Free – food and drink recipes

A few weeks ago I was researching the KitchenAid stand mixer and I came across a blog post by someone that I thought was not the best advice. The post was all about making pancakes with your mixer (or any stand mixer really). Now the recipe was probably pretty good but the process is what was flawed in my opinion. I like my pancakes to be really light and fluffy. And I find that if you use an electric mixer you tend to get thin and dense flap jack style results that just aren’t as enjoyable as they could be.

For me pancakes need to be handled with care and attention. The reason is gluten. Now for a bit of food science. Gluten is a protein, actually it is a composition of 2 proteins named gliadin and glutenin. When water is added to wheat flour and then mechanically mixed, gluten forms. And it is this wonderful gluten that gives bread dough and pasta their chewy and elastic characteristics. But since the gluten content is increased by mechanical mixing or kneading, it is not something we ever want to do if we desire to have light and fluffy pancakes.

So, the next time you want to enjoy some pan fried goodness for breakfast, leave your mixer tucked neatly away. Instead, follow this basic cooking process.

To start, take your favorite recipe for pancakes. But this time, be careful at the stage when you mix the wet ingredients with the dry. Make sure to use separate bowls for the wet and dry ingredients.

Before you can start mixing you need to plan ahead a little. You can cook them with either an electric griddle or a pan on the stove, the choice is yours. An electric griddle is a preferred choice because it has excellent heat control and it has a large surface which means more pancakes can be cooked at once. Regardless of the method you choose you can keep cooked pancakes in the oven wrapped in a clean towel before serving.

Now that you have a hot cooking appliance ready, it is time to mix the batter. You want to achieve the mixing as fast as possible without activating too much gluten. So, take the wet ingredients and literally dump them into the dry. Then take a spatula and fold in the wet ingredients for 10 to 15 seconds. That is it. Some of the dry may not be perfectly mixed but that is all right. I have never had a lumpy pancake using this method.

Next, place some batter on the griddle or in the frying pan and wait. You want to see the bubbles forming all around the outside of the pancake. That is the sign of a flapjack that is ready to be flipped. If the heat is high enough the bottom will be nice and brown. If it is too low it will be pale in color and conversely if it is too hot the bottom will be very dark. So as gently as possible flip the flapjack and continue cooking the opposite side. Normally the second side will cook in half the time as the first.

I always use real maple syrup on my pancakes. It tastes so much better than the ‘other’ stuff you find in your supermarkets which are often made from high fructose corn syrup, etc. And since I put all the effort into keep the pancakes light and fluffy I think they deserve to be ‘dressed’ properly.

There you have it. Next time you get a craving for some flapjacks, keep the KitchenAid mixer covered and instead use the dump and fold method for the lightest and fluffiest pancakes you can make at home.