god damn you, hotcakes Tuesday, Mar 18 2008

Alright well as threatened I prepared pancakes for a third time in a handful of days and this time I just used egg and milk like you’re supposed to. This is what I have to say: the mix I was using really sucked. It was a whole wheat pancake mix. Whole wheat is very hit or miss. And I remember hearing that whole wheat flour isn’t necessarily that much better for you than regular wheat flour. It occurs to me that since whole wheat isn’t hulled, if it has been sprayed with pesticides then they might be doing you a favor by hulling the wheat and throwing that part away. Pesticide probably soaks all the way into plants though. Anyway let me break it down in order of what turned out and tasted the best

1. Making hotcakes the traditional way with milk and egg. The pancakes didn’t really taste better with milk rather than milk substitute, although they did taste better than the oil pancakes, but the consistency was a lot better and of all things they actually got done faster. Unfortunately I thought that they got too easily burnt on the outside, by far. Which was probably the strength of the oil cakes. Nonetheless if you pay more attention than I did when making them you’ll be fine.
2. Making hotcakes with milk substitute (I used vanilla flavored almond milk) and eggs. This was the first way I made them and even though I am consistently unhappy with the denseness of pancakes made this way I seemed to have the easiest time getting them done properly. They also tasted the best but the vanilla flavoring in the almond milk is what accounted for that. If I had actually flavored any of these pancake mix attempts (cinnamon seemed like a good idea) they probably would have tasted better but more on that later.
3. Making hotcakes with almond milk instead of cow milk and canola oil instead of eggs. These ones just sucked. The poor taste was mostly due to the canola oil but it would have been worse if I’d used anything else I had (actually the only other oils I have are safflower and olive so there was almost no choice). I wonder if peanut oil would have been any good? I don’t use peanuts though. This mix ended out extremely runny, I think this could have been mitigated by less liquid but I didn’t think of that at the time, and in the end less liquid means less cake. The advantage of using oil over egg was that because they didn’t have anything in that got done that quickly they came up easier, another advantage was not having to use an egg. In the end though, as much as I hate eggs I hated the way these pancakes turned out even more. They were though vegan as far as I know so that’s something. I wouldn’t say that I can make all my regular dishes without various common allergens or animal byproducts (I don’t have the spirit to make meatless meatballs), but I can make a lot of them that way if pressed. And that seems to come in handy a lot more often than you would think these days. Fortunately as far as I know I don’t have any food allergies so it’s all academic to me.

Well  anyway that was how it went. Other than being instructed to substitute 30 ml of oil for 1 egg, which I’m not sure is an equal volume conversion, I just substitute milk substitutes in equal amounts for milk. If you tweak a bit the results would probably be better. For the record the only other one I’ve used for hot cakes is rice milk but it’s not quite thick enough for anything that you want to have some consistency. I once used it in rice pudding (which if I recall was just cooked rice, milk, rum, and sugar, I used brown sugar and quite a bit more rum as well as coconut milk for thickness) that came out well though. Speaking of coconut milk I wonder if you could use it for pancakes? I’m not that interested in trying, coconut milk has too much fat for regular use in my opinion. I really like it in curry though.

It occurred to me while eating these flavorless pancakes that if you want to flavor your hotcake batter it’s easier to get a flavored liquid than to try and figure out how much of what, like for instance chocolate syrup, to add and try and mix in yourself. In general I’m a fan of vanilla (especially bourbon vanilla) and cinnamon when it comes to spices to use in sweet things because you almost can’t add too much of the former and you’re unlikely to add too much of the latter. You could maybe put some nutmeg or clove or whatever in there as well as sugar. Being reminded of an actual cake I made a while ago, I wonder if you could make a pumpkin hotcake somehow. I’m not that interested in finding the answer to that out for myself though.

In any case here’s the end of this stupid experiment. Good riddance. Let me once again say that I prefer crepes to pancakes hands down. Although I think that if you tried to substitute 30 ml of oil per egg in crepe batter you would just end out with oil drowned flour. That is not a pleasant thought.

