Taste Test: Rice Cooker Pancake

You may have seen the recent trending pics of pancakes made in rice cookers; and hopefully you looked at them with the same awe we did.

The Surreal Gourmet was one of the
 earliest Food Network shows and my first venture
into non-traditional cooking and molecular gastronomy

Apparently, slacker chefs with tiny apartments lacking stoves or those Surreal Gourmet types who like to push the definition of cooking (like putting fish wrapped in foil on a car engine) have been making pancakes in their rice cookers for a while. These crazy people, for whatever reason, decided that pouring a serving of batter in the pot of a rice cooker and letting it cook through over and over was much better or cooler or ...something that just making them in a pan or a griddle.

But it seems one such crazy cook, or shall I say, mad genius, decided to dump all the batter in there at once and let it go.

And we just had to try it.

First, I will be completely honest with you and tell you that despite all of our foodie tendencies, creative skills and even professional techniques, neither J or myself can make pancakes. We use the same type of mix I've seen my parents use for eons, we've tried letting it rest before putting it on the griddle; really, we've tried everything. But we make sponges, not pancakes. One cake will absorb a whole pat of butter in seconds and soak up every drop of syrup before you have time to take a bite. And they taste like nothing. Put that same mix on a waffle iron - perfection. So something must be wrong with our p-cake technique.

So given our flapjack failures, we were willing to try anything. Plus, how cute are these little fluffy pancake-cakes?!

Lifehacker.com

And they couldn't be easier to make. You literally put all of 2 minutes' effort into this dish. Mix it, pour it, set it and forget it. If you're running around with a lot to do - other than obsess over dinner (or breakfast) - this is a helpful recipe. Throw it in the rice cooker and go do what you need to. J got a good half-hour for Skyrim and I took a relaxing bath while dinner cooked itself!

Here goes:

Lightly butter/spray your rice cooker pot (just in case). Using the required ingredients, mix up your favorite pancake mix, according to the serving you want and the size of your rice cooker. We figured normally we'd each eat 4-5 pancakes, so we used the box's ratios for 8-10 pancakes. Make sure you have room in the pot for it to puff up; probably no more than 3/4 full. Pour it into the rice cooker, close lid and click on. Let cook until the rice setting finishes. We checked ours with a toothpick and it was done by the 30 minute cycle mark.

You could do this with plain pancake mix or add fruit or chocolate chips etc. and layer with all kinds of toppings! We were rather traditional and went with a pat of butter and some syrup, served for dinner with scrambled eggs and sausage links.

This was the best tasting pancake that's ever come out of our kitchen! It was fluffy, not super dense like I'd feared. The inside was light and crumbly and it had browned nicely on the top (bottom in the pot). It didn't guzzle syrup and the flavor was delicious. I can't wait to use a blueberry mix or add fresh berries. If you do add mix ins (candy chips, fruit nuts), I'd say you'll probably want to use the same tip for "chunks" that you do with cakes. Toss them in a tablespoon or so of flour (or extra dry pancake mix) before you stir them into the batter; that way they'll "float" in the cake and not sink to the bottom.

I'm normally very opposed to having unitasking tools/appliances in our house, but I've always turned a blind eye to the rice cooker. Now, I can relax knowing that it's valuable beyond it's original purpose and we can continue to use it in multiple ways (in my "research" I also found 20 other things - from cakes to macaroni and cheese - that you can make in a rice cooker and I can't wait to try them, too!)