Mike, here. Cappuccino in hand (well, it's on the desk, but not too far from my hand, but you get the idea). We just finished Sunday brunch (OK, it's not completely finished, as I'm still sipping my coffee, but...say it with me..."I digress!" Sure. I knew you could). And I am happy to say that another hurdle to Gluten-Free Nirvana has been crossed.
Yes, the P-word I am referring to this time around is...PANCAKES. We tried a packaged mix some weeks back (Bob's Red Mill, I believe), and while it looked and smelled...somewhat good...the taste was...um...lacking. A good IsaBuddy recommended putting a scoop of IsaPro in it to improve the flavor, and we do plan to do a recipe for something else (we won't tell you what it is until we have concrete results...especially if it doesn't come out being the texture of concrete, if you know what I mean) that uses IsaPro and takes advantage of its vanilla-y goodness, but at that point I believe we had already ditched the rest of the mix. Oh well.
In this case, Kelly got the brilliant idea of, instead of looking up an entirely new recipe and trying that, like we have done with other recipes, why not take the tried and true recipe that she has been using to make stacks and stacks of nummy pancakes over the years, and simply swap out the glutinous flour for a gluten-free alternative (but leave the rest of the recipe intact)?
So she did. And, true to form, she also did her refrigerator-velcro act, pulling in what was handy by way of flavors and such, and the results? Well, take a look for yourselves:
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you...Triple Chocolate Pancakes. Yep, you heard me right. Chocolate...times three. Oh, baby. 3/4 cup of chocolate milk (Houlton Farms, natch), and both semisweet and white chocolate mini-chips (Ghirardelli, I believe). Served with a generous splash of maple syrup from down the road in Smyrna, Maine (buy local, peeps! If there were a chocolatier in the area, we'd be getting our chips from here, too), and the aforementioned cappuccino (stove-top espresso pot, organic/fair trade coffee, Houlton Farms milk again, and regular sugar; we tried the Stevia in the coffee and it just didn't taste right. You gotta pick your battles).
And it was f***ing brilliant. Oh. Em. Gee. I hate to say it, but I think they were better than the glutinous pancakes. Of course, it could have been the fact that there were (did I mention this?) three kinds of chocolate in the recipe. Yeah, that's probably it. But suffice it to say, they didn't suck. Not by a long shot. They were extremely lacking in suck.
So, in summation: gluten-free pancakes are totally doable. The recipe is available in a separate blog post (for both the flour and the pancakes). Give it a try and let us know what you think!
