What makes pancakes turn brown

I've since realized that it's not much harder to make pancakes from scratch, and it's a whole lot more gratifying. The quest for the perfect pancake is something of a lifelong journey. But unlike other boring journeys, this one is delicious, and served with syrup.

So where do we begin? I favor buttermilk pancakes myself, for their light and fluffy texture. If you go online and look for recipes, you'll find plenty that claim to be the BEST buttermilk pancakes. Are these recipes really all that different?

What sets them apart? And what's the essence of a truly excellent buttermilk pancake? Like any scientist worth their salt sorry , I decided to answer this question with a graph. After all, the whole is just the interaction of its parts. So let's take apart what the web thinks of as the perfect pancake.

Above, I plotted the ingredients that go into a buttermilk pancake, according to eight highly rated online recipes. I normalized the recipes so that they all have the same amount of flour.

You'll see that there are certain essentials that you just don't mess with. You definitely need one egg for every cup of flour. And there isn't much variation in how much salt or baking soda you put in. On the other hand, these recipes vary widely in how much butter or sugar they include. What's a good empiricist to do?

I decided to take the average of these recipes, and build a pancake that strikes a balance between the excesses of its online progenitors. So here are the ingredients for my eigen-pancakes. The quantities turned out fairly close to this trustworthy recipe from Serious Eats. Recipe Summary test cook:. Mix dry ingredients together. Mix buttermilk, eggs, and browned butter together. Fold the dry into the wet. View Series. Be the first to rate and review! No ratings or reviews yet.

Close this dialog window Review this recipe. What did you think about this recipe? Did you make any changes or notes? Cancel Submit. The best land and the best prospects for health I ever saw, and I do believe it is a fortune to any man to come here.

I'm going to venture a guess that, if we could see the other side of these, they would be evenly browned. If so, it's nothing more than the fact that when the batter is poured, it lies flat in the pan.

But when the first side is done and it's turned, the second side is partially cooked and has bubbles and uneven spots, so different parts contact the surface better than others. The dark outer rim makes me suspect one pancake occupies most of the pan, and the edges of the pan are hotter, when you use a smallish pan on a gas burner.

I imagine the problem is aggravated by a pan that doesn't distribute heat as well as an iron griddle or heavy iron pan. Further, the pan is fully heated when you pour the batter. After cooking one side, you flip the pancake onto a pan that is still reheating and doing so unevenly. Does the other side look the same? Usually when you cook pancakes, the first side down cooks evenly to a nice light brown.

The second side usually looks more like what you have. Pancake batter is loose and spreads when you put it on the hot griddle. As a result, a uniformly flat surface is presented to the griddle and you get that nice even color.

When you flip them to the second side, the batter has set somewhat and doesn't flatten out onto the surface so you get uneven browning. My theory is that the griddle is too hot, and this is causing you to have to flip them too early. I would try dialing back just a notch so they brown more evenly and get done on the inside. I also wonder if you are using too much shortening on the cooking surface.

Also the fat in the pan, especially with a non-stick pan, will puddle or bead up, so when you pour the batter over it, it creates this interesting pattern. The batter pushes the fat to the edges of the pancake and makes them browner and crispier on the edge. I actually like when this happens especially with hoecakes. I always have one side that looks similar to this and one side that is evenly brown and more smooth looking.

I'm not very experienced in the cooking field so feel free to state things that may seem obvious. Originally Posted by jed. One is as though nothing is a miracle. Ive tried different oils, no oils, reheating my pan, waiting longer before flipping which causes the pancake to have poppled bubbles and dark spots instead of a smooth surface.

And when I flip them, the second side gets sort of a film on it when I take it out of the pan, the outer layer separates from the rest it kind of looks like saltine crackers lol this is really frustrating. You seem to be doing everything alright with the heat and pan. This sounds like a problem with the recipe. Add more milk or yogurt, or whatever dairy you are using - you need lactose for browning, so soy milk or enzymatically treated cow milk won't work.

Also consider replacing part of the sugar with fructose, HFCS or glucose syrup, they brown somewhat better. Third, make sure they are not too sour. If this is a baking powder recipe, consider using only milk instead of any buttermilk or yogurt. If it is a baking soda recipe, add some more baking soda. If nothing else helps, you can even add a pinch of baking soda to a baking powder recipe, not for leavening but just for browning.

If it doesn't, make sure you are only lifting at the proper moment. The pancake will stick first, then become releasy, then burn. If it still sticks during the releasy part, reduce the heat you should still get enough browning after the measures in the last paragraph. If that does not work either, the last step is to increase the egg.

An alternative would be to find a better working recipe and follow it instead of adjusting yours. You might have to test a few until you find a winner. I had the same problem!