Platonic pancakes
You know, Platonic, like, the eternal pancake, or the essential pancake; the ideal of a pancake.
This is not about the perfect pancake, just about getting at what is fundamental to a pancake.
I just bought a bag of flour and now need to cook through a lot of it as it's most of the carbs I own, and I have no working oven, so I need to explore flour's stovetop possibilities. Pancakes are very important part of that repertoire.
I never really understood pancakes. I followed the recipes and made some decent ones, but I never understood what could be modified and what couldn't. I had ChatGPT attempt to elucidate the orders of stovetop bread, starting from flour + water (a tortilla), working through what it would change to add a fat (like butter), or an egg, or milk, or a leavening agent. American pancakes seem like the end of that progression, because they have "everything": flour, milk, fat, eggs, and a leavening agent. I want to cook though the other permutations, too, but this morning it was just: pancake. Starting from the top.
Once I was thinking of them in this way, it became pretty simple to throw a basic pancake together.
- a measure of flour
- an equal measure of milk (though I replaced 1/4 with sour cream so the baking soda would have an acid to work with)
- some butter
- an egg
- some baking soda
I thought it was so cool to abstract the concept like this... now I realize I could change any of those things, like adding tons more butter if I felt like it, or more or less baking soda to get different rise results. I could throw some vanilla in there for some delicious vanilla sweetness. It feels very liberating to think of them this way.
It all came together very nicely in one bowl; I melted the butter in the pan that it was all about to be cooked in.
Mine didn't really bubble quite as much as I'm used to. I might need more baking soda, or more acid. But honestly, the height was more than satisfactory; they were very thick.
That's the most bubble I ever got
They were really good, though I'm sure I've had and made better. They were so incredibly easy and low-stress, though!
I didn't have syrup so I yoghurted one and peanut-butter-honeyed the other two. Both good but the PB was the best, by far.
It was an enormously satisfying breakfast.
I lucked out and got free dinner at a talk I went to after class. I'm running a little ahead of the budget-cycle-curve and it feels GREAT!