Ah ha! I bet you thought I had forgotten all about this blog. Well, you were only partly right - the sad truth is I haven't really been cooking lately due to problems with my kitchen that I have no interest in getting in to here. But I've been doing some cooking at my in-laws' house, and there were a few items of note.
A few weeks ago, I had a craving for some well made pancakes. (I'm very particular about my pancakes, so most restaurants don't really meet my requirements.) Digging out the America's Test Kitchen binder, I wound up with this recipe:
1 cup whole wheat flour
1 cup graham cracker crumbs
2 tablespoons sugar
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
dash of salt
1 large egg
3 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted
2 cups buttermilk
It should be noted that the recipe called for 1/2 teaspoon of salt, but like everything else, I tend to ignore that and just add a splash (more for luck than anything else). The beauty of this binder is that it always suggests substitutions - in this case, the graham cracker crumbs were listed in place of a cup of flour. The notes suggested I put 9 crackers (i.e. half a box, one of those little wrapped stacks) in a food processor and grind them into fine powder, which I did, and it also wanted 2 tablespoons of cornmeal for texture, which I left out, because I was using whole wheat flour instead of all purpose. The end result was very tasty, even though I butchered the first few by putting too much oil in the pan. (My kingdom for non-stick skillets!)
A few notes: if you have pancake rings, this would be a good time to use them. The batter pours out in a lump, like it's not going anywhere, but as soon as it melts it spreads out and can fill up the pan. If you like the flatter, limper pancakes that's fine, but with a recipe like this I think they work better when they're nice and tall. Also, next time I probably won't grind the graham crackers quite so fine - I think bigger chunks of crumb would have made for a nice crunchy result.
No comments:
Post a Comment