Pancakes and Paywalls
A user's guide to 24 Hour Pancake People, and a non-recipe
Hello everyone, and thank you all for reading and subscribing. The response to this so far has been very encouraging, and I appreciate your support!
I launched this in a very ad-hoc way, and I will continue to use it in an ad-hoc way. I make no promises about what or how often I will post. This is an experiment. It might lay the groundwork for more American food projects in the future, but like I said in my first post, it’s mostly a brain dump, and paid subscriptions won’t get you any more content or structure than anyone else. I’m giving the subscription money away to progressive charities so I don’t feel obligated to meet anyone’s expectations or set unachievable targets for myself.1
HOWEVER. A couple things happened recently that made me rethink this model. First, despite my warnings, people actually did start paying to subscribe! It’s mostly my mates and my parents, which is a little embarrassing, but still – it’s nice, and it naturally motivates me to want to make those payments more worth it. It’s also motivating in the sense that if that revenue grows, there’s the potential to build this into something bigger. I can give more money to charity, but also commission work from artists and possibly other writers, which would be cool.
I also started thinking about the recipe-writing aspect of a project like this, and, prompted by Laura Goodman’s recent post, came to the conclusion that writing recipes is a boring-ass ball-ache. I really don’t have the time or the inclination to write them without compensation.
So here’s how this is going to work: There will be recipes here, but most of them will fall under a category I’m going to call ‘How to.’ These will, in fact, help you learn how to cook things, but they won’t be structured in the typical ‘intro-ingredients-method’ style. They might not even be photographed. (Again: ad-hoc.) Instead, they’re going to be more like work-in-progress feedback reports of how I actually cook, which is improvisational, imprecise, and reliant on other people’s recipes.
The results might not even be successful. But even when they’re not, mistakes or outright failures are instructive. Think of these guides as a peek into the trial-and-error phase of the recipe development process, If this all sounds a bit confusing and pointless, the first entry – How to: (Vegan Blueberry) Pancakes – can be found below, which will hopefully better illustrate what I’m doing.
All of the ‘How to’ guides will be free. But I’ll also post special, fully tested and detailed recipes that will be for paid subscribers only. What makes them ‘special?’ I don’t have any fixed criteria, but they’re things that might be a little bit more involved in terms of technique, and/or unique in the sense that there aren’t that many similar recipes out there. This could be because I’ve put an unusual twist on the dish, or because the dish itself is kind of obscure to begin with.
As an example, the first paid recipe is going to be for vegan kringle. But buyer beware! I will only be posting these sporadically – that is, whenever I can, and whenever I feel like it. So don’t pay expecting lots of (or any!) additional exclusive content in return. Pay because you like what I’m doing or because you want to support the causes I’m supporting, not because you want a steady stream of tried-and-tested recipes. And that’s the truth, Ruth.2 Got it? Good!
How to: (Vegan Blueberry) Pancakes
Recipe writers are unreliable narrators. Do this and that, in this way, and we will have delicious food. And not only will we have delicious food, we will have contentment! We will feel comfort and joy, we will bask in the affection of our loved ones, we will remember our dead grandma with misty-eyed fondness. We will feel connected to our heritage, to our family, to ourselves. Food is our religion, and recipes are our scripture. Amen.
Just like the Holy Bible, cookbooks are both instruction manuals and storybooks. It might be going too far to say that recipes are fiction, but they certainly aren’t true, at least not in the ‘whole truth and nothing but the truth’ sense. There are always things missing: the intuition, the muscle memory, the impossible-to-describe sensory feedback that are all fundamental to good cooking. The ways in which onions behave or misbehave depending on a multitude of unknowns: their water and sugar content, their size, the pan you use, the type and amount of fat you cook them in, the heat source. And perhaps the most glaring omission: recipes don’t fully account for user error.
Like conjurer’s spells, recipes are supposed to will things into existence. Not just the dishes themselves, but emotions, occasions, social bonds, dead grandmas, etc. Recipe writers are liars but we are not only liars. We are also faith healers and witch doctors. Snake oil salesmen. Charlatans.
On that note, let’s make pancakes.
The first thing you have to ask yourself when you want to make pancakes is: do I need a recipe for pancakes? Chances are, you don’t. I’ll bet you could eyeball it, even if you’re not that great of a cook. You need flour, milk, eggs, baking soda and baking powder, a little salt and sugar, oil or melted butter, and maybe some buttermilk if you got it. Mix it all up, spoon it onto a griddle, and boom: pancakes. And if you can’t eyeball it, you can buy pancake mix and just follow the instructions.
But more to the point: do you need a recipe for pancakes from me? The answer to this question is a simple and emphatic NO.
