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Spiced Banana Pancakes

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Mr. Faraway does a lot of driving. It’s about four hours to see me, but it’s also an hour just to get to Costco or Wal-Mart from his house. It’s a way of life I have trouble relating to: Costco is ten minutes from my house, and though I grant you it takes another half hour to park once I get there, I don’t have to circle the lot five times before I leave – it’s only ten minutes home for me. He can’t get home before the ice cream melts.

 

So, it’s really no surprise that his car habits are different than mine: I have a little car (zoom-zoom), where he drives a large limo-service type of car, designed for maximum passenger comfort, but not great with rapid acceleration or parallel parking. And, he keeps food in his car. You get hungry on road trips, and his life, at times, is nothing but road trips. So he keeps fruit in the car, in case he gets hungry.

 

It’s not a car, it’s a boat, says The Child. A banana boat: He’s always got bananas in that boat.

 

I think you can see where this is going.

 

So, The Child makes a request for breakfast one Saturday morning: She wants the Spiced Banana Pancakes that inspired us to buy Flour, Too. I say, I’m sorry, I don’t have any bananas, and she shoots a look at him that says, I know you have bananas in your car, you always do. And he does, so he goes to get them.

 

Like everything I’ve tried from this cookbook series, these pancakes were delicious and not complicated at all to make, though there were definitely some little tricks to them. You have to press down hard on them after you flip them over, to force out all the uncooked batter, or the pancakes won’t cook through. You definitely have to cook them fairly slowly, for the same reason.

 

I loved Chang’s trick of using a rack placed on a cookies sheet in the oven to keep the pancakes warm but also keep them from getting soggy.  It seems like one of those things I should have known, but never learned, and it’s especially useful here because these pancakes are very moist and heavy and will definitely be soggy if you try to serve a great stack of them any other way. The recipe doesn’t make a lot (just eight or nine medium-sized pancakes) – but they are very filling.

 

I found the recipe a little peppery for my taste, but I had recently bought some very potent pepper that I used, so that may have been the cause. You might want to cut the quantity, though.

 

Spiced Banana Pancakes

 

Spiced Banana Pancakes
 
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Serves: 4
Ingredients
  • 1 cup/140 g all-purpose flour
  • 2 tsp baking powder
  • ½ tsp kosher salt
  • 1½ tsp ground allspice
  • ¾ tsp freshly ground black pepper
  • 2 tbsp packed brown sugar
  • 1 large egg
  • 1 cup/240 ml whole milk
  • 2 tbsp vegetable oil
  • 4 medium ripe bananas, cut into ½-in dice
  • 2 to 3 tbsp unsalted butter for cooking pancakes, plus more for serving
  • Maple syrup for serving
Instructions
  1. Preheat the oven to 200°F/95°C, and place a rack in the center of the oven. Put a wire rack on the baking sheet and place it in the oven.
  2. In a medium bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder, salt, allspice, pepper, and brown sugar. In another medium bowl, whisk together the egg, milk, and vegetable oil until blended; add about 3 of the bananas (reserving the rest for serving). Make a well in the dry ingredients and pour in the wet ingredients. With a rubber spatula or wooden spoon, fold the wet ingredients into the dry ingredients just until combined. Don’t over-mix. It will be a thick, gloppy, lumpy batter. (Sounds delicious so far, doesn’t it?)
  3. In the skillet, melt about 1 tsp of the butter over medium heat. Sprinkle a few drops of water into the pan; if the water sizzles on contact, the pan is ready. Pour a scant 1⁄2 cup/120 ml of batter into the skillet and cook for about 3 minutes, or until the edges of the pancake start to brown and small bubbles begin forming along the edges and in the middle of the cake. With a flat metal or plastic spatula, carefully flip the pancake over; the first side should be golden brown. Cook slowly for another 2 to 3 minutes. Gently press the pancake in the middle with the spatula to flatten it out a bit and make sure the center is cooked through. Adjust the heat as needed so the pancake browns nicely but doesn’t burn on the second side. Remove the finished pancake from the skillet and place it on the wire rack in the oven to keep warm while you cook the remaining pancakes.
  4. Cook the remaining pancakes the same way, adding another 1 tsp or so of butter before adding the batter each time. For these pancakes, a slower and lower heat is better; once the pan has been seasoned by the first pancake, you should be able to cook the remaining pancakes on medium-low heat. Serve immediately with butter, maple syrup, and the remaining banana.
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Kate Smith’s Griddle Cakes

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I learned how to cook in my grandmother’s kitchen, making the thing she made that I loved best: pancakes. I don’t have the recipe and if there was one, it was not written down. She would add all the ingredients to her bowl while I stood on a stool next to her, holding her electric mixer and beating egg whites until they were light and stiff.  She taught me how to fold them in, and explained why this was such an important step. It holds all the air, she said. It makes them fluffy.

 

I didn’t really see how that worked, since the egg whites were gone when you folded them in, but I remembered the lesson even as the years went on and I took the inevitable shortcut: pancake mix. Just add water.

 

When I found myself with leftover Squash and Apple Compote, which just cried out to be served as part of a brunch, it occurred to me that pancakes from a mix just wouldn’t do, so I pulled out my 1940’s era pamphlet of Kate Smith’s Favorite Recipes, and found her pancake recipe, which folds in egg whites at the end, the way my grandmother and I used to. So, Mr. Faraway went to work beating egg whites, spilling egg whites, and then successfully beating a second batch of them into stiff peaks, while I assembled the remaining ingredients.

 

In a very hot, lightly oiled griddle pan, these pancakes cook up almost as light as air, or as Mr. Faraway pointed out, as light as angel cake, which was my other favorite thing from my grandmother’s repertoire. The outside browned perfectly and stayed crisp. The pancakes didn’t have much taste to them, making them the perfect vehicle for pretty much anything sweet you might want to add – syrup, fruit compote, whatever. They are not good on their own for the same reason.

