When cooks travel, they inevitably bring back recipes as souvenirs. A trip to central Italy might mean a wonderfully simple braise of fennel in olive oil. Go to southwest France and come back with pork confit. Visit Tokyo and you find a twist on the savory custard chawan mushi. When I hit the road, I usually seem to come back with pancakes.
When cooks travel, they inevitably bring back recipes as souvenirs. A trip to central Italy might mean a wonderfully simple braise of fennel in olive oil. Go to southwest France and come back with pork confit. Visit Tokyo and you find a twist on the savory custard chawan mushi. When I hit the road, I usually seem to come back with pancakes.
Several years ago in Mendocino I discovered one of my absolute favorite pancake recipes, from Ole’s Swedish Hot Cakes at the Little River Inn. They’re rich — 1 ½ sticks of butter! — and delicate in texture. What’s not to love? My newest pancake passion, though, is neither rich nor delicate, and I love it just as well.
I found these pancakes during a summer road trip through northern Minnesota at a sweet little coffee shop in Bemidji called the Minnesota Nice Cafe — just steps from the giant Paul Bunyan statue. It was a chilly morning (do they have any other kind there?), and I was torn between the wild rice and the blueberry pancakes. So I got both.
And both were terrific, but more than the wild rice or the blueberries that were added to the batter, what really won me over was the nutty, coarse, slightly earthy base itself. Owner Jeannette Proulx, who runs the kitchen with her son Greg Archambault, was cagey about the exact recipe but did reveal that the secret was using ground oatmeal in place of some of the flour.
I vowed that I would break her secret code, but it took me a while to get around to it. There’s just something about trying to make oatmeal pancakes when it’s 90 degrees outside. However, Southern California’s winter being just about the same weather-wise as Minnesota’s summer, I recently spent a week working on it. It was worth it.
The recipe wasn’t all that hard to figure out. In fact, one of the things that’s most remarkable about it is how simple it is. Well, that and the flavor. And the way it adapts so well to so many different accessories.
I started with my favorite basic pancake recipe — the “sour milk” pancakes from the 1943 “Joy of Cooking.” Being a responsible householder, of course I never have sour milk in my refrigerator. Or hardly ever. What I do have at almost all times is a carton of buttermilk, which works just as well, if not better.
Just as “sour milk” isn’t really milk that has gone bad, buttermilk isn’t milk with butter in it. It’s milk that has been put through a controlled fermentation, producing lactic acid. That’s some of the same stuff that you get in spoiled milk but in a more palatable quantity. In the old days they did that to improve the flavor of butter that would be churned from the milk — the milk being the whey that they poured off after the butter had formed. Nowadays, they make it just because it tastes good — and because it adds a rich flavor without extra calories.
I altered this basic batter by adding oatmeal that I’d ground to a fine powder in a blender. Make sure you use rolled rather than steel-cut oats. Rolled oats — like the familiar Quaker Oats — have been cooked to soften them, then flattened and dried. Unless you’re willing to do all of that yourself with steel-cut (O hardy artisans!), it’ll never work.
I tried various ratios of ground oats to flour — 25 percent, 50 percent and 75 percent. At 25 percent, you could barely tell the oats were there. At 75 percent the pancakes were dense and kind of gummy (ground oats contain very little gluten). The sweet spot was half and half.
Just to be sure, I also tried the recipe with equal amounts of flour and ground oats by weight and by volume. The weight won out, since it was slightly “oatier” in flavor and just the same texture. If you don’t have a kitchen scale (and you should have one), you need to grind between 1 1/4 and 1 1/3 cups whole rolled oats to equal 1 cup of flour.
These pancakes are terrific as is — they taste the way I always think whole-wheat will but somehow never does. Still, I have to admit they taste even better with a little accessorizing.
Adding cooked wild rice to the batter was a no-brainer. After all, that’s what I fell in love with in Minnesota. Blueberries would work too, but they just seem so … done already.
So instead of fresh blueberries, I got a mix of dried fruit — sour cherries, cranberries, raisins — and softened them in orange juice. I thought that was great until I decided to use the leftover fruit by mixing it into a batch of wild rice. That was even better.
The only thing I can think of that would have improved it was building a statue of Babe the Blue Ox in my backyard. Maybe I’ll do that when it snows.
Oatmeal pancakes
Total time: 30 minutes
Servings: 4 to 6
Note: Based on an idea from the Minnesota Nice Cafe in Bemidji, Minn., and a recipe in the 1943 “Joy of Cooking.”
1 1/3 cups rolled oats (4.25 ounces)
1 cup flour (4.25 ounces)
2 teaspoons sugar
1 teaspoon salt
1 ½ teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
¼ teaspoon cinnamon
2 eggs, lightly beaten
2 cups buttermilk
Butter, for frying
1. Grind the rolled oats in a blender until they are as fine as flour. Combine the oats, flour, sugar, salt, baking powder, baking soda and cinnamon in a large mixing bowl.
2. In a medium bowl, mix together the lightly beaten eggs and the buttermilk.
3. Stir the buttermilk mixture into the flour mixture in a few quick strokes. All of the dry ingredients should be moistened, but don’t worry if there are a few small lumps. That’s better than overbeating, which will toughen the pancakes. You should have about 4 cups of batter.
4. Heat a griddle or frying pan over medium-high heat until it’s hot enough that a drop of water skitters and dances across the surface. Brush the pan lightly with butter and then ladle out the pancakes in roughly one-fourth-cup amounts. Cook until the bubbles stop rising from the bottom and the top surface looks slightly dried out, 3 to 4 minutes.
5. Flip the pancakes and continue cooking until the center feels lightly set when you press the top with your fingertips, about 2 minutes more. Adjust the heat of the griddle as needed so the pancakes cook evenly. Keep the pancakes warm in the oven until all are cooked. This makes about 16 to 18 pancakes.
Wild rice pancakes: Rinse one-half cup wild rice under running water. Bring 2 cups of water to a boil, add salt and then add the rice. Reduce the heat to low, cover and cook until the rice is tender and has opened, about 45 minutes. Drain and cool. You should have about 2 cups of cooked rice. Gently fold the cooled rice into the batter and cook as above.
Dried fruit pancakes: Place 1 cup of mixed dried fruit (raisins, cherries, cranberries, chopped apricots, etc.) in a bowl and cover with orange juice. Let stand until the fruit has softened slightly, about 20 minutes, then drain. Alternatively, warm the mixture in the microwave for 30 seconds and let stand 5 minutes. Gently fold the drained fruit into the batter and cook as above.