Mistakes To Avoid When Making Pancakes

Posted on 25 February 2022 | by VIVE Team

Picture this – you’re in bed and you wake up to the smell of fresh pancakes wafting through the air on a lazy Sunday morning. You run to the kitchen and there’s a picture-perfect stack of pancakes waiting for you at the table. You add your toppings – berries, choc chips & whatever else your heart desires and you finish it off with a big drizzle of maple syrup… Pure bliss.

There’s truly something magical about digging into a fresh stack of pancakes to start your day, and creating cafe-style pancakes doesn’t have to be challenging and stressful!

To level up your pancake making skills and impress your loved ones, we’ve collated a few common mistakes that you should avoid:

Over-mixing the batter

When your goal is to make fluffy and delicious pancakes, you need to resist the temptation to get rid of all of the little lumps. Over-mixing the batter leads to chewy and tough pancakes – definitely something you want to avoid. This is because gluten starts to develop when you mix your wet and dry ingredients together, so the more you mix, the more gluten that develops.

Pro tip: Using a sieve is a great way to reduce the formation of lumps.

lumpy pancake batter on a board with ingredients

Adding mix-ins before cooking

We prefer to add toppings to our pancakes rather than mixing into the batter to avoid uneven cooking. Usually, toppings like chocolate chips or blueberries can burn faster than your pancake cooks. If you do want to add in mix-ins, try pouring half (or all) of the batter for each pancake first, add the mix-ins & then pour the rest of the batter on top.

Setting the heat too high

A lot of people struggle with cooking temperatures when it comes to pancakes. Yes, if the heat isn’t high enough to begin with, the pancakes will take too long to cook. On the FLIPside, if your heat is too high, the pancakes will burn on the outside before the inside has had time to cook! We suggest that you do a test pancake first on a medium heat, to help you determine the right heat and cooking time.

Flipping the pancakes too much

One or two flips should do it! When you flip your pancakes too much, your hard work to make them fluffy will be ruined as over flipping will lead to flat and sad pancakes.
Our recommendation of when to flip: once you start to see bubbles form on the top and those bubbles pop to form small holes, the pancake is ready to be flipped. If you’re worried, you can always lift up the edge of the pancake to check if the underside is cooked.

Drizzling with artificial syrup

No one has time for fake syrup. You spent all this time whipping up a delicious stack of pancakes, so give these pancakes the drizzle it deserves! Look for 100% pure maple syrup when you’re doing your grocery shopping. Trust us, it really does make a difference.

If you really want to take your pancakes (and any other dish) to the next level, we’re giving away a bottle of Extra Rare Ecsuminac Maple Syrup for free! Cultivated in the first week of harvest, this 200ml of maple syrup has a smooth and velvety texture. It’s incredibly rare (hence the name) and will be unlike any other maple syrup that you’ve ever tried.