I like breakfast. Especially for Dinner. The other night pancakes were requested and I was all too happy to oblige.
Thinking we were out of mix on our recent (and way to infrequent) trip to Whole Foods, I picked up a package of their brand of Pancake/Waffle Mix. Unbeknownst to me this was somehow quite different from the Trader Joe’s mix I’ve been using lately, and worlds apart from my Dads (from scratch) which are my all-time favorite.
Over the past several years I started experimenting with whole grain flours and such – looking to health up an otherwise nutrionally devoid stack of sugars and overprocessed flour. Most incarnations were edible – but never well received by my wife or daughter, that is until we found TJ’s whole grain mix. (to which I’ve taken to add soymilk, and a splash of OJ.)
From the start I knew the Whole Foods mix was different. First off it was so thick, that It wouldn’t even totally mix in the blender (in my 2000 Horsepower Vita-Mixer) so I added more liquid than the 2 cups called for (with 2 cups mix) and fortunatlely mixing with a wisk worked. Yet what would normally yield a few cups of batter – puffed up to 10. You’d swear I was raising a turbocharged loaf of bread!
The first few hit the griddle – the batter something between merangue and angel food cake. These cooked up lighter and fluffier than anything I’ve ever seen before, and they were fantastic! While the first ones cooked, the remaining batter magically refilled itself - never ending pancake bowl!
It was a chore, but in between eating 6-8 decent sized, but very light pancakes myself, (my little one even had seconds), I was also able to cook up the remaining batter – plenty for later.
What happened, I still have no idea. But it was delicious! I’m going to have to make another batch the old fashined way, just to see if something got whipped up nice and fluffy via the mixer – unlike the million other times I’ve done this. (Perhaps there is a secret ingredient – some new breed of yeast the military is developing to incubate life on other planets or something.)
