Why I Double-Flip My Fluffy Pancakes

Hello! August greetings to you and thank you to everyone who subscribes to this newsletter, whether paid or free.

A post about soufflé for one is on its way to you very soon…. But in the meantime, because so many of you kindly subscribed after my pancakes post, I just wanted to send a very quick pancake follow-up for paid subscribers on the subject of double flipping pancakes and why I’m in favour of it, after many years of thinking it was forbidden!

Bee xx

If you believed everything you read on the internet, you would think that double flipping fluffy pancakes was ones of the very worst things you could do in the kitchen.

An AI overview on Google reports that

‘You should only flip a pancake once. Flipping it a second time ruins the texture. It lets out the trapped air and makes the pancake flat and heavy instead of light and fluffy.’

Believe me, I tried to follow this advice for years. It felt taboo to do it any other way, not least because as the late Kenny Shopsin once wrote, pancakes have an A-side and a B-side and each side has its own distinct architecture. Anyone who makes a lot of pancakes gets familiar with the patterns and will secretly have a favourite side. Here is the A-side of a slightly wonky batch!

And here is the B side! (It’s much more evenly brown)

In purist terms, there is certainly something pleasing about flipping a pancake only once. Two-thirds of the time on the first side followed by a third of the time on the second side is how many chefs do it.

But feeling bound by purist rules in the kitchen can be a route to unhappiness and pancakes are no exception. I used to feel like a failure for not being able to cook my pancakes all the way through without burning using a single flip. And the more I feared failure, the more panicky I got, and I would end up flipping them too soon, ending up with a splodgy mess in the pan.

This is a lesson in confidence as much as anything. All I can say is that both my pancakes and my mood while making them have improved immeasurably since I started allowing myself the luxury of a double or even triple flip. It took me a while to figure out the timings and the ins and outs but I haven’t looked back. My reasons for changing my mind on this were partly practical and partly emotional.

Consider a blueberry pancake - perhaps like the rather messy ones at the top here, which we ate with sweet ripe mango at the weekend. They didn’t look very neat. But my word, they tasted divine. And the double flip was what got me there.

First, the practical reasons…