When I should have left well enough alone, I strayed.
It happens, in life and in recipes. I fooled around with the family's pancakes.
The established recipe has served us well. It consists of a cup of flour; 3/4 teaspoon baking powder; 1/2 teaspoon baking soda; a scant amount, maybe 1/4 teaspoon, of salt; 1 egg; 1 cup buttermilk; and 2 tablespoons of butter.
I mix the dry ingredients in a bowl, beat the egg, then pour the egg and buttermilk into the flour mixture. I melt the butter in a cast-iron frying pan, then pour all but what's needed to coat the pan into the batter and cook pancakes, one at a time. I store the finished pancakes on a plate in a preheated, 200-degree oven.
There is a rhythm to the process. I read the Sunday morning newspapers as I cook. After plowing through about 10 paragraphs of a story, I glance at the pan and sure enough, the pancake is bubbling, a sign that it is time to flip it. The flip side only cooks for about four paragraphs.
From time to time, I "freshen" the frying pan with a pat of butter, once again pouring the excess back into the bowl of batter, and turning on the exhaust fan to remove any smoke from burned butter.
The procedure is not complicated, but it gets results, producing fluffy, tangy pancakes that are treasured by our clan.
Yet on a recent Sunday morning, I wandered from this proven path. Perhaps I was suffering from a midmorning crisis, or maybe my electrolytes were low. Whatever the reason, I succumbed to the urge to experiment.
It began with the buttermilk. I regard buttermilk as a central component in the quest for a good life. It yields excellent corn bread, terrific biscuits and luscious salad dressing. Usually, we have a quart or two fermenting in the fridge. Yet somehow, we had run out of buttermilk.
Rather than running to the store to get a fresh supply, I turned to Joy of Cooking for advice on how to turn a cup of regular milk into "sour milk," a beverage that approximates the "cultured" buttermilk commonly sold in groceries. Real buttermilk, also called churn buttermilk, is the fluid remaining when the fat is removed by churning cream into butter. It is hard to find. Nowadays, I settle for cultured buttermilk, prepared from skim or low-fat milk by fermenting it with bacteria that produces lactic acid.
Following the instructions of Joy of Cooking, I put a tablespoon of lemon juice in the bottom of a measuring cup, added 1 cup of 2 percent milk and waited five to 10 minutes for nature to take its course.
In about 10 minutes the milk had "clabbered," turning into curds and whey. I tasted it. It was sour, yet had a distinct, somewhat pleasing, citrus zing.
Having substituted sour milk for buttermilk, I wandered ever farther off my usual course. I tried a recipe for "Light and Fluffy Pancakes" in Pam Anderson's 1998 cookbook, The Perfect Recipe. Anderson was an editor at Cook's Illustrated, a magazine noted for its extreme attention to recipe details.
After diving into the details of pancake making, Anderson became convinced, she wrote, that many recipes call for more baking soda and baking powder than is needed.
Sure enough, her recipe called for only 1/2 teaspoon of baking powder and 1/4 teaspoon of baking soda, proportionally much less than my 3/4 teaspoon of baking powder and 1/2 teaspoon of baking soda.
There were other differences in our recipes. She called for 2 teaspoons of sugar; I use none.
She separated the egg, blending the white with the milk, and the yolk with 2 tablespoons of melted butter. I simply beat the whole egg and add it to the batter.
Finally, she coated her skillet with vegetable oil. I use butter.
Her batter, I must admit, was smoother than mine was.
Her pancakes, cooked on the oiled skillet, were browner than mine were.
But they were also much flatter, they lacked lift, and they were a little too sweet for my taste.
So after trying the new, I returned to the old.
Change is not always good, especially on Sunday morning.
rob.kasper@baltsun.com