rye pancakes

I am the self-proclaimed King of Pancakes. I mean I adore pancakes and I make them all the time. Now that we are living in a house and are together again I will go back to my tradition of making pancakes or crepes at least once per weekend and usually twice. Sometimes we even have pancakes for supper mid-week. Over the years, I have perfected pancake recipes and cooking methods so that I get perfect hotcakes every time...light and fluffy golden brown.

This past week we milled a batch of rye flour for a customer and I had a bunch left over so I decided to try making rye pancakes and rye crepes. They turned out tremendous! Cindy said that they were the best pancakes she had ever eaten. We have never made pancakes out of rye before and I have never heard of them up until now. So, I present to you, in their world premiere...the Rye Pancake!

They taste different from a regular wheat pancake...a little nutty flavoured perhaps. Definitely more of rich, grain taste. They are not dark or heavily textured as Rye Bread is, on the contrary they are very light and fragile. Fully cooked, theysimply melt on the tongue drenched in buttery sweetness. You can see in the photo

 that the batter has a light colour, with little flecks of darkness that is purely rye.

The rye grain does not contain the protein and gluten of a wheat so the rye pancake does not fluff up as much as the wheat will. Still though they were light and fluffy enough and the complete opposite of chewy. Simply delightful.





My recipe is simple but I do it with feel instead of measuring cups and it doesn't need to be precise anyway.

1 cup of flour
1 tsp of baking powder
1 egg (very important...keep the egg count low for pancakes)
1-2 cups milk
pinch of salt
2 tbsp of sugar

I mix the dry ingredients together and then add the wet. The final pancake product is determined by the thickness of your batter. A thicker batter will puff up and have a great degree of volume while the opposite is true of a thin batter. It should be thicker than runny crepe batter, but thinner than muffin batter. You can see in the picture what a perfect pancake batter looks like.

Cooking a thick pancake batter is a little trickier than thin. The heat should be medium to medium-high. Too high and the outside will burn and the inside will still be runny. Keeping the heat lower is better than too high. Take your time making pancakes. True gourmet pancakes take time, like all great food. I mean these are not common, ordinary griddle cakes!