These might very well be the best pancakes in the world. It’s my recipe, probably stolen in my twenties, but I changed it over the years to make it my own. I used to work in a diner, so I have an unnatural love for breakfast twenty-four hours a day.

It’s getting harder to find twenty-four hour diners. They’re Americana–fading into history. I miss the feeling of the diner–the background noise, buzz, and twenty-page menus. But, I can make most of that at home. Especially pancakes!   Pro tip: triple the recipe. Freeze the extras. To avoid getting one stack of stuck pancakes, stack them off center: one to the left, then one to the right. They’ll separate better.

The Best Pancakes

  • Servings: 4-10
  • Difficulty: easy
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INGREDIENTS
  • 1 cup flour
  • 1/2 to 1 cup of milk
  • 1 egg
  • 1/3 cup sugar (optional).
  • 2 tablespoons melted butter
  • 2 tsp baking powder
  • 1/2 tsp salt
  • 1 tsp almond and/or vanilla extract (definitely make your own vanilla and keep a jar handy!)
  • Optional: chocolate chips, home-dehydrated apple slices, blueberries
DIRECTIONS
  1. Mix the ingredients together. Get all the lumps out, though nothing says “I love you” more than a big mouthful of baking powder.
  2. Preheat cast iron skillets. It’s best if you can get two or three going. Make this a production line Henry Ford would be proud of.
  3. Butter and cook up the pancakes.
  4. Eat some. Freeze the rest.

Toppings

  • Maple syrup–don’t get the cheap stuff.
  • Blueberry sauce
  • Powdered sugar.

COST: $  Cheap and filling. Unless… you go crazy with the toppings. Maple syrup is $$$$. Don’t let that deter you. It’s delicious. There’s nothing worse than corn syrup with food coloring pretending to be a worthy topping for these beautiful pancakes!

 

Idea:

Leave out the vanilla, almond extract and sugar. Use these as a breakfast (or lunch) sandwich. These can be really versatile. They freeze well. Make once, eat for two weeks!

 

Photo credit:  Mae Mu on Unsplash