Pancakes

/blows dust off blog

For christmas I got Ruhlman's book Ratio, the premise of which is that most culinary ventures can be broken down to ratios. For example, most doughs, be they cookie, bread, muffin, whatever, are just different ratios of flour to water to other ingredients. It gives ratios for a lot of basic things and then elaborates them, like given a bread dough ratio, small changes can give you pizza dough, foccacia, or whatever. One of the advantages of this approach is that it pares recipes down to their core ingredients, and encourages tweaking.

Pancakes. I've always used the Joy of Cooking recipe, which isn't terribly different from this one. The recipe is (in terms of lowest common denominator, the egg):

4 oz milk (6 oz if buttermilk) (4 oz ~ 1/2 cup, 6 oz ~ 3/4 cup)
4 oz flour (~3/4 cup)
2 tbs melted butter
1 egg
1 tbs sugar
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp vanilla
1/2 tsp salt

I found the as printed in Ratio (4 oz) worked pretty well with skim milk, but was too dry when I tried it with buttermilk. Increasing the amount of liquid for a higher fat liquid keeps the batter nice and thick and gives big fluffy pancakes. The instructions are simple. Combine dry ingredients in one bowl, wet ingredients in another (sugar is dry, but it doesn't really matter). Once your pan or griddle is hot (medium low heat), combine (I like dry into wet) and fold the dry and wet together, taking great care to be gentle and not over mix. Pour or spoon out onto the pan, flip when there are little bubbles, throw it on a plate in a warm oven until you've used all the batter.

As an aside, I use vanilla paste for this, and I think it's one of the places it really shines.

Edit: Further experimentation shows that sugar really should go with the wet ingredients, as it makes for slightly fluffier pancakes and seems to keep the butter from clumping back up.