Allergy-Friendly Cornmeal Pancakes

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Hi everybody! If I sound different today, it’s because I am. Don’t worry, my lovely wife Brit will still be writing most of the recipes on this blog. But I like to cook once in a while too. I’ve also very much gotten into baking and other baking-adjacent things, like making pancakes and pizza. So finding out about our son’s allergies to wheat, dairy, and eggs threatened to end that hobby. Obviously, tons of baked goods use at least one of those, and many use all three.

A lot of what I’ll be doing is taking existing recipes (credited where credit is due) and finding ways to modify them to suit our little Ben-Ben’s dietary restrictions. You don’t have to go too far to find vegan OR gluten-free recipes, but finding ones that are vegan AND gluten-free is a lot harder. That perfect combination of flour and eggs is really hard to do without. (I feel obligated to point out once again — as in our allergy statement — that we are not actually vegan, so honey is still fair game.) In addition to finding recipes that can be adapted, I’ll also be tweaking them as I see fit. Even the best 1-to-1 flour substitute may still lend a different taste or texture to the result, so adjustments are often still needed.

My inspiration for the following recipe came from seeing a bag of Bob’s Red Mill 1-to-1 Gluten Free Baking Flour in the grocery store. I’d been trying and failing to make pancakes that don’t trigger any of my son’s allergies, usually by replacing the wheat flour with something like almond or coconut flour. What I eventually realized was that most non-wheat flours can’t simply be substituted into a recipe; you kind of have to re-engineer the recipe around it. My next step was trying a “Gluten-Free Pancake Mix”, but it had similarly disappointing results — at least when I followed the recipe on the box. I later learned that was more the fault of the recipe than the mix itself; they didn’t do enough to make up for the lack of dairy & egg. So finding a vegan recipe was crucial. Hence, my recipe mostly borrows from this vegan pancake recipe from Sweet Like Cocoa, but uses the substitute flour — and one other twist.

You see, there was something missing the first time I tried substituting GF flour into the vegan pancake recipe. They were good, but they were also kind of gooey. They were more like scallion pancakes or potato pancakes than pancake pancakes.* Not enough grit.

* Side note: it makes sense that they’d be more like potato pancakes, as the gluten-free flour mix includes both potato starch and tapioca flour — tapioca being derived from yuca, another root vegetable, which also happens to be a Cuban staple. Just saying.

So I added grits. Well, sort of; cornmeal. I’m not sure how common the idea of cornmeal pancakes is, but they were a thing in my house growing up. If you use coarse ground cornmeal here, you’ll end up with something clearly identifiable as “cornmeal pancakes”; however, if you use fine ground cornmeal, it ends up basically like regular pancakes. Either way, I’ve been really happy with these results, and so have all my family members who’ve tried them.

The most important part of this recipe is the ingredient list. I will offer a few pointers about technique, but really, it’s nothing new. If you already have a certain way of making pancakes, don’t change it. You probably make them better than I do. Only the batter is appreciably different here.

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DRY INGREDIENTS

• 1½ cup Bob’s Red Mill Gluten-Free 1-to-1 baking flour
  I have experimented with other brands of GF 1-to-1 flours, including cheaper ones such as Pillsbury (which don’t perform as well in other recipes — expect an article going into more detail about this later). They all seem to work fine in this recipe, but I’m still giving a shout-out to Bob’s Red Mill for introducing me to the concept.
  
• 1 cup Cornmeal
  I’ve used both yellow and white cornmeal and not really noticed a difference. Pretty much any kind will work, but as I mentioned earlier, coarser grinds will increase how “corny” they taste.
  
• 6 to 8 tbsp Sugar (granulated)
  Just your average refined white sugar, or whatever you usually use for baking. Use the lower amount if you’re using a sweetened milk or just don’t want so much sugar. The higher amount is tasty though.
  
• 1 to 1½ tsp Salt (table salt)
  Same as above; you can use the lower amount and the pancakes will come out fine. The higher amount will add a little more intense flavor if you need it. This will definitely depend on taste preference.
  
• 2 tbsp Baking powder
  Nothing to say about this. It’s just baking powder.

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WET INGREDIENTS

• 2¼ to 2½ cups Non-dairy milk of choice (unsweetened coconut preferred)
  Use the lower amount for thicker pancakes, the higher amount for thinner ones. My preferred non-dairy milk is unsweetened coconut, because coconut and corn tend to work well together. It also has a high fat content. Obviously if you have an allergy or some other aversion to coconut, you can go with one of the many other milk substitutes available. You may need to make slight adjustments to the amount, since some milk substitutes are thinner than others.
  (NOTE: I am not talking about canned coconut milk, which is a whole other thing, sort of a condensed milk. I’m talking about the kind that comes in a carton and is meant for straight drinking.)
  
• 2 to 2½ tbsp Apple cider vinegar
  The idea of the apple cider vinegar is, partially, to add a tangy flavor reminiscent of buttermilk. But it also has a binding effect on the batter, which is why you’ll often find this — or applesauce — in vegan/GF recipes. (If you’ve ever forced yourself to drink apple cider vinegar for health reasons, you can consider this your sweet revenge.)
  
• 1 tsp Vanilla extract
  I’ve never tried imitation vanilla in this, but if that’s your speed, I imagine it wouldn’t work any worse here than it does anywhere else.

OTHER

• Oil for cooking surface, such as vegan butter or coconut oil
  My preferred oil for the cooking surface used to be coconut oil, but I’ve recently discovered vegan butter. Unsurprisingly, it works really well for pancakes. And it’s getting easier to find; even Country Crock is getting in on the action. (Well, I guess they didn’t have too far to go. Well played, margarine.) If you don’t have that, coconut oil is still a good choice. It’s on the “buttery” end of the spectrum, texture-wise, and the flavor works too.
  
• Syrup, for topping
  I’m not going to force you to use maple syrup, but use maple syrup.
  
• Other add-ins such as cinnamon, chocolate chips, etc.
  I’ve tried both of the above and they work great. It’s your blank canvas, go nuts!

MISCELLANEOUS NOTES

• Overwhisking? Unlike with traditional pancake batter, there isn’t too much risk of overwhisking, since there are no eggs or gluten to overwork. So I wouldn’t stress about this; do whatever you have to do to combine the ingredients.
  
• The cooking surface: I use a large (12”) cast iron skillet that we don’t cook anything allergy-unfriendly in. I used to use 2 stainless steel pans, but they gave me a lot more trouble with the pancakes sticking to the pan. Copper or enamel-coated pans can be great for this too.
  On my electric stove, I usually hover around medium-high heat, one notch past the middle. About 5 minutes of pre-heating will do it. You’ll probably need to add a little bit of oil to the cooking surface before each pancake / set of pancakes. This is just one of those things you have to experiment with.
  
• Size: I’ll leave it up to you to figure out how much batter to use for each pancake. There are really no strict rules here. In my large skillet I can manage to do 3 small (3-4”) pancakes at a time. Not that I don’t like larger pancakes, but this is a bit of a time-saver.
  
• Serving: Some people get fancy and keep the finished pancakes in an oven at a low heat so they’re perfectly warm for everyone. If your kids are patient enough for that, more power to you. I usually just shove some of the less pretty ones in my mouth while I’m cooking.

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