Mark

this was a pretty light adaptation of the source recipe, Simply Perfect Pancakes from the King Arthur website, which I find really lives up to the name. It has a few steps that are slightly more complicated or time-consuming than an absolutely dead-simple pancake recipe could be (for example, beating the egg and milk together, melting the butter, letting the batter rest for 15 minutes) but I think they all add something.

For my version, first of all I halve it, since there's just me and Ben and a full recipe of pancakes would likely be too much. So just an exact half of all the ingredients. That ends up making five pancakes, which is pretty much perfect for two people. I measure the milk, butter, flour, and malted milk powder by weight. I use melted butter (of course!) and I add a half teaspoon of vanilla extract and a quarter teaspoon of bourbon to the liquid ingredients. Just now I'm looking at the King Arthur website's blog post about this recipe, and it recommends adding the butter after combining the wet and dry ingredients, which I'll have to try next time, as I have noticed the congealing butter globules that the post mentions. I don't think they really have an unpleasant effect on the end product but I do think they're a bit unsightly. The malted milk powder I'm using is Ovaltine, which I think is not exactly the same thing as the malted milk powder King Arthur sells or the Carnation kind that is usually the easiest to find, but I think it worked great. With the Ovaltine malt powder, the vanilla, and the bourbon, there's a warm rich flavor here - it definitely makes me think of how Stella Parks calls malted milk powder "the umami bomb of dessert".

In terms of my process, it's essentially just what's in the instructions, other than adding the extra ingredients and stirring the wet ingredients into the dry rather than vice versa. (That last part was essentially an accident but definitely isn't a problem imo - there are some recipes where that really matters, and I'm sure it has a small effect on how fluffy the batter is if you can fold the dry ingredients into the whipped-up wet ones more easily, but the whipped egg and milk don't get that heavily whipped so I don't think it's a big deal.) I definitely cook my pancakes a lot darker than the ones on the King Arthur website, haha. I use plenty of neutral vegetable oil to fry them in, which tends to give the first side down that "ring" of deeply fried crust around the edge.

So yeah, that's Mark's perfect pancakes! I would definitely like to try mixing the recipe up in the ways King Arthur suggests in the tips - adding some whole grain, using it for waffles instead, etc. I also think there might be interesting things to talk about in terms of when and how to bother with things like whipping the eggs, adding malt powder, letting the batter rest - these little "secret weapons" that ostensibly take the recipe to the next level. I love things like that, but I also think sometimes they're a bit gimmicky and I can get too attached to them, when they do add time and expense. But it gives me so much satisfaction to know that I'm making the perfect pancakes!