tall, fluffy buttermilk pancakes – smitten kitchen

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About a year ago, over a series of weekends I was up too early anyway, I went on a buttermilk pancake-making bender. I tried, well, not all, but several of the recipes I always read about, the loftys and the fluffys and the best-evers. I used, in turn, cornstarch and vinegar and unseemly amounts of butter, I separated egg whites, I rested batters, and every single one of these pancakes was consumed by happy children but not a-one of them stayed as tall as they left the pan for more than a few minutes and I was gravely disappointed. It was very possibly user error; all pancakes were made before 8:30 a.m. on weekends, pre-coffee. Regardless, I tabled it and moved on.

Recently, in an attempt to extract myself from the 1008-page book I began in the fall and needed to accept I was probably never going to cross the halfway point of, I read Nora Ephron’s Heartburn. I honestly didn’t know the narrator was a food writer going into it but this made it even more delightful.* (I promise, I’m getting somewhere with this.) In some passage that I now cannot find, she essentially says that there are very few truly new recipes, that most things have been made well before, and this led me to send my kid to take down the 1896 Fannie Farmer cookbook and look up her pancake recipe. “It’s not in here.” “Yes, it is. Look in the index.” [I think library science lessons are a small price to pay for pancakes, don’t you?] “I did, there are no pancakes.” But I knew there were pancakes in there and grabbed the book from him and hrm, he was totally right, there were no “pancakes,” but there were many recipes for “griddle cakes.”

And so we made the buttermilk ~~pancakes~~ griddle cakes and guess what? They were tall and fluffy and stayed that way indefinitely; they were good an hour later from a warm oven, the leftovers were good microwaved on a school morning, and they were good cold schmeared with a little jam. They’re thick enough that you could add blueberries or other chunks of fruit or chocolate chips to them and they won’t fall to mush. There’s no cornstarch in there, no vinegar, only a moderate amount of butter and, here’s the best part, no separated eggs. Nobody should ever have to separate eggs before 9 a.m. on a weekend.

If you’ve thus far been enamored, understandably, with oatmeal or strawberry-cornmeal or lemon-ricotta or old-school cottage cheese pancakes, I do not expect these to replace them in your life. But if you’re looking for a classic, tall, fluffy, no-nonsense, one-bowl weekend pancake, do know that these are so simple, you can make them half-asleep; I know because I usually do.

* especially tangents like this sidebar about “serious food people” and their gushing over how creative cooking is:

[This] also misses the whole point of cooking, which is that is totally mindless. What I love about cooking is that after a hard day, there is something comforting about the fact that if you melt butter and add flour and then hot stock, it will get thick! It’s a sure thing! It’s a sure thing in a world where nothing is sure.