Grain-free    &&    Very low fat

My pancakes don’t always come out picture-perfectly round, like so many pancakes you may see on the internet. Good thing you can’t taste shapes.

These pancakes are sort of where my fat-free, grain-free baking all began. When I had to cut out grains and fat from my diet because of my gastroparesis, obviously that had no affect on my weekend morning cravings for a warm fluffy stack of pancakes. I had a good recipe for chickpea flour buttermilk pancakes in my copy of the Chickpea Flour Cookbook by Camilla V. Saulsbury (check out her blog https://powerhungry.com/ for lots of great grain-free recipes!), but they contained more fat than I could tolerate as written. So I’d been making them just with the fat cut out, but they seemed to be dissatisfyingly dry; not really a surprise with the fat removed, but, I thought, what can you do? Right around then autumn was getting into full swing and to distract myself from the inevitable disappointment of the end of the summer berry season, I was amping myself up for all the delicious squashes and root vegetables just coming into season. I wanted to make pumpkin pancakes that came out as fluffy and delicious as the chickpea flour buttermilk pancakes I’d been making, but I couldn’t find a grain-free and low- or non-fat pumpkin pancake recipe anywhere (I knew that was a tall order), so I resolved to make one up myself.

That was when I discovered pumpkin, squash, and sweet potato are excellent stand-ins for the fat in a recipe! (Of course I wasn’t the first person in history to discover this, but it was a totally new concept to me, and seems to not be a super-well-known baking fact in general.) The pumpkin/squash/sweet potato (whatever you decide to use) makes these pancakes tender and moist, while keeping them enjoyably light and fluffy. At the time I was a little disappointed the pumpkin flavor didn’t really come through, but that keeps the flavor of these pancakes pretty classic and well-suited for any time of year!

Cooking pancakes seems so straightforward on the surface: pour batter into pre-heated pan, cook a couple minutes, flip, cook another minute, devour. Pretty much every pancake recipe I’ve seen is written that way. Maybe it’s just me and my obnoxiously persistent attention to detail, but there seems to be a lot more nuance to it than that. In the 13 years since I’ve been making pancakes (yes, apparently I needed to earn a college degree before I could embark on the journey of trial, error, and self-discovery that is pancake-making), I feel like I’ve learned a lot. For years my pancakes were flat and heavy (and that was with regular white flour and as much fat as a normal pancake recipe calls for). Finally my pancakes are actually something to be desired, and part of that is technique, so I figured I’d share a list of pancake-making tips that could have saved me years of floppy lifeless pancakes, if only I’d known! These tips apply to standard grainy/fatty/sugary pancakes the same as they do for my grain-free, no-added-fat, slightly-sweetened pancakes in the recipe below.

Pancake cooking tips:

• Batter consistency is important. I saw many a recipe that said the batter should be between spoonable and pourable, whatever that means. A thicker batter will result in taller pancakes, but you risk burning the outsides of your pancakes waiting for the middle to cook through; if you turn down the heat to avoid burning anything, the shock of the heat won’t be strong enough to kick the leavener into action quickly, resulting in heavy pancakes with not much rise. Similarly, if your batter is too runny, there won’t be enough structure in the batter for the pancakes to hold together and rise tall; instead they’ll just spread, and might come out with a light texture, but they’ll be very flat. The way I’d describe the batter consistency that I’ve had luck with is “thick but still pourable”. Hopefully if you follow recipes as written, particularly if you weigh your ingredients, rather than measuring by volume, the batter consistency will come out right. I weigh my ingredients, but sometimes depending on the day of month and the phase of the moon, my batter will come out a little too dry or too wet, and will need some tweaking. Recognizing a good consistency comes with experience to some extent, but feel free to tweak your batter as you cook, if your pancakes are coming out too thick (add buttermilk) or too runny (add flour).
• Pre-heat your pan while you make the batter! This will help your first batch come out right, and help ensure consistency between batches.
• Pancakes are sensitive to the exact heat of the pan. Every pan and every stove is different, so it will just take some trial and error with your particular set up to know what the best heat is to cook your pancakes properly. Adjust as you go, if needed. Once you find the right heat setting, get out a fat sharpie, make a big mark on your stove dial, and label it in big, delicious letters “PANCAKES”, so you can find the right heat level again easily for future pancake-making (…not really).
• The first batch in the pan is always wonky. Is it just me? Maybe. I think it may be the fact that the pans start clean and maybe don’t get coated with an invisible layer of oil/butter/pancake magic that seems to stick around after the first batch. Also, the first batch is really a test batch that you should use to gauge the heat of your pan on the stove and the consistency of your batter. Start with only one or two pancakes in the pan for your first batch, just to be safe and get that pancake magic in there, so your following batches will come out correctly and consistently.
• Pancakes take more than the one to two minutes to cook than many recipes suggest they do. “Pancakes are so simple and only take a couple minutes to cook!” Hah. Disagree. That said, they shouldn’t take 10 minutes per side either… If they cook in one to two minutes I’d guess they’ll come out burnt on the outside and underdone in the middle, so turn the heat down. If they take 10 or more minutes to cook they’re going to be flat and you’re going to get very bored very fast, so turn the heat up. Set your expectations properly.
• Wait until your pancake looks ready to flip before flipping it. This one’s probably the most useful tip. The tell-tale signs that a pancake is ready to flip are: 1. the edges of the pancake should look dry on the surface, and 2. little air bubbles should be rising up and popping on the surface in the middle of the pancake (which should not look as dry as the edges). Once you see both of these signs, flip away.
• Pancakes that wrinkle when you try to flip them likely need more time to cook through on the inside before you try to slip the spatula between the pancake and the pan, even if the outside looks dry and cooked. I’ve found this to be an issue with chickpea flour pancakes in particular. This also brings back into focus the delicate issue of pan temperature; the inside needs to cook through without the outside burning, so if your pancakes wrinkle up when you try to flip them, maybe turn the heat down a hair and given the pancakes an extra minute to cook. But also, don’t worry about it too much; like I said, you can’t taste shapes.
• Use two spatulas to lift your pancakes from the pan. Don’t be stubborn about trying to avoid getting extra utensils dirty. This also helps your pancakes not wrinkle.
• Don’t keep your cooked pancakes in a warm oven while you make the rest. In my experience this just dries them out. If you really need to, re-heat any cold pancakes in the microwave for a few seconds; they’ll taste just as good as straight from the pan.
• Note specific to chickpea flour pancakes: The inside of the pancake tends to firm and fluff up as it cools. If you try biting into a chickpea flour fresh off the skillet, it may seem a bit mushy and possibly even under-cooked. Give them a couple minutes to cool on a plate, and then the texture will be fluffy and amazing! (IMHO)

