Thursday, October 21, 2010

Low Carb Win! Low Carb Pancakes! Woot!


Very happy with how these turned out!I wanted to make these for my picky toddler to see if I could get more protein into her.

She didn't like them.

Although she ate a previous incarnation of this recipe with no problem. I like this one better. She does not.

Seems like mommy never wins when it comes to food!

These do taste remarkably like pancakes. The texture is good. They look like pancakes. I was happy!

Anyway the recipe is based on The Gluten Free Almond Flour Cookbook by famous food bloggiste Elana of Elana's Pantry.

I made some changes to the original recipe as follows.

Ingredients

-2 eggs
-Sweetener as follows: 2tbsp Splenda brown sugar blend or 3tbsp honey or maple syrup
-1/2 cup water (added in halves to manipulate batter consistency, do NOT just dump in 1/2 cup water!)
-1 tbsp vanilla
-1 tbsp grapeseed oil for the batter
-1 1/2 cups almond flour
-Dash of salt
-2 tsp baking soda
-1 tbsp flour or flour alternative
-Grapeseed oil for the pan
-hand blender

Instructions

1. Crack eggs into a bowl with steep sides and lightly beat. Note:You'll be using a hand blender to incorporate all the ingredients together and the steep bowl sides will cut down on splatter.

2.Add in vanilla, 1/2 of your 1/2 cup of water, your sweetener and the tbsp of grapeseed oil. Mix gently--no hand blender just yet.

3.Add the dash of salt.

4.Add in almond flour and baking soda.

5.Mix by hand and assess batter texture. You don't want it too thin or too thick, but just right, which is difficult to convey in a blog post. If the batter seems stiff, definitely add water. You want it to be malleable but not runny. Add water if you need to thin the batter out.

6.Blend it all with a hand blender to insure even incorporation of ingredients. You can skip this step, but I strongly recommend that you don't. I would only skip if you don't own a hand blender or food processor. Otherwise, suck it up, drag out the equipment and use it, you'll be happy you did!

7.Coat pan with a thin layer of grapeseed oil and let warm on medium low heat.

8.Spoon small, silver dollar pancakes into pan and flip when bubbles appear. Work fast because these burn quick. They cook (and burn) much faster than regular pancakes, at least in my experience.They also are a challenge to flip because they don't get firm on the bottom, so the pancake flipping can get messy. Just kind of push all the batter back together when it splatters as you flip--you won't get perfect circle pancakes, but you will get a pancake.

The one issue I had while making these was my pan just got hotter and hotter as I went even though I was on medium low heat, meaning I had to really work to avoid burning my pancakes.

Serve with topping of your choice. For low carb, these could be easily adapted into a McGriddles spinoff. Just use some syrup in the batter or use 1 tsp on the pancake before topping with eggs and bacon/sausage. Needless to say the carb level is such that this would only be an occasional indulgence, not something to eat all the time.

Reduced sugar or sugar free jam would also work. Natural peanut butter with melted dark chocolate would be good--kind of like a Reese's peanut butter cup pancake. Or simply top with a mash up of fresh berries. For Fall, cook some cranberries with the sweetener of your choice, add some pectin or unflavored gelatin to thicken and top pancakes with 'cranberry syrup'.

If you are careful and calculate all your carb counts, you could probably come up with a low carb pancake suitable for daily consumption.

2 comments:

  1. Hello, I just found your blog from lowcarber.org. I have 6 children and their tastes change or they're full, etc, so you may want to try the recipe you like again. They look good to me, thanks for sharing.

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  2. Thank you for the comment. Yes kids' tastes do change from day to day,something I find so very frustrating. Toddlers are hard to feed!

    These were soooooo beautiful and scrumptious. I used honey for the toddler and ate a few with some red. sugar jam and OMG they were delish.

    She's just being stubborn. Someday she's going to love these and I will tease her about how much she used to hate them.

    M

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