Lemon Ricotta Pancakes

It would be pretty hard to tell they’re special just by looking at them

Time: 45 Minutes

Ingredient Availability: 5/5

Difficulty: 1/5

I think I might start exploring more with pancakes. I hadn’t heard of cornmeal pancakes and they were better than normal pancakes, so when I came across ricotta pancakes I was intrigued. Cheese in a pancake doesn’t sound like the greatest idea on first thought, but I’ve put sour cream in cakes before and those turned out pretty good. The ricotta must do something special. Of course I had to try them out. I was initially going to add some blueberries to some of them, but the grocery store was out of them when I looked. This recipe was written by Genevieve Ko of NYT Cooking.

Key Ingredients & Omissions:

Nothing Special about these Ingredients

No Ingredients were left out from this recipe. As usual, go whole milk with your cheeses.

1. The recipe recommends whole milk buttermilk, but I only needed a quarter of a cup and the smallest container in the store was low fat, so that’s what I went with.

Tools:

• Griddle or pan

• Whisk
  

Cooking Review:

Mixing Ingredients: 23 minutes

To start, the dry ingredients are mixed. I used a scale to measure out the flour to be more accurate. Next, I zested a lemon into some sugar and massaged it through before adding the egg and whisking until frothy. The frothiness is hard to see while whisking, so stop every now and then to see if bubbles form. The rest of the ingredients were mixed in next and whisked until smooth. Finally, the dry ingredients are mixed in gently until no traces of flour are left.

Cooking: 18 minutes

After mixing the dry ingredients, I put my griddle on medium low heat to come up to temp while I prepared the rest of the batter. I really like how this recipe had it preheat for a while so you don’t have to wait on it when your batter is done. I melted some butter on the hot griddle and spread it out before scooping quarter cup portions onto the griddle. I then let the first side cook for 3 minuted before flipping and cooking the opposite side for another 2 or 3 minutes. I ended up having 3 batches, which all took about the same amount of time, buttering the griddle between batches.

Analysis:

The first thing I noticed was how soft these pancakes are. They are super fluffy and almost melt in your mouth. I think they might be the softest pancakes I’ve ever had. Next, I noticed the nice lemon flavor that these have. I was kinda surprised that just the lemon zest was able to provide so much lemon flavor. On top of that, I could definitely tell the ricotta added something special to these pancakes. It’s hard to describe, but the pancakes had an extra almost creaminess to them. After eating these (and the cornmeal pancakes for that matter) it’s really hard to go back to regular pancakes. The only thing that these may be missing is a crisp edge, but I think I could go without it. Oh, and adding maple syrup does make these sweeter, but they are plenty sweet on their own, and I prefer them without it. Overall, I’ll give these pancakes a 9/10. If I could have the flavor and interior texture with some crisp edges, then these would be perfect.

The color on these is pretty good, too