There are already so many pancake recipes out there. Like, SO many. The one on BBC Good Food has five stars, so it’s bound to satisfy. Sally’s Baking Addiction is one of my go-to baking sites that always produces great results, and she has a whole category dedicated to pancake recipes. It makes little sense for me to publish a new recipe for pancakes when I myself would be relying sources like these. I may be American, but that does not make me a pancake expert. (It’s weird to assume that people will be skilled at cooking food from their own culture simply because they grew up in that culture. I’m in a far better position to write a recipe for okonomiyaki than I am to write one for American pancakes.)
So, no pancake recipe from me. But! Pancakes are still easy to mess up, even if you’re a generally competent cook. And what I can offer is troubleshooting. You can learn from my mistakes.3
First of all, look at the photo above. This was an American breakfast-for-dinner I made on election night. A fitting meal, I thought, to either pre-emptively celebrate America’s salvation, or mourn its demise. The pancakes, while delicious, were a strange shade of greenish blue. This was due to a rookie error: I stirred frozen blueberries into the batter before ladling them onto the griddle. Best practice is to either use fresh blueberries, or if using frozen, plop them onto the batter after it’s been ladled onto the griddle, to keep their juices from running into the mixture. (The green tinge, by the way, is caused by the berries’ colour reacting to the alkalinity of the baking soda.)
In this instance, I used Picard frozen wild blueberries. These are delicious – just about delicious enough to justify their absurd price, but that’s your call. Pancakes are not a dish that necessarily benefits from getting all bougie and particular about ingredients. I think just about any blueberries are fine in pancakes. Even not-so-good ones taste sweeter and juicier when cooked, but a little bit of sourness from sub-par berries can be a good thing in such a buttery, syrupy dish anyway.
Another thing that may be useful to know about these particular pancakes is that they were vegan. My son is allergic to milk and eggs (and many nuts) so a lot of what I cook at home is vegan to accommodate this. Any plant milk will do in pancakes, but these days I usually buy Moma oat milk because it is frequently on offer, contains added calcium, and doesn’t contain added sugar or vanilla flavouring (even many ‘plain’ plant milks have this, which is obnoxious). Crucially, Moma also doesn’t engage in wackaging like Oatly does. I have enough stress and annoyance in my life without my fucking oat milk trying to act cool and crack jokes at me.
In addition to the milk, I also added some soy yogurt. This was mostly to use up a couple pots of Alpro that Felix opened and didn’t finish for breakfast, but it also adds a little extra fruitiness and buttermilk-esque tang. Plant-based yogurts are also an okay substitute for eggs in some recipes, because of their fat, protein, and viscosity. They don’t provide the same structure or tenderness in the finished bake that eggs provide, but they at least contribute a similar consistency.
It’s rarely in the recipe or the batter where pancakes fail – it’s in the cooking when things tend to go wrong. There’s an old truism that the first pancake out of the pan is always the worst one, as it’s made before the cook finds the sweet spot in terms of heat and cooking times. I guess that’s probably true, but the way to mitigate this is to start on a lower heat and then turn it up incrementally. You can always cook pancakes a little longer to get more colour on them if you need to, but if you start off with a too-high heat, they’ll quickly burn. Take it easy. You’re not searing a steak.
I cook pancakes on a griddle so I can do more at a time, but I would actually recommend using a wide pan with a lid. Placing a lid on the pan as the pancakes cook causes them to steam, which makes them softer and also helps to set the upper surface so they are neater and easier to flip. It will also cook them through faster and more thoroughly. (There are few things more disappointing than a pancake that looks perfect and golden on the outside but is still gooey-doughy in the middle.)
If you are cooking multiple stacks for multiple people, you can keep the pancakes hot in a low oven. On Election Day I made the mistake of wrapping the pancakes in foil, which captured their steam and made them go a bit sticky/soggy. They were still fine, but next time I will spread them out on a tray, uncovered.
Is any of this helpful? Hopefully! The further into my cookbook career I get, the more I think about Kurt Vonnegut’s advice that you should write for an audience of one. Sometimes, that means I write for me. I make the thing that I want to read, in order to make the food that I want to eat. Hokkaido is like this. And these little pancake tips are kind of for me, too: mental notes, so I’m less likely to make the same mistakes again. But increasingly, when I write recipes – especially ones for American home cooking – I think of my kids, because I want them to know how to cook, too. And knowing how to cook is different from knowing how to follow a recipe.
If you’re wondering ‘what charities, exactly?’ I’ve got a few in mind so far: AAUW Wisconsin, the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, ACLU, Planned Parenthood, and Cultural Survival. I am open to suggestions! Each time I get paid, I’ll post a note about how much money has come in, and where I’m sending it. Transparency, motherfuckers!
Apropos of nothing, I really enjoyed this video essay about the ending of Do the Right Thing.
My wife made pancakes on a whim yesterday, and asked if I had any ‘constructive criticism.’ Home cooking, as an act of unconditional love, is not to be openly criticised. On the other hand, if we want reliably and consistently good pancakes – and of course, we do – then we must be willing to evaluate and learn from any mistakes. Kaizen, motherfuckers!