I grew up on Bisquick pancakes, and I enjoyed the fast easy prep the mix offered when I became a mommy, too. However, Bisquick isn't safe for my food allergic kiddo. I went through dozens of recipes and alternate versions of those recipes to put together my own pancakes from scratch, but holy cow, it's definitely not fast and easy. I kept thinking there had to be a way to put it all together in a mix form at home. So, I started looking for powdered versions of all the liquid parts to my recipe.
Powdered buttermilk is available at most grocery stores. I ran across it looking for something else and picked it up for my mix experiment.
Powdered butter, however, isn't as easy to find, and it was iffy as to what the actual ingredients were. In my online research, it was called pantry butter, and used as a back up plan for when you ran out of butter. It could be reconstituted as a spread. I wasn't really interested in something like that. I didn't see how the consistency would be right for pancakes. Then I ran across a powdered butter that wasn't meant for reconstitution, Frontier Bulk Butter Powder. This stuff is made for mixes, and is highly concentrated. 1/4 lb powder for every 1lb regular butter. That sounded great since it's about $20 per pound, and I would only need about 1 tbsp for every stack of pancakes I wanted to make.
I've used EnerG egg replacer for years, and it's available in most groceries with decent health food sections. So, there was no doubt in my mind that would be what I used for this recipe, but I wondered if it would work as well mixed in with the flour rather than mixed with warm water before putting in the mixture like the directions on the box recommend.
Actually, out of all the liquid ingredients, the vanilla was the hardest to manage with a corn allergy. They make vanilla powder, but even the super expensive organic kind I found at Whole Foods contained corn products both to sweeten and preserve it. This one was tough for me to figure out, and I eventually decided to try dried vanilla beans (the cheapest in our area is from Trader Joe's). I thought I it would be easy to just cut them, scrape them and crumble them into the mix, however, it was harder to manage than I thought.
The first mix I tried:
1 1/4 C all-purpose flour
2 Tbsp sugar
1 tsp kosher salt
1 tsp baking soda
2 tsp baking powder (homemade)
4 Tbsp buttermilk powder
1 Tbsp butter powder
1 vanilla bean, cut in half and scraped
So, I mixed it all up and measured the powder mixture so I could make a bunch and just scoop out what I needed as I went. It measured exactly 1 3/4 C mix, and that made me happy being an exact measurement and all. Now for the vanilla beans. Cutting and scraping was easy. Getting the 'bean' unclumped and evenly distributed in the mix was not. I made a pile of the scraped vanilla, added a little flour and crumbled it in my finger tips until I got it as evenly distributed as I could. It looked like those little black dots all over the mix would work just fine. I added 1 1/2 C warm water and two eggs, and got cooking. They rose well, cooked evenly, and looked great, but the flavor wasn't like the scratch recipe. Time for revisions.
This time:
1 1/4 C all-purpose flour
2 Tbsp sugar
1 tsp regular salt (I decided I wanted everything super fine and powder like)
1 tsp baking soda
2 tsp baking powder (homemade)
1 Tbsp butter powder
3 tsp EnerG egg replacer
1 vanilla bean, cut in half and scraped
This time I decided to nix the buttermilk powder and use the egg replacer. I mixed it all together and added 1 1/4 C buttermilk. The consistency was too thick. So, I added about 3/4 C warm water, enough to make it the consistency I liked for my pancakes, and got cooking. This time, they turned out fluffy and yummy. They came out tasting almost exactly like the scratch kind, and not a single pancake was left when we were done (depending on how big you make your pancakes, it makes about a dozen). I definitely feel like I've found the mix recipe for us, however, I'm thinking when I put up the mix, I might just stick the vanilla beans in whole. I've heard of this technique when flavoring sugar. Maybe it will work with flavoring the mix without my having to cut and scrape the darn things. Or, maybe I'll just try it without them. Let the syrup add the flavoring. We'll see.
To start with, I'm mixing up several individual bags of mix. Next I'll try making a big batch and try just scooping it out and adding the buttermilk and water.
Final product: 1 1/2 C mix, 1 1/4 C buttermilk, 1/2 - 3/4 C warm water
So much easier than scratch and a nice change of pace from cereal, oatmeal squares or cereal bars.
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