pancakes

There is a lot of recipes for pancakes around, and I experiment periodically, though I still can't recreate the taste and general feel of the thick pancakes ("оладьи") of my childhood. I suspect it is mostly due to the fact that dairy products are different everywhere, and some of the stuff readily available in Russia ("кефир", for example) is not so readily, and sometimes not at all available where I live.

But experiment I do. So here is another attempt — still not quite the same, but very decent pancakes anyway. I followed this recipe with the following changes:

1) No butter for frying. On non-stick pans all the butter does (at least for me) is burn. It lends a nutty burned-butter taste to the pancakes, but I don't like it, so... no butter or oil on the pan.

2) I let the batter rest for a bit (ten minutes or so). I am not sure if the mixture needs to rest, but I noticed that pancakes get better towards the end of the frying process. A Russian saying goes "первый блин комом" — "the first pancake comes out all scrambled" — could it be coz you don't let the mixture rest? The chemistry involved is, I believe, the forming of gluten cross-links, same as for bread dough; while for thin pancakes the soft support of "endoskeleton" consisting of coagulated gluten is not desirable, for the thick ones we do want some so they don't collapse.

I will continue with experiments :)

More photos of pancakes on Shutterstock