Sourdough Buttermilk Pancakes with Homemade Butter

Yea!!!! It's snowing. I love the snow and we don't really get any here in the south, so we are thrilled with the rare treat. When it's cold outside it's perfect inside for a breakfast (or dinner) treat of Sourdough Buttermilk Pancakes with homemade butter, maple syrup, juicy grapefruit, fresh scrambled eggs and cheese, crisp turkey bacon, and a pot of steaming Abuelita Hot Chocolate on the stove with marshmallows. Sourdough pancakes are a great way to use your starter when you don't feel like baking. These pancakes are really tasty, nothing like that Bisquick bland stuff. I'm not a huge fan of pancakes because I do think they are pretty blah, but these are delicious.

Sourdough Buttermilk Pancakes
2 c flour
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/4 c sugar
1 1/3 c buttermilk
1 c sourdough starter
2 Tbsp oil
1 egg


Combine all dry ingredients in large bowl with whisk. Add buttermilk, starter, oil and egg to the dry mixture. Whisk until combined. Can be thinned with milk or water if the batter is too thick to easily pour. When griddle or pan is hot, pour batter on. At this step you can add fruit (we had some frozen blueberries left over), granola, or chocolate chips. Cook until bubbles form and then flip.

You can cook your pancakes in the traditional circle shape or you can cook them in "sticks" like we sometimes do. These are the perfect shape for dipping in syrup, which means you don't hear the "mom, can you cut these?" whine. This recipe makes a ton of pancakes, so I usually make some with fruit and then freeze the plain sticks for another day. You can separate them with wax paper and just pop them into the toaster oven to heat them up.

Since it's Valentine's Day weekend, you could color the batter pink like I did and pour them in the shape of hearts. Or sometimes we do "x's" and "o's" and the kids love that. Having a batter bowl makes this much easier, but you could pour the batter out of a liquid measuring cup.

This weekend we topped our pancakes with homemade butter. It was a science experiment for the kids and it was REALLY easy.

Homemade Butter

1 quart heavy cream

a little salt to taste (optional)

Pour cream into large mixing bowl and let it sit on the counter for a couple of hours to warm up. Using the whisk attachment on your mixer, beat the cream on medium or as high as you can without spraying it everywhere. As the cream beats it will slowly get stiffer and more like whipped cream (yes this is how you make fresh whipped cream, you just add some powdered sugar). Now you can jack the power up on the mixer to high and really get things going. Don't walk away from the mixer because butter is about to appear before your eyes. As you keep beating, you'll notice the cream gets chunkier and stiffer. It will start to ball around your whisk with a yellow color. You...have...made...BUTTER! 
At this stage, you can add some salt. Scrape it off the whisk into your container just sprinkle some salt on the butter as you mash it into a container. When you are smashing, you will get more liquid out of it. Don't throw that liquid away. This liquid byproduct of making butter is better know as BUTTERMILK! You are totally cool now, you've made butter and buttermilk!

Now this is what I call a cool kitchen experiment with yummy results. You can use your buttermilk in the pancake recipe above. This recipe will make about 2 c of butter and 2 1/4 c of buttermilk. I keep the buttermilk in a glass jar in the fridge until we need it. The butter will continue to weep buttermilk so you can just pour it into your jar. It's hard to believe butter can taste so creamy and delicious, but this stuff is phenomenal.

Enjoy your snowy morning with a yummy breakfast, I'm off to make snow angels!