A Week of Alton Brown Day 5: Buttermilk Pancakes

I'm noticing that I'm getting lots more hits on this blog when I'm actually cooking something.  That's awesome!  I am sorry that I can't deliver that every night this week.  My confession is that I don't cook that often on weeknights - I get home around 6:15pm and James not usually until 6:45pm.  Sometimes we cook together and don't end up eating until 8:30pm!  So it doesn't happen often.

Our usual routine is to cook bigger meals on the weekends and eat leftovers all week, often preparing fresh vegetables to go along with it.  It's hard because we both travel a lot and try to visit family and friends as often as possible, but that is the system that works best.

So today is another post of a recipe without pictures but that I have made many times: Buttermilk Pancakes.

If you like to make pancakes often, the recipe Alton provides in the video below is actually his own homemade "instant pancake mix."  You add buttermilk, butter and some eggs and you're ready to roll.  But, sadly, I don't make pancakes that often, so I've adjusted his recipe down to just one serving, which is the recipe you'll see below.

A great Alton video-description of the process!
Times of certain parts of the process are noted below

Alton Brown's Buttermilk Pancakes (1 batch of 12 pancakes)

Ingredients:
2 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon of baking soda
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons sugar
2 eggs
2 cups buttermilk
4 Tablespoons melted butter

Procedure:
Similar to the Chocolate Chip Cookies earlier this week, we're going to use the Muffin Method for these pancakes.  Which simply means: mix wet ingredients together, mix dry ingredients together, pour wet onto dry, fold until just combined.  For some reason, any recipe made by this method makes it so much less daunting for me.  Therefore:

• Mix together eggs, buttermilk and melted butter
• Mix together flour, baking soda, baking powder, salt and sugar
• Pour the wet ingredients onto the dry and mix gently until they are "just combined" (2:06 on the video)
• Get your pan nice and hot and then add your pancake batter (we don't usually butter the pan, because there's so much butter in the batter it doesn't seem to need them.  But it certainly doesn't hurt anything...)
• Ladle your batter onto the pan.  Watch as bubbles starting to form around the edges.  When this happens, peek under your pancake to see if the it's gotten to the desired level of golden-brown-and-delicious.  If so, flip it over, girlfriend. (2:50 on the video)
• The second side doesn't have the nifty bubbles indicator, but cooks much faster.  I would peek after 30 seconds.
• We line a plate with a kitchen towel and fold it over the finished pancakes while working on the others.  This keeps them both warm and moist.

This recipe is fluffy with just the right amount of tang to go along with a syrup (or try with honey!) and delicious breakfast meat.  I hope you can try it the next time you're jonesing for some pancakes.