Every Sunday for several months I have been making pancakes.  This has become my daughter’s favorite food.  I work a 24 hour shift every Saturday and when I get off I come home and make a large enough batch for a late breakfast and the snacking that will ensue all day.  You heard that right.  Snacking.  Every member of my family will get one of these golden beauties later in the day and eat it cold.  That’s how good they are.

Most people make pancakes from a mix that is bought in the store, and that is just silly.  There is nothing in that box that you would not find in the well stocked kitchen, and if you have these ingredients and a set of measuring spoons you can mix this stuff together in about as much time as it will take you to open the over-priced box of pancake mix.  Also, that box of pancake mix probably has the absolute cheapest ingredients money can buy and there is no telling how old the box is, so it is a safer bet to mix your own anyway.

This recipe is adapted from an Alton Brown recipe on the Food Network site, but it has been altered to yield a single batch of pancakes and work well with an iron skillet which is my weapon of choice for frying them.  If you want to go all hoity-toity girly-man and get an electric griddle your results may vary, and you will be called a wuss by all of us REAL men who make REAL pancakes.  But enough of the posturing.  Let’s get down to business.

You will be mixing two sets of ingredients.  There will be a dry set, and a wet set.  Once they are properly mixed you will throw them all together into one big sloppy, lumpy mess, but first things first.

The Dry Mix:

2 cups all purpose flour
½ teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon kosher salt
2 teaspoons sugar

I usually put all of the dry ingredients into a big glass bowl, mix them up with a whisk, and set it aside.  This will be the final bowl that your batter winds up in so make this a large enough container to hold the dry and the wet mixes, and make it small enough to where it will still fit on your stove next to your frying pan.  You will be scooping batter directly from this into the pan.

The Wet Mix:

2 eggs
2 cups cultured butter milk
4 tablespoons butter (1/2 stick)

Take the half stick of butter and melt it in the microwave.  (Using a microwave safe dish of course.  If you are a REAL man you can do this in a crucible with a plumber’s torch, but that’s only for ‘Advanced Super-Manly Pancakes’ which will be covered in a future post.)  Set this hot butter aside to cool for a bit.  If you pour the hot butter into the eggs and the milk, things will go all wonky on you.  Have patience.  Let it sit for a minute.  Beat the living hell out of the two eggs and then whisk them into the two cups of butter milk.  (Don’t be getting that ‘low-fat butter milk’ either.  Low-fat butter milk is a contradiction in terms.  You are frying fat in a pan.  You are about to pour syrup all over it and shovel it down your face hole as fast as you possibly can.  This is not the time to be health conscious.  Have no illusions.  Low fat butter milk will not help you stay thin while you eat this.  Let go and float down stream.)  Now that the butter is cool you can whisk it into the main wet mix as well.  Depending on the temperature of the milk and the butter, some of the butter may become solid again and clump up.  This is fine.  Just keep whisking and smooth it out as much as you can.

The Batter:

Now take all the wet stuff and pour it on the dry stuff.  Get your biggest, manliest whisk and go to town on it.  (If you are a real man, you will be stirring this together with a bowie knife.  Again, see ‘Advanced Super-Manly Pancakes.’)  This mixture will not be perfect.  It will be lumpy.  Don’t worry about that.  Just make sure there are no pockets of flour that are dry, having not been incorporated into the wet mix.  Set this next to your hot iron skillet and proceed to the next step.

The Deed:

Now if you want this to go right you will use a cast iron skillet.  (Real men will want to cook this outdoors over an open fire with a beer…while naked.  See again: ‘Advanced Super-Manly Pancakes.’  Loin cloth is optional, but you will be required to have a cool scabbard for your bowie knife.)  Iron skillets take a while to heat up properly.  I set mine on medium heat and let it warm up over the course of 15 minutes.  Truth be told, the very first thing I do for this entire recipe is start heating the skillet.  I mix everything together while it is heating and then race to pour the first pancake on before the surface of it starts smoking.  But that’s just me.  I like it on the edge.  If you are lame you will heat it up later.

I like my pancakes to be ‘silver dollar’ sized.  There is a reason for this.  One of my favorite parts of the iron skillet pancake is the slightly crispy edge.  Smaller pancakes mean maximizing that edge, or more surface to area ratio.  I have a small soup ladle that will deliver three loads of batter that just fill my 12-inch iron skillet.  This seems to be a good balance.  This produces a pancake that is big enough to stack three or four high.  Yet the pancake will be small enough that you can put a stack of these on a large plate and still have room for other parts of your breakfast that are bad for you such as bacon and sausage.  But in the end, you do what you want.

The first batch is always a little weird until you find the perfect temperature for your skillet.  Sometimes you hit a home run.  Sometimes you are feeding the first batch to the dog when your wife isn’t looking.  You want to have a balance of heat that produces a thoroughly cooked pancake without being too brown on the outside.  If your pancakes are raw on the inside but black on the outside you may wish to lower the heat a bit.  (If you are one of those people that has to recycle absolutely everything, these can be placed in the oven and cooked longer to make organic hockey pucks.)  Remember that you put butter in these pancakes.  Butter browns quickly.  Some recipes substitute an amount of vegetable oil for the butter but this is for girly-men who cannot cook.  Your pancakes will be uniform, and lifeless.  Live on the edge.  Turn down the heat.  Use the butter.  Each of your pancakes will have it’s own look and character.  They won’t be as uniform.  But they will taste better.

Keeping these things warm is an art in itself.  I cook them three at a time, but this recipe will yield 18 or 20 of these things, so keeping them warm is an issue.  I stack them on a plate on top of the stove with a towel over them.  Then my wife gets mad at me because I used the wrong towel.  Apparently there are towels that are okay to do these things with, and towels that are not okay.  I invariably choose the wrong one.  Therefore you should cook these as early as possible, preferably before your spouse is awake.  The fact that she woke up to breakfast will most likely over shadow how much you have fucked up the kitchen.  If you are cooking the ‘Advanced Super-Manly Pancakes’ you will most likely be eating them as you cook them.  Also, cooking naked over an open flame in your backyard usually leads to divorce so you can use any damn towel you like provided she left you some in the settlement.  In any case it may be preferable to use a grease rag from the garage or workshop in order to maximize the rustic nature of the final product.

Your choice of syrup is crucial too.  All of the popular syrups in the grocery store (even Ms. Butterworth and Aunt Jemima) are nothing but high fructose corn syrup with a few artificial things thrown in that are known to cause cancer in laboratory rats.  It costs a little more, but go for the 100% maple syrup.  It is not so sickeningly sweet that you feel the enamel is being eroded from your teeth as you eat, and there is a deeper, richer flavor.  There is a technique by which you can extract sap from a maple tree using a bowie knife and purify it with a blow torch wearing nothing but cool looking leather gauntlets and steam punk goggles, but again that will be explained in the ‘Advanced Super-Manly Pancake Recipe.’

The only thing left is to shovel them down until you have to unbutton your pants and you feel gross.  Don’t make any plans because the only thing you’re going to feel like doing after this is watching TV.  If there is a 007 marathon on Spike TV, all the better.  Enjoy.

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