Erik Pukinskis, Snowed In

I’m back home in Ithaca, NY spending some quality time with my family. First order of business: create the perfect vegan pancake!

We made 20 different recipes of pancake, varying basic proportions, auditioning potential “secret” ingredients, and having a gay old time. Here are our findings, with the final recipe at the bottom. And yes, there were spreadsheets involved.

Oil vs. Earth Balance

We tried both, multiple times, and the difference was one of the most striking of the afternoon. Canola oil pancakes taste like crap, and Earth Balance pancakes are delicious. Don’t use canola oil, period. Other oils, like coconut, might work, but we didn’t try them. Let us know if you try something else and it works out.

Cutting the fat

Melting down your earth balance and mixing it into the dry ingredients provides a good flavor, but if you want a really amazing texture, just spoon the cold earth balance right into the dry stuff, and then “cut” it in. Traditionally, cutting fat into a flour mix is done with two knives, but we found that just squishing the earth into the flour worked great. Squish until you get a relatively homogeneous crumbly mixture.

It should be noted that you can make a pretty good pancake with no fat besides what is naturally in the banana and what you use to fry it. Not quite decadent, but certainly delicious.

Rising action

Recipes on the web vary wildly in the amount of baking powder they recommend, from less than a teaspoon per cup to up to two tablespoons (6 teaspoons) per cup. We found that for white flour, about one tablespoon of baking powder per cup of flour works well, yielding an extremely fluffy pancake with only a slight baking powder taste, which can be masked by other flavors.

A good fluffy pancake will actually visibly puff up when you flip it over, yielding a lovely dome shape like the one you see in the photo. Going down to two teaspoons per cup of flour yielded a soggier, denser pancake.

For whole wheat flour, we upped it to 4 teaspoons of baking powder per cup of flour. Whole wheat flour is less fluffy to begin with, so you might want to compensate.

We also tried using half baking powder, half baking soda, since we’d seen that on a few recipes, but that only seemed to create a nasty pretzel pancake thing. It certainly didn’t improve the leavening action.

The glue

Traditional pancakes have eggs, which not only provide protein, flavor and leavening (rising), they act as the glue that binds everything together. We found that the best way to achieve a great fluffy pancake that isn’t too crumbly was to add two teaspoons of mushed banana for every cup of flour, and if you’re using whole wheat flour, to add in an additional 1/2 teaspoon of corn starch (or any other starch) to provide additional binding. The banana taste is noticeable, but it works well with syrups and other fruits, and the texture is just great.

Egg replacers like Ener-G work too, but they are are basically just starch, baking powder, and flour. You’ve already got baking powder and flour in your pancake recipe, so all you’re really doing is adding some potato starch or something. We’re pretty sure in the case of pancakes, corn starch and Ener-G will be basically equivalent. That said, we didn’t spend the money on a huge box of the stuff just so we could try it out. Let us know if you do.

Wetness

The wetness of the batter makes a huge difference in the quality of the pancake. Too much liquid, and your pancake will be dense and thin. Too little liquid and the pancake will be thick and dry. You’ve got to be like Goldilocks and find the porridge that’s just right.

The correct amount of liquid seems to be about the same as the amount of flour. One cup flour, one cup water. However, you might need a little less if you are adding banana or applesauce. We recommend adding the liquid slowly, whilst stirring, and monitoring the consistency carefully. You want a batter that will spread out to a round puddle about 1/4″ thick. If you tip the bowl, such a batter will slide freely and quickly off the walls of the bowl, leaving a thin layer of batter behind, but there should be some batter that slides down the bottom of the wall more slowly.

Bananas and apple and yams, oh my!

As we mentioned above, we really like what bananas do for vegan pancakes, especially the whole wheat ones. But we also tried adding applesauce and mushed cooked yams (in both cases, 2 teaspoons per cup of flour). The applesauce pancakes were good, but you sort of lose that wheaty pancake taste. I’d rather have regular pancakes with a sweet, cinnamon apple topping.

The yam pancakes were very good. If you want a heartier, more filling pancake that’s still sweet and fluffy, this is the pancake for you. Just microwave, bake, or boil the yam until it is soft, and then mash it with a fork. After you’ve cut the earth balance into the dry ingredients, add the yam and knead it into a dry dough. Then add water slowly until you get the right batter consistency.

Got milk?

Many vegan pancake recipes suggest using soy milk or other alternative milks. We tried both soy and oat milk, and it didn’t seem to matter. Water was just as tasty. Unless you really want the 1/4 gram of protein, you might as well save your money and use water.

Salt ‘n Suga’

Added salt seems unnecessary. Baking powder is already a little salty. We did like the sweetness a little sugar imparts, especially in the whole wheat pancakes which are prone to blandness, but if you’re using a banana you can get away without using sugar.

The Recipe

Proto-Ultimate Vegan Pancakes

(Makes 12 eight-inch pancakes)

These are the result of strenuous testing, but we’re open to suggestions for improvement. Post a comment if you think you’ve got a variation that beats these.

• 3 cups flour (white works well, but half whole wheat, half barley is a delicious alternative)
• 1/4 cup sugar
• 4 Tbsp baking powder
• 2 Tbsp corn starch (if using whole wheat flour)
• 1/4 cup Earth Balance, plus 1/8 cup for frying
• 1 banana, mashed
• 3 cups or less water

Mix the dry ingredients in a large bowl. Add 1/4 cup cold Earth Balance, and cut it into the mixture using your fingers. When the mixture is uniformly crumbly, add the mashed banana and knead it in. Put a large, flat bottom skillet or griddle on medium-high heat. It’s hot enough when water dribbled on the pan sizzles. Add the water to the banana mix slowly, until the desired consistency is reached. (See “Wetness” above). For each pancake, put about 1/2 teaspoon of Earth Balance in the middle of the pan. When it has melted, pour 1/2 cup of batter slowly into the center of the Earth Balance puddle. When the bottom of the pancake is browned, but the top is still wet, flip it. When the other side is browned, which will take less time, remove it from the heat.

Serve immediately! Don’t stack pancakes in the oven, put them on a plate and tell someone to start eating. The crispy, fluffy texture is best fresh off the griddle.

Variations: Substitute cooked, mashed yam for the banana. Make sure you incorporate the yam with the flour well before adding liquid. Or, add applesauce, cinnamon, and nutmeg for an apple pie taste.

Open Questions

Even after an afternoon of pancakery, there are still some things we didn’t get to test; some questions left unanswered. Like, since most baking powder is double-acting, would it make sense to let the batter sit and froth up, and then gently ladle it onto the pan for a second rise? If we did that, could we get away with less baking powder? And, my mom informed me last night that baking powder needs an acidic environment to react. Should we try adding some lemon juice or vinegar with the baking powder? And what about that no-fat-inside pancake? Was it really that good? What would vanilla add to the flavor, and exactly what happens when you cook a pancake on lower heat for longer? What about the liquid/flour proportions? Do you really need to eyeball it every time you make the batter, or can we construct a recipe that Just. Works. Every. Time? Katt says corn oil tastes great… what other oils work well, and how do they stand up to venerable Earth Balance?

Lots of questions. Perhaps a second edition of pancake VTK is needed.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 21st, 2007 at 4:24 pm and is filed under cooking, family, food, photos, pi, recipe, test kitchen, vegan, video. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.