 

Kate Smith's Griddle Cakes

Kate Smith's Griddle Cakes
 
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Ingredients
  • 1 ¼ cups sifted cake flour
  • 1 ¼ tsp baking powder
  • ½ tsp salt
  • 2 egg yolks, lightly beaten
  • ¾ cup milk
  • 2 tbsp butter, melted and cooled
  • 2 egg whites, stiffly beaten
Instructions
  1. Sift flour once, measure, then add baking powder and salt, and sift again.
  2. Combine egg yolks and milk; add gradually to flour, beating only until smooth.
  3. Add melted butter. Fold in egg whites.
  4. Cook on a hot, greased griddle or frying pan. Makes about 10 griddle cakes.
Notes
These griddle cakes are fantastically light but also very plain - best served with your favorite syrup or fruit topping.
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Waukau (Berry Pancake)

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The Child is going on a trip. She will fly on a plane without me; she will hand her passport to a customs officer by herself. She will see Niagara Falls, someplace I have never seen, and ride the Maid of the Mist, something I have never done.

I should be happy; I will have some much-needed time to myself. I should be proud; look at my girl, growing up fast! I should be excited; she has the opportunity to see more of the world, something I have always wanted for her.

I am sure that I am all of these things, though it doesn’t feel like it when I think about it too much.

She and one other girl were invited on the trip by a friend from school, also an only child; she is going to Canada with her family for ten days at the end of the summer. Just before the trip, we have dinner with the family so we could talk about the plans for the trip. The mother of the other invited girl, is also a single mother, is also there. She talks a lot, as she usually does, about nothing in particular: there are no pauses or silent moments around her.  The Child and her friends hang out in the hammock while the adults grill and marinate and slice and discuss things like allergies and food preferences and the validity of American health insurance in other countries.

I write notes and make a to-do list in a small notebook: The Child will need a suitcase and water shoes. There isn’t much for me to do: the host girl’s father has thought of every possible detail, and paid for everything. I try to think of things I should be asking, but it seems to be under control, and in any case, the constant chatter makes it hard to focus, so I don’t: I relax and watch the three girls, giggling in the hammock.

We amble through dinner, sipping lemonade and discussing the latest advances in mosquito-repulsion technology. The chatter starts to wear on me, and I find things to do to be in a different room from it, when I can: I help out in the kitchen, and then focus my attention on the host mother’s cookbook collection. She likes Cook’s Illustrated and Cook’s Country, and I find myself entranced by America’s Best Lost Recipes, a collection of vintage recipes that have been tested in a professional kitchen and tweaked if needed to provide reliable results.

I focus on the cookbooks as long as I reasonably can, but then the girls disappear into a playroom, and the four adults are left to discuss the final details. I suddenly realize The Child does not own a suitcase; she is leaving in just a few days and everything has been thought of except the most basic travel necessity. The Departed packed his stuff in her suitcase when he left, and she and I have shared a suitcase ever since, but I am taking advantage of her trip to go away for a few days, too – and I never thought to buy her a new suitcase.

No suitcase. Not ready.

I remind myself that, like the babysitting, she is more ready than I realize. She is among friends and clearly well cared for. She will be gone for ten days, and will come home glowing with stories and memories.

A day or two before she leaves, I get a copy of America’s Best Lost Recipes from the library, and make her a special breakfast: Waukau, a berry pancake that is partly fried and partly baked, kind of like the pancake version of a frittata. It sounded really good, and not hard.

Waikau1

The recipe called for what seemed like a lot of sugar, so I reduced the amount, but the end result was still a bit too sweet for our taste. The pancake itself had a nice crispy bottom, and a crispy-sweet top from the sugar, with the all the berries resulting in a soft middle. The pancake base has very little flavoring and no sugar, so the whole dish is really about the topping.

Neither of us really liked it, though we both had ideas about what would make it better: Less sweet and more tart. I thought a strawberry-rhubarb mix with cinnamon sugar would cut the sweetness, or even just something more tart that the blueberries I used.

Or maybe just less sugar.

My Waukau also did not spread out to fill the pan as the recipe indicated, though it still puffed up nicely. This may have been my fault, since my pan is slightly larger than the 12-inch size called for in the recipe.

It wasn’t what we expected, and The Child didn’t eat much of hers.

Waikau2

 

 

Waukau (Berry Pancake)
 
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Serves: 6
Ingredients
  • 1 cup all-purpose flour
  • ½ tsp salt
  • 1 cup milk
  • 1 large egg
  • ½ tsp vanilla
  • 4 tbsp unsalted butter
  • 2 cups fresh berries
  • ½ cup sugar
Instructions
  1. Adjust an oven rack to the lower-middle position and heat the oven to 375 degrees. Whisk the flour and salt in a medium bowl. Whisk the milk, egg, and vanilla in a small bowl. Make a well in the center of the flour mixture and pour the milk mixture in. Whisk until combined; a few small lumps may remain.
  2. Melt the butter in a 12-inch ovenproof skillet over medium heat. Pour the batter into the center of the skillet and let it level itself. Scatter berries over the batter, leaving a 1-inch border around the edges. Sprinkle the sugar over the berries, again avoiding the 1-inch border.
  3. Bake until the edges are puffed and deep golden brown, 50-60 minutes. Transfer to a serving plate and serve immediately.
Notes
Use any combination of berries that appeals to you for this recipe. I used blueberries. The original recipe calls for ¾ cup sugar; I reduced this amount to ½ cup and still found it to be a bit on the sweet side.
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