Recap 2: The Pancake Ordeal

So perhaps this was a bit of an over-reaction, but I just about lost it when I made my first batch of GF pancakes. Many GF folks reading this will go "Huh? There are tons of pancake options that are good! What was the problem?" The problem was that I was all set to enjoy some Bisquick-style pancakes made with something else that was magically going to mimic them exactly... except they didn't.

My first GF pancake attempt was the Saturday or Sunday after my initial diagnosis using Pamela's Baking and Pancake Mix. Sounds promising, right? I thought so -- especially since many people raved about how great they were on websites, forums, product review pages, etc. So I followed the recipe on the bag exactly, prepared my griddle just so, and cooked them up. Oh... I forgot to mention that the mix contains these little dark brown flecks from one of the ingredients (can't remember what off the top of my head, but they even have a note on the bag so you don't think that's a problem when you first see it), so they look a little different even in batter stage. The appearance of the cooked pancake is also slightly unusual, but not totally weird, so I keep an open mind and my high expectations. My verdict: they're edible, but they're nowhere NEAR tasting like a Bisquick pancake (and they're definitely not as good to my taste buds). If I had any notion of being able to switch the whole family to my new pancake recipe, this was NOT going to do the trick. Deflation...

So with a busy week and plenty of other new things to figure out, I set the pancake issue to the side (though it continued to poke at my mind). By Friday, I was just mad as hell that pancakes weren't a no brainer and I was really craving some. So after the kids left for school, I got out my griddle, mixing bowls, and recipe books (including my Better Homes and Gardens book and one of the new GF cookbooks I'd bought).

First, I tried the Bob's Red Mill GF Pancake Mix. Someone else who hadn't cared for Pamela's said her kids liked BRM. Again, it was a decent pancake but I just didn't like it -- probably because it still didn't taste like "regular" pancakes to me. No worries. I had recipe books to go to -- if the mixes don't work for me, let's cook for real!

Next, I tried to substitute a GF Food For Life All Purpose Flour Blend for the wheat flour in the BHG recipe. I'd used the BHG recipe before when we were out of Bisquick, and that flour blend had worked well as a flour substitute in a roux for a cheese sauce earlier in the week, so I figured it might do great. Um... GROSS is all I can say about that batch of pancakes. Not even close to edible. Threw out the cooked ones after attempting to eat half of one and rinsed the bowl.

By now, I was getting mildly upset and worried. But not to panic -- I still had a very promising cookbook left to go: You Won't Believe It's Not Gluten Free. This cookbook's organization is really interesting -- the author includes 3-4 recipes per item she's making, all using different flours or combinations of flours. The pancakes offered 4 recipes: a rice flour, oat flour, potato flour, and corn starch option. Based on the taste-tester opinion info included on each recipe, I had the highest hopes for the rice and corn ones to meet my flavor needs. I did the rice first b/c the feedback from her testers said they tasted "like pancakes", which is all I wanted! It worked really well! My pancakes don't usually call for sugar or vanilla, so they tasted different, but not in a bad way. The texture was a bit lighter than "normal", but all in all, I was very happy.

Since I was already cooking, I then went ahead and did the corn recipe from that book. Again, it called for sugar and vanilla, so they weren't exactly like my old ones, but they were definitely pancakes and didn't have any strong grain flavor that my palette found off-putting. I decided the corn ones were a bit drier than the rice ones, so I preferred the rice. In the end, I ate some of each of those and put the rest in the fridge to (a) taste test w/the kids and (b) see how they reheated.

When I reheated some the next day for the kids, Erin preferred the rice (and actually said she thought they might be better than Bisquick) and Matt preferred the corn. Figures they'd not agree, huh? I thought the rice ones reheated better (and in some ways were better reheated than they were hot off the griddle on day 1)!!

Since that day, I've done the rice flour pancakes one other time and they were very yummy.

Just this morning, I decided to give Pamela another try at the pancakes. Though I like the rice ones, it's kind of a pain to have to mix a bunch of ingredients together in the morning when you're in a hurry (mix, milk, eggs is much easier than 7-8 ingredients whose mixing order matters). This time, I just substituted Pamela's into my Bisquick recipe instead of using the Pamela's bag recipe. I liked them MUCH better. Then after the first batch of 4, I tried adding some vanilla to the batter. Even better! They've kinda got a whole-grain flavor to them and the vanilla seemed to soften that.

So while I'll still do the rice or corn pancakes when I have the time to spend, it's nice to know I can whip some up in a hurry on a school day if I want to.

Ahhhh... Pancake success!