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Recipe: Coconut-banana buttermilk pancakes 8 January 2009 12:39 pm

Posted by Tracy in : Morning Glory,breakfast,cooking,pictures,vegetarian , trackback

Pancakes, cropped.

These pancakes are dressed up like a breakfast special we ran at Morning Glory back in late March, early April last year. (Hilariously enough, in that post I also wrote that I felt like I’d entered the Nepal photo captioning homestretch. Good thing it was April Fools’ Day, I guess.) My recipe is based on “Light and Fluffy Pancakes” from The New Best Recipe, the buttermilk variation. Otis can’t tell you that the original sweet milk variation is delicious, but not for lack of wanting to:

Otis loves pancakes.

Good cat. Anyway, on with the recipe.

Ingredients

Instructions

If you don’t have buttermilk, whisk 1 tablespoon lemon juice into 2 cups regular milk and let it sit while you assemble the dry ingredients; this will approximate buttermilk.

Combine flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda, and salt in a medium bowl with a whisk. Next, stir the egg and melted butter into the (butter)milk until combined. It will be clumpy; this is okay, even kind of awesome, as you may recall from July’s recipe for Cheddar-Scallion Drop Biscuits. Make a well in the center of the dry ingredients, pour in the clumpy butter-buttermilk mixture and stir until just combined. Don’t over-mix it; there should be some lumps left. Now, let the batter rest while you prepare the rest of the ingredients.

In a dry skillet, toast the coconut, stirring occasionally until it goes from white to a beautiful medium brown:

Toasting unsweetened coconut.   Toasted coconut.

This is a clever way of preheating the skillet you plan to use for the pancakes, or you can do it in a separate pan, but you should be preheating your pancake-cooking surface at this time, too. If you want, you can slice the banana now, too:

Sliced banana.

Note how the banana’s not completely peeled: in theory, this technique negates the need for a cutting board, but the slices roll away from me often enough that I hedge my bets.

When the coconut is toasted, remove it from the heat (give the pan a quick wipe if you’re going to use it to cook pancakes). Lightly oil the pancake-cooking surface with maybe a teaspoon of oil, or a spray if that’s how you roll. To make sure the pan is hot enough, make a teeny pancake with maybe a tablespoon of batter and flip it after a minute. If it comes out pancake-done, neither too pale nor burned, you’re good to go. If not, adjust the heat accordingly and give it another try. (Alternatively, skip the testing step if you’re willing to eat pancakes that are slightly burned or under-done.)

Pour quarter-cups of batter onto the hot surface, as many as will fit with room left to flip (I like at least half an inch between cakes; Peter’s a little more ruthless about crowding them). Now, leave them alone. Slice a banana if you haven’t already. It will take 1 1/2 to 2 minutes until the bubbles appearing on the pancakes’ surface begin to stay open when they pop, like at the top of this picture:

IMG_6195

Sprinkle the pancakes with coconut and top with banana slices before flipping them and cooking them for another minute or two on the other side. (I tried both bananas-first and coconut-first, by the way, and it doesn’t make a lot of difference but science still rules.)

Bam! Pancakes. Serve or eat them, make another batch, and so on, until you’re out of batter. Add more oil to the pan if the cakes start to stick (banana can be gluey, so don’t be too shy), and have a great brunch.


  • Kurt

    “Bam! Pancakes.” – FTW

  • cj

    yea! pancakes. I just finished off my kamut ones, with raspberry syrup, while reading. I will have to try these, but without the bananas. I’m kind of a purist about the banana. I like “picking” at Jack Johnson’s (playing ANY of his music is much harder than it sounds like it should be), but that is probably the only type of banana pancake I enjoy. What other fruit would go with coconut? I have used walnuts and almonds (but nuts go with everything). Any ideas?
    (by the way, for a fuzzy demon, Otis is very cute)

  • mom

    I agree with cj that Otis is out-of-this-world!

  • Ellie

    Yum! I’ve also heard that 2/3 c plain yogurt + 1/3 c milk is a decent approximation of buttermilk – what’s your experience? I’m going to have to try these soon.

  • http://www.tracyfood.com Tracy

    Hi Ellie! I’ve actually used straight-up 1-to-1 substitution of yogurt for buttermilk in some recipes, but it probably depends on what you’re making.

    CJ — unfortunately, I have no idea what to substitute for banana in these ‘cakes. You could leave off the coconut and go blueberry on them with great deliciousness… likewise, it’s probably hard to go wrong with apple slices (or better yet, coarsely chopped apples tossed with a little cinnamon and brown sugar). Maybe chocolate chips, if you’re really feeling like having dessert for breakfast? And now you’ve got me thinking about Jack Johnson, whose music always eats my brain. Thank you for saying it’s more complex than it sounds; it makes me feel a little better about that particular weakness.

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