We love to have American style pancakes as a weekend breakfast treat. Until recently my favourite recipe was one I found on (no longer operational) Google Knol by Scott Jenson – luckily the recipe is preserved in several places online, including this site called Tastebook.
Because we don’t always have buttermilk in the house I’d occasionally played around with alternatives, and had a bit of success mixing yoghurt and milk – but I found if I got the proportions wrong in this mix, the flavour was a bit off. Then one day I had some left over sour cream, and used that, mixed with milk, in place of buttermilk. The result was the tastiest and fluffiest pancakes I’ve made:
Wet ingredients
- About 100ml sour cream mixed with 200ml milk. The amounts are quite rough here, because I tend to use whatever sour cream I’ve got, and top up with milk (and rarely note exact measurements). I try to be a bit conservative with the milk – you can always thin the batter with some more milk later.
- 1 egg
- 50g melted butter
- 1-2 tsps vanilla extract
Dry ingredients
- 125g strong white flour
- 40g caster sugar
- 1/2 tsp baking soda
- 1/2 tsp baking powder
- 1/2 tsp salt
Mix the wets and drys separately, then mix them together and let them rest for few minutes for the raising agents to start working. The resulting batter should be a bit lumpy. How thick you make the batter is up to you – if you make it on the thicker side you’ll get thicker pancakes that will need to cook a little slower to cook all the way through in the pan.
Glad you liked my original recipe! I’ve been continuing to evolve it, especially since moving to California, where I’ve discovered that the buttermilk is very different from the mid west variety that I started with. This has forced me to explore alternatives.
The best I’ve found so far is to replace the 1.5C Buttermilk with 1C whole milk + juice of half of a lime. This sours the milk and encourages a strong reaction from the baking soda. The reason to reduce it to 1C is that milk is much runnier than buttermilk.
I’ve also upped my flour a bit, making it a bit thicker. Now, in order to get the batter out of the measuring spoon, I have use my finger like a spatula to scoop it all out (that’s how thick I’m making the batter) I still use bread flour but I’ve even pumped up the protean higher by adding 1T of vital wheat gluten.
These changes produce a very consistent and extremely light pancake. I hope you give it a shot!
Scott