If you Google “pancake recipe,” the first search result, for the past couple of months at least, is this one from Allrecipes.
The flour-milk-egg ratio of that recipe produces batter with the consistency of molasses, and, try as I might, I’ve been unable to get pancakes made with that recipe to be anything other than burnt, raw on the inside, or both.
Two nights ago, lacking other options, I decided to make crepes for supper, and I figured that crepes are really just thin pancakes, so I freestyled a recipe, using a cup of flour, a single egg, and considerably more milk than that pancake recipe calls for. The batter was the consistency of motor oil. And the resulting neo-pancakes were thin, cooked right through, and as different from the disastrous pancakes of yore as to be an entirely new species. With a little bit of dried basil added to the batter, and some of Paul Offer’s mushrooms fried up and placed on top, the result was very tasty.
So much so that I switched out cinnamon for basil this morning and we had blueberry pancakes from the same ad hoc recipe.
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Oh, look, Pancake Ridge is a real place.
And it has its own fiddle medley.
I wonder if you’ve yet had the joy of discovering Michael Ruhlman’s book Ratio. He breaks down cooked foods into ratios of basic ingredients that make them up. It’s a very good exploration of the “why” of food.
The pancake and crepes recipe in that book has served us well. It also served as a “gateway drug” to get comfortable enough to make bread from scratch and even try making my own sourdough starter.
I am 
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