Mission-driven, fully-tested fluffy pancakes
Ella Quittner is obsessed with the best and I'm obsessed with her
Even though I’m neither here nor there, I didn’t want to miss one my favorite things about writing this newsletter: Friendship Food. Those of you who’ve been with me know that every month I choose a friendship food recipe and make a donation in honor of our community to a food-related organization. Since this month’s recipe is for amazing pancakes, it seemed just right to contribute once again to NO KID HUNGRY, a group that understands how much a healthy breakfast can mean to a child.
xoxoDorie is a reader-supported publication. Subscribe to access the 300+ post archive on food, travel and community, share it with friends, and know that your subscriptions supports a food-sharing cause each month. How sweet it is to be part of #TEAMCAKE!
Hello! Hello! and soon Bonjour!
I wrote this before I left Paris for Tokyo, so I’m not sure what language to greet you in! By next week I should be sorted. And by next week, February 24, to be precise, Ella Quittner’s book, Obsessed with the Best will officially be in the world [Bookshop // B&N // Amazon]. Raise your voices in joyful celebration. It’s what I did when I got an early electronic version of the book to “thumb” through.
At some point, I looked up from my screen and said to Michael, “She’s such a good writer!” And Michael, with a tone implying what? amusement, I think, said: “How many times are you going to tell me that?”
Not that I was surprised. I’d read Ella a lot in a lot of places, often in the New York Times and New York Magazine, and always with delight. (Here’s a link to some of Ella’s work.) But it was extra fun to have a whole book — a cookbook! — chockablock with Ella’s takes on so many things we love.
Chocolate chunk cookies for days, crispy bacon, melty cabbage and piles of pancakes, fluffy and lacy
In Obsessed with the Best, a title that could speak for itself, Ella sets out to thoroughly, tirelessly, meticulously and yes, obsessively, test recipes for a couple dozen foods, most of which most of us who love food and make it have given some thought to. Probably not as much as Ella did, but enough that you’ll want to jump into a chapter and learn her results. I know I did!
Just looking at the ways she tested chocolate chunk cookies could make an ordinary mortal cross-eyed, but Ella’s got a brilliant way of pulling it all together for us. On the first page of every chapter, across from phenomenal photos, she lists two important things: “Mission” and “What I Tested.” So for Superlative Chocolate Chunk Cookies, tested 32 (!!!) ways, you’ve got:
MISSION
The best chocolate chunk cookie that you’ve ever had the pleasure of baking, with a chewy, dense center and all of the classic flavor notes—toffee, nuttiness, vanilla—dialed up to an extreme.
WHAT I TESTED
Flavor and texture enhancements • Alternate flours • Chill level of dough • Baking temperature • Length of dough resting time
And as she does for each food, she summarizes the Best Method(s) and gives you several recipes, leading with a Mother Recipe.
Pancakes that stack up
I ended up homing in on Ella’s chapter on pancakes, the major food group when I’m making breakfast with Gemma and VV. The opening pancake images show 31 pancakes labeled with what she was testing in each. Here’s the sum-up:
MISSION
Pancakes with deep flavor, a degree of fluffiness that feels celebratory, and crispy edges.
WHAT I TESTED
Leaveners • Flours • Liquids • Additions • Cooking fats • Pancake thickness and composition
You’ve got to eat a lot to test a lot
In her intro to the Pancakes chapter, Ella starts by describing pancakes she had when she was in Japan, jet lagged and sleep deprived (maybe this is why the chapter called to me). She says:
… It wasn’t the first time a pancake had fixed me. The rich, tender stacks at the Commerce Inn in Manhattan fully renewed my interest in brunch after a decade of claiming it’s the worst way to spend money. (Their secret: tapioca flour and baking the pancakes in an oven after a quick stovetop browning.) The soufflé-style pancakes I tasted across Osaka and Tokyo quivered like living pillows as I doused them in syrup, forcing me to consider at what point food becomes too beautiful to consume. In Alabama, at Salem’s Diner, a perfectly taupe seven-inch round that was neither thick nor fluffy made me wonder if I was overthinking the pancake entirely. The kanom krok at a Bangkok street market reversed my jet lag. The skillet-size Bisquick pancakes my older sister Zoe and I would construct breathlessly when our parents went out of town, adding as many chocolate chips and raspberries as we could while still having some hint of batter continuity, still make me laugh. (Left with an uncaptained house, most other high school kids threw ragers; we sat around daring one another to fill the bathtub—which was outfitted with waterjet tech that in the late 1990s seemed impossibly cutting edge—with heavy cream, to see if it would whip with us in it.) I’m not convinced there’s a single prototype for a perfect pancake; there’s a time and a place for thin and crispy, for soft and crepe-like, for stuffed yeasted pancakes, for buttermilk ones, and for soufflé-style. Here, I focus on enhancing flavor, maximizing fluff, and retaining crispy edges.
I finished Ella’s intro and wanted to go on an around-the-world pancake tour with her. Instead I made the Mother Recipe for Fluffy No-Special-Equipment Pancakes. Scroll down for the recipe — they’re fabulous!
Next?
I want to make all of Ella’s vegetable recipes. The roast chicken, of course. The salted whipped cream, the yellow cake and her poached eggs. Oh, the scrambled eggs too. There are so many tempting recipes and there is so, so, so much to learn from the book. And did I mention that she’s such a good writer?
Preorder Obsessed with the Best and then pick the rabbit holes you want to cook your way down.
Love from wherever I am now. I’ll see you next week, when my feet will once again be planted firmly in Paris.
📚 📚 You can find more recipes in my latest books, Dorie’s Anytime Cakes, Baking with Dorie, and Everyday Dorie.
ℹ️ Click here for helpful links while using Substack.
