Wednesday, May 04, 2016

Waffling Leftovers: Pancakes

By now, you are quite familiar with my Waffling Leftovers series.  I've shown you how to transform your leftover Italian cuisine (pizza, lasagna, and more), your casseroles (mac and cheese, tuna noodle, etc), and your side dishes (mashed potatoes, cheesy grits, yadda yadda).

Now, it is time to turn attention to a totally different type of cuisine: breakfast.  Perhaps the most natural fit for my waffle maker, since, well, isn't breakfast when most people use their waffle maker?  But of course, I'm not going to make a waffle batter, I'm going to take a leftover, and just reheat it in my waffle make.

So, Leftover Pancakes: Will it Waffle? Sure ... but there are better ways to reheat pancakes.
The Original: IHOP Harvest Grain N' Nut Pancake.
My starting point was an IHOP Harvest Grain N' Nut pancake.  You know how much I love those things, so I started experimenting with not eating my entire giant stack while at IHOP, and bringing some home to enjoy later.

It turns out, pancakes freeze and reheat very well.  Just wrap them in foil, bring them up to temperature in the toaster oven that way, and finish off with the foil removed to crisp them up a bit.  Totally fine.  But I thought I could do better with my waffle iron.
No mess with this one!
I started with just half, in case it was disaster, so I could fall back on my standard reheating technique.

Unlike most things I've waffled, this was simple, and there was no mess.  No cheese oozing out, no falling apart.  Just a pancake.  In a waffle iron.
Waffled Pancake + Honey Butter + Whipped Cream.
It was ... fine.

It did reheat perfectly well this way.  It was easier even than my standard foil-wrapped and then toasted technique.  But it wasn't awesome, although in part I blame the pancake itself.  I think it would work better with a much fluffier pancake, as the thin style just made this too crispy for my liking.

I did see the appeal in creating the waffle pockets in the pancake though.  Not pictured is the warm maple syrup I also added, and it was fun to pour it directly into the holes (as I do with waffles anyway).  I guess I'm just not sure what this buys you over just a waffle, or just a pancake, besides being a really easy way to reheat a pancake.

I'm more a fan of waffling leftovers where the item is completely transformed by waffling, this didn't enhance it in any way, but, it did work.  So, quasi-success?

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