What you need
300 grams plain flour
1 teaspoon of baking powder
Half a teaspoon of sodium bicarbonate
1 teaspoon of salt
1 tablespoon of sugar
2 eggs
600 millilitres buttermilk
60 grams melted butter
Maple syrup
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SHROVE Tuesday, which this year falls on 25 February, is marked in some countries by making pancakes. At their simplest, they use a batter of flour, eggs and milk. This works well for thin, crepe-style pancakes. But I’m going to make fluffy US-style pancakes, which need a thicker batter – and bubbles.
As pancakes cook, starch granules in the flour absorb water, swell and burst. Starch molecules stick to each other, turning the batter into a soft solid. Flour also contains proteins that, in the presence of water, link together in a network of long chains. We call this gluten. Along with egg proteins, gluten contributes to the structure of a pancake. But unlike a bread dough, we want to limit gluten development in the batter to keep the texture of the pancake tender rather than chewy. That is why it should be made quickly, with minimal stirring.
Baking powder is one way to produce bubbles. It contains an alkali – sodium bicarbonate (or bicarb) – along with an acid (usually potassium bitartrate) and some starch to absorb moisture. Add liquid, and the acid and alkali can react together, producing carbon dioxide. The reaction is helped along by heat when the batter hits the frying pan. Batters containing baking powder should be cooked straight away, otherwise the gas will escape before cooking.
Alternatively, you can include acidic ingredients, such as buttermilk or sour cream, then add sodium bicarbonate, either instead of or as well as baking powder – in this recipe we add both. If you don’t have buttermilk, you can substitute it with ordinary milk with a tablespoon of lemon juice for every 250 millilitres.
The batter’s pH also influences how quickly the pancake browns as it cooks. We encountered this principle in an earlier column when caramelising onions. In pancakes, too, alkaline conditions speed up the Maillard reactions between amino acids and sugars that give us the brown colour and delicious flavour we’re looking for.
In his book The Food Lab, J. Kenji López-Alt demonstrates this by cooking five batches of pancakes with different amounts of bicarb. The more there is, the darker the resulting pancake. If you see dark spots on the pancake, it might mean the bicarb needs mixing more thoroughly into the batter.
To make my pancakes, mix all the dry ingredients together. In another bowl, beat the eggs and add the buttermilk and melted butter. Then mix the two together and drop a ladleful into a lightly oiled pan on a medium heat. Cook until nicely browned on both sides, and serve with maple syrup.
If you add berries to the batter and they turn green, your mix is too alkaline. Anthocyanin and related pigments in fruit are sensitive to pH and change colour in alkaline environments (for more on these fruit pigments see Almost the last word).
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1 The scientific shortcuts to cooking delicious caramelised onions
2 How to make halloumi and ricotta cheese using ancient biotechnology
3 How to cook perfect chips: Learn the science of crispiness
4 Here’s how to make your own tofu for Chinese New Year
5 Use the science of curing to turn salmon into gravlax at home
6 How tempering chocolate hacks its crystalline structure
7 Umami: How to maximise the savoury taste that makes food so satisfying
8 Perfect pancakes
9 Kimchi/fermentation
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10 Sourdough bread
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