👋 Say hello and share what you’re making on Facebook and Instagram.
MOTHER RECIPE: FLUFFY NO-SPECIAL- EQUIPMENT PANCAKES
Adapted from Obsessed with the Best by Ella Quittner
Get your copy at Bookshop // B&N // Amazon // More options here
Submit your preorder receipt here to get a free digital poster, and the chance to win 1 of 50 Fluffy Pancakes pre-printed posters.
GOOD TO KNOW BEFORE YOU START
The pan: A cast-iron skillet or griddle is recommended, but alas, I didn’t have one. I used a nonstick pan and got really nice pancakes. I’m betting they’d be even lacier and crisper-edged with cast-iron. Let me know.
The egg whites: Ella, as you’ll read below, beats her egg whites by hand. Wimp that I am, I used a hand mixer.
The mixing: The batter is mixed with a whisk — handy and also hypnotizing, so it’s easy to overmix: Don’t! In her intro, Ella makes the point that the batter needs lumps to climb on. I love the image and I loved the tall pancakes.
Timing: Because pans and stovetop heat vary, treat the time for each step as a gauge and pay attention to the visual clues.
The yield: I got about 18 pancakes from the batch.
Serving: These are at their peakiest peak seconds after they come off the pan. Have your people around you. That said, I couldn’t stop nibbling the leftovers even though they were at room temperature and not as fluffy as the hot cakes.
Here’s what Ella had to say:
I refuse to tell you to pull out a stand mixer for breakfast. But I adore the effect of egg whites folded into pancake batter. It works just as well with a whisk, and, to be transparent, 6 minutes of whisking is exactly what I need to wake myself up to make polite conversation. These aren’t as soft or towering as the soufflé pancakes I tasted across Japan, but they have a velvety, uniform crumb that soaks up butter and syrup beautifully. One recipe tester compared them to a more flavorful (!) crumpet. If you’re in the mood to pretend you own an ironic and chic diner, you could use this batter to make two giant pancakes in oven-safe nonstick pans (finish them at 350°F, then soak with honey-butter or maple syrup, love you:-*). I prefer to make dozens of smaller pancakes right away and top them with an amount of butter and syrup that would make a doctor blush. These use buttermilk for tang and tenderness, whole wheat flour for nuttiness, and ricotta to give the rising batter something to cling onto. Try swapping the whole wheat flour for buckwheat, or finely milled cornmeal—but then remember to let the batter hydrate for 10 minutes.
LEVEL
Anyone can execute
TIME
35 minutes
MAKES
Pancakes for 4
INGREDIENTS
2 cups (284 grams) all-purpose flour
1/2 cup (65 grams) whole wheat flour
4 tablespoons (50 grams) granulated sugar
3 teaspoons baking powder
1 1/2 teaspoons Diamond Crystal kosher salt
5 large eggs (275 grams), at room temperature, whites and yolks separated
2 1/2 cups (610 grams) buttermilk
3 tablespoons (42 grams) unsalted butter, melted and briefly cooled
1/2 cup (117 grams) ricotta
Clarified butter or ghee (or a mix of neutral oil and butter, see below)
Pure maple syrup and butter
DIRECTIONS
In a large bowl, whisk together the dry ingredients: all-purpose flour, whole wheat flour, 2 tablespoons of the sugar, baking powder, and salt.
In a separate medium bowl, whisk the egg whites vigorously for about 5 minutes, until soft opaque clouds form, thicker than the foam that washes up during a high tide. Add the remaining 2 tablespoons sugar one little spoonful at a time, vigorously whisking until integrated and the whites become quite thick and glossy, like warmed marshmallows, another 3 minutes or so. (The peaks won’t get as stiff as with a stand mixer, and that’s okay; there’s baking powder and more than enough egg white in there for insurance, and the pancakes will still plump up in the pan.)
Make a well in the middle of the dry ingredients. Add the buttermilk, egg yolks, butter, and ricotta and whisk until just combined, with lumps. Fold in about a quarter of the egg white meringue mixture, to loosen the batter. Fold in the rest, just until no streaks of egg whites remain. Do not overmix. Lumps are critical for height!
Heat a large cast-iron skillet or griddle over medium heat for 1 minute. Add a generous few tablespoons of clarified butter. (Use less fat if you want perfectly consistent golden pancake faces.) When the butter has melted, add 1/4-cup scoops of batter about 2 inches apart, very gently smooshing the edges into circles if they’re lopsided. Keep an eye on their bottoms, lowering the heat to keep them from burning . When the edges have just set, about 1 minute, add a large spoonful (roughly another 2 tablespoons) of batter to the center of each pancake. Then, when tiny bubbles begin to form on the surface of the batter (timing here can vary, but you want some bubbles a bit inward of the immediate outer edge; there likely won’t be any in the center, though), very gently flip each pancake and cook until golden on the second side, about 2 to 3 minutes.
Serve hot in stacks topped with maple syrup and butter. In between every two batches or so, replenish your cooking fat to keep it close to the original level, so every pancake gets just as crispy.
UPGRADE: Add fork-mashed ripe banana and chopped dark chocolate to the batter before you fold in the egg whites. I also love to add fresh raspberries, with or without the other two!
NOTE: The easiest way to make a big batch of clarified butter is to melt a pound of butter in a small saucepan over medium-high heat and, after the foam recedes, skim off the fluffy white fat along the surface. Pour through a cheesecloth or super-fine sieve and store covered in the fridge.
Thanks for the heads up about this book! Sounds interesting! Safe travels !
Thank you, Dorie, for promoting this very interesting book. Great recipes and a great writer? A win-win in my book! I think I’ll pre-order, although I’m running out of room for more cookbooks! Safe travels and welcome home—to Paris I guess?—to you and Michael once you land!