you cook them in or drop into the mix as a topping, then who eats bread, rice, muffins, plain cake, anything without jazzing it up?
I’ll use whole milk, not water, with batter, drop in some olive oil AND fry them in olive oil (good Lord do they get crisp), and add blueberries that were soaked in sugar over night (shorting on the milk to compensate for the liquid in the berries, so it at least congeals). Need no syrup.
I like the way Rivrdog thinks.
Been meaning to try some poured over strips of bacon in the skillet, as they made them in the ’50’s, before we became such a nation of fucking pussies.
There was a restaurant in Cedar Lake when I was a kid that sold something they called a “Texas stack” which was pancakes with bacon, sausage, and corned beef hash between the layers and poached eggs on top. Bliss.
Try making a batch properly.
No box mix allowed.
On a well seasoned cast iron griddle.
Bit of a difference there.
As my uncle said to Mom one fine day in the backwoods of Oklahoma: “Dorothy, I’m used to the marshmallow and whipped cream pancakes my wife makes. These things are made of flint rock and buckshot!”
Poor sod never could finish more than one of Mom’s buckwheat specials. I could barely manage two, and I was a growing boy.
Mom, you see, believed not only in using whole grains, but the whole of a good sized cast iron skillet, as well. Her pancakes were like my calzones, real platehangers, and they arrived with weight and authority.
If your pancakes don’t taste good by themselves, come over (or bring the OgWife) some morning and I’ll show you how to make ’em good…the butter and syrup just make ’em better.
Basic Bisquick don’t cut it.
If you want a real (different) treat, try making ’em out of jiffy cornbread mix.
Of course, making them in an iron skillet helps.
Let me point out again, since nobody is listening: I have had pancakes that were supposed to be the best on earth. I was not impressed. B, if you can make a pancake that will impress me, I will do the dishes by hand. I will not have to get my fingers wet, I guarantee. I know you can cook, I’m not exactly a slouch myself.I didn’t attain this size on pizza hut and mcdonalds.
You have to remember: I had a chef living in my house that trained in the best schools in Vienna. She cooked every single day. And I grew up with men whose camp cooking was as good as their wives.
I do not impress easily.
Pancakes are like curry: There’s a million acceptable ways to make both. There is no such thing as a One Right Recipe for either.
Sounds like a challenge, B. If you accept, will we hear about the results?
I love pancakes. Traditional with butter and warm syrup or using them as shortcake with mashed strawberries. I also like them made with Jiffy cornbread. Tried it one night for a snack. My potato pancakes I make with leftover mashed. Just add an egg and flour and shape them into cakes. Yummy! Now I gotta find a snack. Oh well. Didn’t need to lose weight every day, right?
Hmm. I find ordinary pancakes to be heavy and in need of flavor adders like syrup, butter, jam, or in a pinch, powdered sugar. I will have to try Art Welling’s suggestion of French Vanilla creamer instead of milk.
The way I like pancakes is to make the Austrian dish called Kaiserschmarrn, which is a simple milk and egg dough but with the whites separated and whipped to hard peaks before they are folded back into the rest of the dough. Fry them up with Nucoa Margarine (it burns at a much higher temperature than butter or any other margarine), chop them into bite sized pieces and scoop them onto the plate with whatever topping you want (or nothing, it’s that good). And Emperor Franz Josef lived to be 85 or so, so it couldn’t have been THAT unhealthy for him).
Randy Rager — And my dad liked buckwheat pancakes, too, and no one else did. I recall getting them a few times, and for some reason no matter how much syrup I used, they were even heavier and chewier and DRIER than regular pancakes which were to me about like rocks.
My dad like pancakes, any kind. His favorite were the buckwheat pancakes made by his mom (a Norwegian Immigrant). They WERE good enough to eat cold rolled up with butter and sugar on ’em. They were heavenly served warm, three in a stack with butter and sorghum molasses. Po’ folks food at it’s best.
Gerry N.
If those pancakes were supposed to be “the best on earth”, or however you put it, I’m guessing they were served at a restaurant. Restaurants never put enough sugar in their pancakes. You’d think something you cover in syrup shouldn’t be sweet, but you’d be mistaken.
Couple tips: Sourdough, you start general purpose flour with fermented potato-peeling water. This results in a bubbly mixture which you nurture like a pet, because it is. Lotsa books on this subject.
Potato pancakes: you have to use a hand-grater with the correct mesh on the potaoes, and I’ve never found the right size in a store, wind up getting a too-fine mesh and enlarging each hole with a mandrel/punch similar to a finishing nail-set. As for the goose-grease, you have to roast a fat goose to get it. You’ll get a quart of grease from each goose. It IS the best animal fat to cook in, bar none. The crackly goose-skin you get from cooking a goose is WAY better than pork cracklins.
I really don’t like the typical American-style pancakes. I agree with you totally there, Og. They taste like cardboard sponginess to me, even with toppings. GERMAN pancakes, however, which are more crepe-like, are YUMMY. Even plain. :)
Rivrdog, what is Potato-peeling water? And what is the process for fermenting it, if I might ask a question fraught with peril for the asking?
And goose grease. I’ve been trying to score some bear grease, which I have heard third hand is top notch for cooking, but goose grease seems easier to organize.
I have a recipe for blue corn panckes from scratch, 15 min, start to finish.
If you want to try them, let me know and I will e-mail you a copy (no substituting ingredients, though. :P )