Basic, Dairy Free, Fluffy Pancakes

Hello and Happy New Year.  I hope to try alot of new foods and make alot of posts this year.

Once you realize how easy pancakes are, you'll wonder why you overpaid for that box in your pantry that's six months old.  This is a very simple fluffy pancake recipe.  No one thinks that pancakes are healthy but they can be better than most are.  Here's what you need for 2 portions.

1 cup flour
1 cup water/milk substitute (more on this later)
4 tsp baking powder
2 tbsp sugar

Lets talk about ingredients.  I found some organic unbleached white flour.  White flour or bleached flour used to be a somewhat of a status symbol.  I can't see why I would want bleach in my food.  Some of the silliest things were status symbols in history.  Such as a large green lawn.  Most people did not have enough property to have such a thing.  Now we work hard to get rid of our lawn and put in landscaping.  Moving on.  I use turbinado sugar.  This is unrefined which means your body takes longer to break it down.  The baking powder I have is double acting baking powder.  Baking powder contains baking soda along with other acidic components which cause a chemical reaction.  This reaction releases carbon dioxide which acts as a leavening agent.  Double acting means that there is an itintial reaction that happens when you mix it in the batter and another when you expose it to heat.

 On the left you see the ingredients unmixed in the bowl.  4 tsp is the same as 1 tbsp + 1 tsp.  I used rice milk and a quarter cup of water in my batter.  The rice milk just gives it a little extra flavor.  You can use just water and have perfectly good pancakes.  I will be making some home made walnut milk in the future which I will tell you all about, but until then vanilla rice milk will do just fine.  If you use 1 cup flour, you want to use 1 1/4 cups liquid, otherwise your batter will be very thick.  On the right you will notice the bubbles in the mixed batter, those are from the first reaction in the baking powder.

If you are using an electric stove make sure to heat your pan for 5 minutes or so because if you pan is not hot enough your pancakes will spread too far.  The magic temperature is 350F but since no stove will give even the slightest indication of where that is, put it between 1/3 and medium heat.  Good luck.  Make sure you spray your pan with a cooking spray.  When your pancake is ready to flip it will look like the picture on the right.  You can see the edges look a little more dry than the center.  If I were not trying to take a picture of this the pancake would have been flipped by now.  If you want to make blueberry pancakes -yum-, you want to add the blueberrys shortly after you drip the batter into the pan, that way you can evenly distrbute the berries in the pancake.  Flip it over for a short period and your pancake is done.

Although I am writing from Wisconsin and some Grade A maple syrup is always delicious, I went another route.  It sounds kind of simple and odd but it is quite tasty.  I put sugar and lemon juice atop my pancakes.  This is a little healthier.  In one portion you may have about 5-7 teaspoons of sugar (depending on how much you use on top).  If you compare that to just one can of mountain dew which has about 11 teaspoons of sugar, this doesn't seem quite as bad.  Take into account that soda uses corn syrup, which has 2x the amount of fructose as sugar and you are looking at 22 teaspoons.  Suddenly either the pancakes seem very good or the soda seems very bad.  In any event, I hope you enjoy the pancakes.