My long-standing but unproved thesis is that pancakes are the ultimate adaptable food. They’re great. The base is just flour and eggs, with a few extras thrown in for texture and flavor; you can even use different flours to make multigrain pancakes, though they tend to be heavy. For breakfast, you can put tons of stuff in them: berries, fruit, chocolate chips, spices, almost anything breakfasty, and then serve them with syrup, yogurt, apple sauce, or, well, almost anything. And we all know that you can have pancakes for dinner. Sometimes it’s been a long day and you just need to dip your dinner in maple syrup, and that’s that.
But if pancakes are so flexible at breakfast, why can’t they be a real dinner food, not just breakfast-for-dinner? They’re just flour and eggs, after all. It shouldn’t be a stretch to make savory pancakes.
So that’s what I did. These were carrot pancakes with a mix of white and quinoa flours, and veggie stock swapped in for the milk. The batter was very thick, despite all the liquid I added, and the pancakes held their shape excellently and cooked quickly. I seasoned them with garlic powder and mustard — next time I would add more seasoning, maybe crushed garlic or sauted onions, though taking the time to saute onions defeats part of the beauty of pancakes as a quick-fix food. The result was good: heavy, but not rich, and very filling. They were a little dry, so I might add some milk in the future.
I can see lots of possibilities for this. Pancakes with spinach blended in? (Green pancakes would be delightful!) Pancakes with rice or quinoa? Cheese, certainly: a nice sharp cheddar, or maybe swiss with herbs. The only limitation is that any add-ins need to be small enough to mix in and cook as fast as the batter.
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I’ve been a proponent of pancake universality for the past few years – they form a distinct lobe on the Deliciousness Manifold in baking-space, adjacent to (and, I contend, continuous with) those of quickbreads, crepes, muffins, cakes, and omelets (which are pancakes with zero flour and milk).
Caraway and rye make a nice pancake, sweetened with molasses or maple, or savored with salt and pepper.
(also, and maybe it’s my browser, the name/mail/website fields for the comment-adder are an unreadable shade of yellow against their white background.)
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[...] I was also in the mood for comfort food. Really, I was in the mood for pancakes. I thought of my own savory pancakes of the past, and remembered some tips from Mark Bittman on some very tasty-looking spinach pancakes. Then I [...]