By Vida Gustafson
Contributing Writer
There’s no better way to get kids (and grownups!) out of bed and at the breakfast table than a good old-fashioned stack of pancakes. Now that summer is drawing to a close and some of us have to change our routines, this recipe will help.
I immigrated here from South Africa nearly 20 years ago, and this recipe for “crumpets” is still one of my favorites. They are light and fluffy and the recipe stands up to conversions really well. You can easily substitute a gluten-free flour for the standard white flour and you can substitute oil for melted butter.
Ingredients
2 cups flour
2 eggs
5 tbsp sugar
2 tbsp melted butter
4 tsp baking powder
½ tsp salt
1 ¾ cups milk
Method
In a large mixing bowl, whisk together the eggs and sugar until pale. It might seem tedious, but the more you mix, the fluffier the pancakes.
Melt the butter in a small bowl and add ½ a cup of milk to the butter then mix it into the eggs. Sift together the flour, baking powder and salt and add to the egg and milk mixture. Once it has been smoothly mixed in, not whisked, add the remaining milk a little bit at a time.
Do not overmix once the flour has been added. That would activate the gluten and make the pancakes chewy.
Heat up a skillet to medium high — my favorite for this is cast iron. Butter the cooking surface very lightly and turn down the heat a little bit. And drop spoonfuls (depending on how big you want the pancakes) of batter onto the pan or grill.
As soon as you see air bubbles come to the uncooked surface and remain there (as a small hole in the surface) the pancake is ready to flip. After the first side is cooked, the second side takes less than half the time to be thoroughly cooked. Don’t worry if the first batch burns or goes wrong in some elaborate way. It usually takes a couple of tasty flops before you and the pan start to figure each other out!
