The “Simple” Joy of Vegan Pancakes

Pancakes are one of the all time great comfort foods–it’s main limitation is time. It takes a significant amount of time to prepare and cook, and you may or may not have enough batter, but it’s so worth it. Now remove normal ingredients…

Preparing food in my house is never easy. Anything that requires eggs is out. We avoid meat in the house. Also, onions and garlic, with tomatoes to a lesser degree. That makes cooking a meal rather difficult, even a vegetarian one, because onions and garlic (which I love) are the base of so many of things. Cheese, the basis of all American cuisine, is also out the window and the vegan substitutes never quite have the right attributes to make it work in most dishes.

What does this have to do with pancakes? Eggs are an essential part of any batter, but unlike most substitutes, this is the easiest. Chia “eggs” work just fine; this is chia seeds ground up and mixed with water. Milk is honestly just liquid in most recipes; it doesn’t add anything. So I use a minimum amount of hemp milk (which is only good for cooking) and then use water for the rest.

Because maple syrup isn’t sweet enough for my kids, I have to throw in chocolate chips, otherwise they’ll barely eat anything. Frankly, I think that ruins the aesthetic, but I’m outvoted.

For the dry ingredients, I mix in mostly einkorn flour, which before the gluten free movement, was mostly used for animal feed. (To quote Samuel Johnson: “Oats… in England, a food for horses. In Scotland, food for men.”) Mix in a portion of garbanzo bean flour (for protein, used in Italy during WWII when they were starving and couldn’t get wheat) and brown rice flour (for lift), and of course, a little baking soda and cream of tartar (because baking powder has corn starch), and you’re good!

Of course, the work is never done, because my wife cooked fish on my cast iron skillet two days before and never cleaned it off. So scraping off fish scuz was joyful, and then oiling, then scraping some more, then oiling again. I was willing to throw away the first pancake. But apparently my scraping did enough to clear off the fish scuz and it turned out all right.

So we eat our pancakes with fake butter (Earth Balance Soy Free), maple syrup, and (because we got it as a gift), wild chokecherry syrup. The last was interesting, because it’s one of those Native American things that sounds good. The problem is that there’s so much sugar in it that you can’t taste anything beyond a vague fruit taste. But it still tasted good… but man, that was a long way to go for something simple.

Challah Wallah

There is a simple joy in baking bread. It’s unlike any other type of baking. The ingredients are deceptively simple. The timing is known, the process is straightforward… so why on Earth can’t I ever get it right?!

Ever since I got married, I’ve been (not always) making bread. Part of our faith involves blessing the wine and bread every Friday night, and you get a lot more out of it if you make your own bread. I’m sure I’d get a lot more out of the wine if I had my own vineyard, but when I started, we couldn’t even get wine up in the Himalayas, so… count your blessings.

When I first started out, I had a lot more advantages than I do now. I could use real wheat flour and eggs and milk. I had a marble countertop (because marble is really cheap near where they quarry it) that I could whack the bread onto to make it fluffy. Then I could braid it into challah, which is this wonderful braided bread that looks and smells great. Then you put an egg glaze on it… boom! My newlywed wife used to boast about my bread to her friends. One of them called me the “challah-wallah” (wallah means “seller” in Hindi) and that name stuck.

However, once we left the mountain and moved back to the States, my bread making stopped being as easy. Try throwing a ball of dough onto a plastic countertop and you’ll shake the ever-living crap out of your kitchen. So my bread didn’t turn out as fluffy. Then we discovered my wife had a milk allergy, so we removed milk. Then we realized that wheat did not agree with me, so we had to use alternative wheats. Then egg was a problem for the boy. Then yeast is a concern for the ladies in the family.

So how do you make bread without all of the components? Or as I phrase it, “How do you make bricks without straw?”

At first, we ended up having oily pancakes. Thankfully, over the years, the world has become now full of alternatives. You can grind up flax seeds and make an egg substitute. We use sourdough starter to get some lift in the dough. We use spelt flour, and when that doesn’t work for me, we use chickpea, rice, and whatever GF flour we can find. Milk turns out not to be as important as you might think. Some weeks, our bread turns out great, others… it’s a gooey mess in the middle and you have to wait until Sunday to bake it again as toast.

Nowadays, we can’t braid the dough because it doesn’t stay together enough to create the lines to make the braids, but it turns out you can buy molds that can give the illusion of braided dough (see my picture above). Sometimes we just give up and put the dough in cupcake molds.

Why did the simple joy of baking bread become a science experiment? Am I the only one who has these problems? Tell me your bread-baking woes in the comments below!