Leave a Response »

 

The eggless hotcake Saturday, Mar 15 2008

So as promised I attempted to make pancakes without eggs since the mix I received said you could use oil instead. It didn’t specify which oil to use so I used canola. Unfortunately the canola I had really didn’t taste so great, and the hotcakes ended out tasting mostly of it. But they did turn out.

Now on this package it had me using 30ml (two tablespoons if you’re familiar) of oil instead of 1 egg. I have no idea whether or not that would work out for a typical pancake recipe. I had previously heard of people adding grease to the mixture in addition or in the absence of greasing the pan, but never had I heard of using it instead of egg. The overall consistency to me seemed both runnier and thicker if that’s possible. I had some difficulty in cooking them as I pretty much had to let the bottom burn (2 minutes a side as opposed to 1-1:30 a side the last time I made them) in order for enough of each cake to cook to be able to flip it over without the whole thing falling apart. This probably could have been solved by doling or spreading the mixture thinner on the pan but I was having other issues so that’s not how it went for me. Speaking of which, the cakes really collapsed once I flipped them over and they ended out so dense it was hard to tell when they were done. I again made this batch with almond milk instead of cow milk by the way, that again might have made a difference.

I previously mentioned a certain difficulty with the pancakes splashing around on me when I flipped them. The thinness of the mix only added to that problem however I found that by flipping them away from myself (my inclination is apparently to flip them inwards) this was somehow dampened. Also I pressed the cakes flat with my spatula so that they matched up with the splash. Frankly even though I suggested trying to get the cakes to land flat I didn’t make a great effort in doing so. I was holding the spatula extremely low, my hand was nearly touching either the burner or the cakes, while flipping hotcakes, part of that was the spatula I was using which has a parallel blade and handle and part of that was a stiff serving (unless it was supposed to be three) of mead. For the most part the faster I flipped the less fluid deviation there was and the neater the cakes turned out. But whatever. I was baking them in batches of 4 and ended out with 12 which is a pretty typical amount for that kind of thing, I think, so that gives you however many chances to try doing things whatever ways you want.

All said and done, going back to being a bigger crepe fan, even though I dislike eggs as a general matter of principal I prefer the way that pancakes turn out if you use eggs compared to not using them. Same thing with cow milk, probably (I will next try eggs and cow milk with the last of the dry mix I have). However for those of you who are vegan or simply have an egg or milk allergy or whatever there is a glimmer of hope as all kinds of pancake recipes are out there and for the most part they all end out about the same: almost flavorless. So don’t worry too much about what’s in your cakes and instead worry more about whether you’ve got enough of them (those 12 cakes went pretty quickly) and what you’re going to put on them.

Leave a Response »

 

The simplest cakes Thursday, Mar 13 2008

In my opinion the easiest cakes are pan/hotcakes. Whether or not these are truly cakes is debatable but considering recent kitchen forays I can say that you use roughly the same ingredients, eggs milk and flour; and end out finishing in similar ways, pouring some kind of sugary sweet topping on them. And so viva pancakes. But. Crepes are better. By far.

Having a preference for crepes it had been some time since I’d made hotcakes, but someone wanted me to try out an organic whole wheat and coincidentally vegetarian/dairy free mix that they’d obtained. Which conversely had no cooking instructions on the back, just a list of measurements for mixing. Oh well. So I made a batch using it, warily at first and then properly once I realized that my crepe making tips (which conversely is one of my most popular posts since I used the phrase “burnt butter” for the title, I had no idea how much trouble people have burning butter) generally applied only pancakes have a much greater margin for error because they’re quite a bit thicker (if you mix and pour them right anyway). The experience was somewhat unremarkable, however I did use an almond milk instead of cow milk since I was making it for someone that’s extremely lactose intolerant. And of course after going out of my way that person ended out eating just 2 of the 16 yielded pancakes. Yeah fuck you very much too. Actually I don’t mind substituting milk types that much and pancakes are one of easiest things to substitute out ingredients for. It does seem like the fewer animal products you use the thinner and denser and possibly even dryer your hotcakes end out though. I might try that mix again with cow milk, and then another time with rice milk instead of cow milk and oil instead of egg (actually the mix said the egg or oil was optional but that seemed weird and already substituting one thing I thought that I’d better use the egg), if there’s enough for two batches, to see if that holds out or not.

