Fluffy Buttermilk Pancakes with Brown Butter
Tall, tender American-style stacks
There is fluffy, and then there is fluffy with depth. These tall buttermilk pancakes get their tang from cultured milk and their rise from a generous hit of raising agents, but the real twist is brown butter folded straight into the batter. That gentle, toffee-and-hazelnut note runs through every bite, turning a familiar weekend stack into something quietly special. Serve them warm, drenched in maple syrup, with the last spoonful of brown butter melting over the top.
Fluffy Buttermilk Pancakes with Brown Butter
Ingredients
- 75g unsalted butter
- 250g plain flour
- 2 tbsp caster sugar
- 2 tsp baking powder
- 1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
- 1/2 tsp fine salt
- 400ml buttermilk
- 2 large eggs
- 1 tsp vanilla extract
- A little flavourless oil, for the pan
Method
- Melt the butter in a small pan over a medium heat, swirling, until it foams, smells nutty and turns golden-brown. Tip into a bowl and leave to cool slightly.
- Whisk together the flour, sugar, baking powder, bicarbonate of soda and salt in a large bowl.
- In a jug, whisk the buttermilk, eggs and vanilla, then whisk in most of the brown butter, holding back a spoonful for serving.
- Pour the wet mixture into the dry and fold gently with a spatula until just combined. A few lumps are fine; do not overmix.
- Rest the batter for 10 minutes while you heat a non-stick frying pan over a medium-low heat. Wipe with a little oil.
- Ladle in roughly 60ml of batter per pancake, leaving space to spread.
- Cook for 2 to 3 minutes until bubbles appear on the surface and the edges look set.
- Flip and cook for a further 1 to 2 minutes until golden and cooked through.
- Keep warm in a low oven while you cook the rest, wiping the pan between batches.
- Serve in stacks, drizzled with the reserved brown butter and your topping of choice.
3 The Story
The American-style pancake is a creature of leavening. Where a French crêpe or a Yorkshire-batter pancake stays thin and lacy, the stack you find at a diner relies on chemical raising agents to puff up into something soft and cushiony. Buttermilk is central to that effect. It is acidic, and that acidity reacts with bicarbonate of soda to produce carbon dioxide, which inflates the batter as it hits the hot pan. The same tang also keeps the crumb tender, because acid interferes with the gluten that would otherwise toughen the flour.
Traditional buttermilk was the liquid left behind after churning cream into butter, faintly sour from the natural cultures in the cream. Most buttermilk sold today is made differently, by adding a culture to low-fat milk, but it behaves the same way in a batter. If you cannot find it, stirring a tablespoon of lemon juice into ordinary milk and leaving it for ten minutes makes a workable substitute.
The twist here is brown butter, known in French kitchens as beurre noisette, literally hazelnut butter, for the colour and aroma it takes on. When butter is heated past its melting point, the water cooks off and the milk solids it contains begin to toast. Those solids are mostly milk proteins and traces of sugar, and they brown through the same family of reactions that give toast, roast meat and coffee their savoury complexity. The result smells of nuts and caramel and tastes far richer than plain melted butter.
Folding brown butter into pancake batter is a small move with an outsized payoff. It seasons the whole stack from within rather than sitting on top, and it pairs naturally with maple syrup, which carries its own gentle caramel notes. The technique asks for only a little patience: the butter goes from golden to burnt quickly, so it pays to keep swirling the pan and to pull it off the heat the moment the foam subsides and the smell turns nutty. Get that right, and the difference between a good pancake and a memorable one comes down to a single browned ingredient.
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