Sourdough Diaries: Overnight Sourdough Pancakes

Sourdough starter

Learn how to make overnight sourdough pancakes.

Hey its the morning. Let’s do the second part for the sourdough overnight pancakes.

Here’s the bowl today, I don’t know if you can see, but it’s quite bubbly. You see this mark right here – that tells me it got to that point and then started to sink a little and that’s all good and great. It smells exactly as it should smell. It’s kind of got that sour, bakery smell to it.

So, lets two beaten eggs or if you don’t eat eggs, like me, I made a flax egg out of two tablespoons of ground flax meal and a third cup of water. Then get some butter or oil, doesn’t matter. A quarter cup, melted. And in this little dish, I’ve got one teaspoon of baking soda and a half a teaspoon of salt. So just kind of sprinkle this across the surface and I’ll just mix this all in and then I’ll meet you over by the stove. 

Now, we’re at the stove. I’ve got a cast-iron skillet that’s heating up. You don’t have to have a cast iron to make pancakes, of course, you can use whatever skillet you want. You can use a griddle which is great. I like cast iron because it brings me back to my Prairie Town days.

I’ve got my batter here and we’re just gonna test to see if the skillet’s hot enough – it’s important to do before you start slapping pancakes on there. Let’s take a little – let’s oil up our pan first with whatever you want. You can tell if it’s hot enough if the oil kind of gives this shimmery look to it. I’m just going to schmear it around a bit. I might add a lot more oil too.

So let’s find out if our pan’s hot enough, just do a little test piece. The sacrificial first clump. And resist the urge to fiddle with it. Patience is a virtue, one that I currently work on all of the time. So you’ll know that it’s time to flip whenever the edges start to dry out, just like any other pancake. And if you are going to use cast iron, and you probably already know this if you live that cast iron life, you need to take the time to preheat this. Because if you try to heat it up very quickly, it’ll just get hot spots instead of heating up the whole thing entirely with even heat.

Alright, I have confidence that I can flip this little nugget. I think just about perfect. Look at that rise – did you see it rise? Alright, I’m going to move this dude to the side, re-oil that little spot and then just start plopping away. Now I have very poor pancake-flipping skills, so I don’t make my pancakes much larger than this. I’ve got a third of a cup scoop here. And, you know, if you are a pancake king or queen, you just do it. You do you. And because of my poor skills here, I’m only going to put three in at a time. I’ll look at my little nugget – too early to flip, shouldn’t have done that. I might see how this batch goes before I turn the heat up. I have an inkling that I might need to turn the heat up. It’s just about medium right now. But see with this only teaspoon of baking soda, what’s happening here is the yeast is rising as it would in bread, so the yeast touches the pan, it gets hot and it’s like “yes! All of this heat” and then it’s like “no, too much heat” and then it dies of course, but that’s okay, because we’ve got that rise. 

Instead of staring at me watching the pancakes rise, I’ve done a batch and there are a couple of things to note. The pancakes will do better if you cook them low and slow, so like medium, medium-low. Resist the urge to crank them up to get them to go faster, because what will happen is the outside will get to brown but the inside will still be raw because this is still very much a bread-like pancake.

It’s also ideal for waffles. If you’ve got a waffle maker you could just stick them in the waffle iron.

I’m just going to keep on making pancakes. It’s very important, too, to re-oil between the batches. And you don’t need to stir the batter in between the batches, it’s actually better if you don’t. Just scoop it on in there and start plopping. And these are really great, too, leftover. So since I’ve got enough pancakes to feed a dang army, I’m going to freeze them. So I’ll just freeze them in some plastic freezer bags and then when I want pancakes later, I’ll just pop them in the toaster or reheat them in a warm oven and then I’ll be good to go. 

One more thing, as I was just sampling my pancakes here, I just want to to show you the texture of them. They’ve got some structure, kind of like bread like I mentioned, but they’re nice and light on the inside. 

So I’ve got ideas about these. So you could eat them like a pancake like you normally do. I like to slap peanut butter on it, with or without maple syrup, but that’s me. You could, they’re actually right on the line between sweet and savory, so this would make a great breakfast sandwich, so if you wanted to slap some egg and cheese on it between two pancakes on the top and bottom, that’d be really good. Or I would even dip this in hummus, but I put many things in hummus. But give them a try and see what you think and then experiment because what’s more fun than experimenting in the kitchen, right? 

I hope you give it a try and I hope you enjoy them and I’ll see you for another recipe later. Take care.