The only interesting thing to happen while making the pancakes was that one particularly wet set ended out kind of splashing because I flipped it strangely. And so in the spirit of my crepe observations I want to give some hotcake observations. First of all use a reasonably long and wide spatula for the flipping. If you use the term “flap jack” to refer to pancakes you should be shot. You might not deserve death for that, unlike riding a vespa on the sidewalk, but you do deserve to be shot. Second is to make sure that the heat is up hot enough, heat the pan to medium high (8 out of 10) to heat it up and then turn to just past medium (like 6 out of 10). You’re trying to burn them to a certain extent you know, that’s the goal of most pan cooked dishes in fact, so don’t worry about it. That said in order to get them properly done enough to flip you need to go a little more than a minute and a half on each side, two minutes is not overkill on the first side as long as you’re using a non-stick griddle and plenty of grease (butter, margarine, oil) but it shouldn’t need as long on the second side after that. As to flipping, you need courage to flip properly. Get your spatula well under there and lift it up off the titular pan, if the cake isn’t holding it’s place firmly on the spatula, like if it’s trying to bend over or the top is sliding off, then you’re flipping it too soon, and then aggressively flip it over all the way in one sudden motion. As opposed to kind of sadly sliding it off the spatula. Upon giving the matter a little consideration, I realized that my pancakes “splashed” when and how they did because of a combination of how I was holding the spatula and the direction I was flipping them. Unfortunately I don’t remember what the right combination was although I’m pretty sure that I was holding the spatula with my palm down and then flipped them towards myself, so in theory you should go the other way. If you’re holding the spatula with your palm towards you then you can flip it towards yourself, just make sure you’re holding the spatula at a height above the pan that when you make the flip it will land flat.

Seeing as writing the way to not smear your pancakes all over the place was the intended point of this whole entry I should have made a note of what actually happened since I’ve already forgotten. Shit. Oh well. I’ll make them again another day and pay more attention. So by the way, crepes really are better, but if you’re just starting out with cooking pancakes are a lot easier, pancake mixes are pretty reliable too. This is some general cooking advice but if you want to be good you need something to measure against so when possible my usual method is to first have a food cooked for me at a restaurant, which will presumably be the way it’s supposed to be assuming the restaurant or chef doesn’t suck. Then I’ll make the dish from a mix or otherwise partially prepared version. And then I’ll finally make it “from scratch”. This is a much more relevant process as far as sweet or desert dishes go, like a lemon meringue pie or crepes, because those are much more widely available in numerous forms than say… Bollito Misto. Maybe there’s some kind of mix for that somewhere but actually I’ve never even had it in a restaurant myself so I just made it after seeing it on a show one day and have no idea whether the way I made it is the way it’s supposed to be. But it tasted good and that’s all that matters right? Yeah so hotcake away, almost everyone has eaten a hotcake right?

And by the way, being dark brown or black all over isn’t a requisite to doneness for a pancake, it does mean that you burnt it though. Someone I know will without fail always manage to burn both sides of their hotcakes and yet still have it be not quite as done as you’d like in the middle. That’s really the worst you can do, you’d think that being burned at least it would be done but that’s not always the case. If you’re having that problem then re-coat your pan with grease (brush some butter/margarine on) after each batch, turn the heat down a bit, and leave them on longer than you have been. I know what you’re thinking when you botch the batch though “it’s smoking so it must be done” but that’s not always so. You can also apply that advice to anything you cook/sear/fry in batches (like pork cutlet or pan fried fish) as the problem is generally just too much heat with not enough grease.

Leave a Response »