With the long holiday weekend calling, I rolled up my sleeves and did some cooking. By the end of the day, I had used most of a stick of butter.
For breakfast, I made pancakes from a recipe I saw mentioned on megnut.com. It’s from Epicurious, Condé Nast’s recipe collection reprinted from its Gourmet and Bon Appétit magazines. This one’s from the April 1998 issue of Bon Appétit.
Bread Pudding Pancakes
- 3/4 cup all purpose flour
- 2 tablespoons sugar
- 1 tablespoon baking powder
- 1/2 teaspoon salt
- 7 slices stale white sandwich bread, crusts trimmed, cut into 1/2-inch pieces
- 2 cups whole milk
- 2 large eggs, beaten
- 3 tablespoons butter, melted
- more butter for cooking the pancakes
- Stir flour, sugar, baking powder and salt in small bowl to blend. Place bread in large bowl and add milk. Let stand until bread is very soft and beginning to fall apart, stirring mixture occasionally, about 15 minutes.
- Add flour mixture to bread mixture and blend. Mix in eggs and 3 tablespoons melted butter. Let batter stand 15 minutes.
- Melt a tablespoon or so of butter in a heavy large skillet over medium heat. Drop batter by 1/4 cupfuls into skillet. Cook pancakes until bubbles form on surface and bottoms are brown, about 2 minutes. Turn pancakes over; cook until cooked through and brown on bottom, about 2 minutes longer. Transfer to baking sheet. Keep warm in oven. Repeat with remaining batter, adding more butter to skillet as needed. Yield about 14 pancakes.
I learned some things making this dish. Bread goes stale more quickly if you spread it out. I stacked mine on a plate which I covered with a sieve to make less accessible for bugs that may have happened by my kitchen counter. A day later and only the top piece was truly stale; the others were just less soft, which isn’t saying much when you’re dealing with commercial sandwich bread pulsing with multisyllablic chemicals. Instead, I should have put the slices on a cookie sheet and kept them in my unheated oven for protection.
Also, and I admit I had this same problem when I began making grilled cheese sandwiches: once the pan is greased and heated, turn down the damn heat. The first few pancakes were flash-fried and blistered with shameful char spots. The next few, I dampened the flame, but used too much butter, so the pancakes ended up more like crêpes, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
Refrigerating leftover pancakes: it may have been because I hadn’t allowed mine to cool completely, but after stacking and sealing them in a Ziploc bag that I refrigerated, I discovered later several of them had glued together.
But most importantly, how did they taste? Rich and custardy. I thought that with the addition of bread cubes, they would resemble cross-sections of conglomerate rock, but that’s not the case; they look like pancakes. I recommend serving them with U.S. Grade A Dark Amber maple syrup. Some readers on Epicurious.com insisted on adding cinnamon, nutmeg and/or vanilla to spruce up what they perceived as blandness, but my batch’s unadorned sugary-butter-warmth taste was satisying.