Baking Apple Pancakes with Kenny Goliff

What is your favorite breakfast? One of my all-time favorite breakfasts is the apple pancake at the Original Pancake House. This is a behemoth of a pancake with a cinnamon topping and apple slices baked right into the batter. This meal takes longer to make than anything on the restaurant's menu, but it is always worth the wait in the end.

This beautiful creation is what inspired me to search the internet thoroughly for the best apple pancake recipes out there so I could make it at home for my family. After months of looking, I was given Cook's Illustrated Best Breakfast and Brunch Recipes for my birthday. This book has some of the best recipes I've ever had, and for each one there's about a page of information about the history of the recipe, why it's great, and how to make it better.

This book is where my search for the apple pancake finally came to an end. On page 73, one of the best-tasting recipes I've ever made was found. "Introducing German Apple Pancakes" by Meg Suzuki and Matthew Card.

One section of the recipe's informational page taught me a lot about how to make batter. When talking about how the batter for the apple pancake was designed, the author stated that they "began experimenting with different types of liquid, making pancakes with half-and-half, heavy cream, and a combination of sour cream and milk. The pancake made with heavy cream was too heavy, baking up leaden and flat, while the sour cream and milk version had a strange tart flavor. Half-and-half turned out to be the perfect solution" (Suzuki 72). The section this was in explained how when using a recipe like this, it is important not to substitute one ingredient for another ingredient because the smallest change could affect the outcome of the food drastically.

Another part of the information section entitled "Apples and the Mush Factor" explained how to figure out what kind of apples to cook in order to get a desired outcome. According to this section, there are three factors to take into consideration when choosing what kind of apple to cook- the composition of the cell walls (how hard the apple is), acid (how the apples dissolve), and air (the size of air pockets between cells) (Suzuki 73). This section was actually surprisingly interesting to read and taught me a lot about apples I didn't know. For example, when it talked about the air factor, it said that "all apples have air pockets between their cells... When apples are cooked, the air escapes and the air pockets collapse. As a result, there is a loss of firmness and volume" (Suzuki 73). For this reason, Granny Smith apples would be the best choice for this recipe, but it also says that depending on the recipe, different apples can be used.

Overall, the apple pancake was a huge success. By using a combination of stove-top cooking and baking in the oven, the pancake rose to just the right level and it turned out delicious.