The World Table

An interactive culinary compendium: recipes, lexicon and study

New Hampshire · Breakfast

Sugar House Pancakes

  • Easy
  • 30 min
  • roughly 2 of 4 for cost
  • Vegetarian

rich · sweet-edged · fiery Leads with richness that coats and comforts, a sweet edge rounding the corners, on a slow, honest burn.

Ingredients

  • 250g flour
  • 2 tbsp sugar
  • 2 tsp baking powder
  • 1/2 tsp baking soda
  • 1/2 tsp salt
  • 2 eggs
  • 500ml buttermilk
  • 55g butter, melted, plus more for the griddle
  • Real maple syrup, warmed

The skills inside

Griddle & plancha workResting dough: the pause that does the work

Allergen screen

Found: gluten · dairy · egg

Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.

Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.

Method

  1. Whisk the dry ingredients in a wide bowl.
  2. Beat eggs, buttermilk, and melted butter together.
  3. Fold wet into dry with a light hand: lumps are correct, overmixing gives you rubber.
  4. Rest the batter 10 min while the griddle heats to medium. 10 min
  5. Cook in butter until bubbles break across the surface, flip once, and serve with warm syrup, never the corn syrup impostor.

How to tell it is going right

This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the techniques it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.

Griddle & plancha work 45 recipes

  • Full contact with the metal: the food lies flat, with no dome in the middle and no curled edge lifting it away, so browning reaches the entire face rather than a ring of it.
  • Contact is immediate and audible, and the food stays where it is put rather than sliding around in a slick of its own released liquid.
  • The cooked face is an unbroken sheet of even colour: the whole surface browned, not a pattern of marks with pale ground between them, and not a dark centre with pale corners.
  • The metal around the food is dry: no spreading wet patch steaming out from under it, nothing weeping onto the surface and boiling there.
  • Turned once or twice and no more, and lifted while the crust is still brown: a piece flipped repeatedly never holds heat long enough to build one.

Where it goes wrong The surface was crowded and its temperature crashed, so everything gave up its water at once and stewed on the metal: pale, damp, grey at the edges, and stuck fast where the crust never got the chance to form.

Resting dough: the pause that does the work 71 recipes

  • It actually rested, covered, for the time stated, not cut short because the rest of the schedule was tight.
  • It rolls and shapes without fighting: it stays where it is put, and it does not spring back or shrink on the bench between passes.
  • The surface is smooth and supple rather than dry, cracked, or skinned over.
  • It is at the temperature the next step needs: cold where the fat must stay solid, cool and relaxed where it must be rolled thin.
  • Baked, it holds the dimensions it was shaped to rather than shrinking back from the edges of the tin or the rim of the dish.

Where it goes wrong The rest was skipped or shortened, so the gluten was still tight: the dough fought the pin and sprang back thick and uneven, then shrank down the sides of the tin in the oven.

At the Table

The Pour
Mimosa (weekends only)
Also Right
Cava, straight
From the Taps
-
Zero-Proof
Fresh orange juice & café au lait

Morning food wants brightness and bubbles, or honest coffee: nothing that argues before noon.

Saved on this device and kept across visits: export from My Menu to move them.

Film school

This dish, cooked on camera Search films of Sugar House Pancakes Search YouTube: J. Kenji López-Alt on Sugar House Pancakes A YouTube search for J. Kenji López-Alt and this dish. No affiliation.