Beer for breakfast? Why not?
I’ve written before about my habit of cooking with beer leftover from the night before, but sometimes a beer (even one you crack open for the occasion) can be just what you need to take a traditional breakfast food, like say pancakes, to a whole other level.
When it comes to something like pancakes, a nut brown or fruit-based beer can give your average run-of-the-mill breakfast a little extra flavor, and can be the perfect Sunday brunch item to follow up a Saturday of adventures.
Making beer pancakes is pretty simple… just take how you typically make pancakes, and then replace the liquid in the recipe with beer. Yep, that’s pretty much it.
If you’re fancy, you can make your pancake batter from scratch using something like this (admittedly simple) recipe by All Recipes, subbing the milk for beer.
No matter how simple, pancake batter from scratch is typically a little too ambitious for my early morning adventures, so I often opt to go for the good ol’ boxed kind instead.
For the batch I whipped up for this post I went with Trader Joe’s Buttermilk pancake mix. For that, I needed just an egg and a cup of beer (along with the mix) to make enough batter for 12 4-inch pancakes. More than enough for two people, and arguably enough for a few more.
When baking with beer (or making pancakes) I recommend pulling out an immersion blender (or a motorized blender of some kind). If you don’t get all the beer properly mixed in with everything else, you end up with a finished product with a pretty weird texture. I find that something motorized really helps when it comes to blending things up. Of course, if you’re a master at the manual whisk, you can certainly use that too, just be prepared for it to take a little longer than the same recipe would with milk or water.
I made this batch with Rogue’s Hazelnut Brown. I recommend going for something like that, a sweet stout, or a really fruity brew (for fruity pancakes) over something bitter or hoppy. While I love my hops in pretty much everything else, hoppy pancakes are pretty gross. Beers you would drink for dessert, however, generally always = good pancake beers.
Pancakes simply involved subbing a cup of water for a cup of beer. The result? A breakfast miracle.