Robot-compatible Chickpea flour Buttermilk Pancakes

Note: These pancakes freeze and reheat in the microwave pretty perfectly! I recommend making a huge batch and always having some in the freezer for instant pancake gratification. They’ll keep just fine in the fridge for at least a week too.

Makes about 17 pancakes with about a 5″ diameter (I use a not-quite-full 1/3 cup measure to scoop the batter)

Bits:

Dry:

• 313 g (2 1/2 cups) chickpea flour
• 2 1/4 tsp baking soda
• 1 1/4 tsp salt
• 1 Tbsp pumpkin pie spice (I make my own with this recipe: https://thepioneerwoman.com/food-and-friends/how-to-make-pumpkin-pie-spice/)

Wet:

• 144 g egg whites (or about 3 large eggs, if you don’t mind the fat from the eggs)
• 325 g (about 1 1/4 cups) roasted and mashed pumpkin / winter squash / sweet potato (NOTE: Canned pumpkin will work too, in a pinch, but roasted pumpkin / squash / sweet potato will make a noticeably softer, fluffier pancake! My favorite is roasted red kuri squash, but I most frequently use roasted sweet potatoes as they are cheap and accessible year round.)
• 2 cups low-fat buttermilk
• 2 1/2 tsp sweetener of your choice (I have been using coconut palm sugar lately, because I have some to use up; brown sugar or white sugar will all work fine.)
• 1 Tbsp + 1 tsp lemon juice
• 1 1/4 tsp vanilla extract

Reduced-fat butter (it exists!) for greasing your pan, if your pan needs help to prevent sticking

Algorithm:

• Preheat a large, ideally non-stick, frying pan on medium heat on the stove (see pancake-cooking tips above).
• Sift flour into a large mixing bowl. Add remaining dry ingredients and stir to combine.
• In a medium mixing bowl, combine wet ingredients except the butter. Stir together, mashing as needed to be sure the pumpkin/squash/sweet potato is smoothly mixed through.
• Pour wet ingredients into dry ingredients, and stir gently / fold vigorously with a rubber spatula until combined. Be sure to scrape the bottom of the bowl when mixing, to ensure there are no surprise pockets of dry ingredients.
• Put reduced fat butter if needed into your frying pan in order to prevent sticking. Make sure the surface of the pan is coated evenly. The pan should be heated such that butter should sizzle, but not immediately brown when added to the pan.
• Use a scoop (I use a 1/3 cup measure) to pour batter into pan. The pancake is ready to flip when the edges look dry, and air bubbles rise up and pop in the middle (see tips above). Flip and cook each pancake for another minute or two. The pancake is done when the spatula slides easily under the pancake and the bottom is golden brown.
• Top with jam, fruit, or maple syrup, and enjoy!