Put down the box mix and make pancakes in minutes

Everyone loves sitting down to a plate of fluffy, golden, flavorful pancakes, but making them is another matter. Nobody wants to run out for buttermilk or sour cream before the first meal of the day, never mind haul out (and then clean) their stand mixer to whip egg whites.

That’s where box mixes come in, but their convenience is hardly worth the results they deliver. Besides, most prefab products still require you to add milk and eggs to the dry mix, so at that point, why not throw together a batter of your own?

That’s exactly what we set out to do. We limited ourselves to basic ingredients — no buttermilk or sour cream.

To make the pancakes tall and fluffy, we prepared a thick batter by using a relatively small amount of liquid and lots of baking powder and mixed it minimally. With less stirring, the lumpy batter was noticeably thicker than a batter mixed until smooth because lumps obstructed the flow of free water.

The lumpy batter was also better able to hold on to the air bubbles formed during cooking, producing taller, more leavened pancakes. And the flour pockets didn’t taste like flour; letting the batter rest briefly allowed them to hydrate slightly before cooking.

For the pancakes’ flavor, we used sugar, vanilla and baking soda, which provided sweetness, depth and saline tang, respectively. Baking soda plays a more important role in the flavor of baked goods than you might think: Many pancakes, biscuits and quick breads rely on its saline tang and are noticeably flat-tasting without it. A mere 1⁄2 teaspoon did the trick here; it also helped the pancakes brown more deeply (baking soda increases the pH of the batter, which speeds browning reactions) and rise higher.

By the end of our recipe development, tasters were unable to distinguish these pancakes from a more traditional buttermilk type. That means you can now make and enjoy a great pancake breakfast even before your morning coffee wakes you up.

CARL TREMBLAY