IHOP Buttermilk Pancake Recipe

Here's what you need to make your own IHOP pancakes: all-purpose flour, an egg, buttermilk, sugar, baking soda, baking powder, vegetable oil, non stick spray, and salt. If that sounds remarkably like your own homemade pancake mix, you're right. The full ingredients list is at the end of this article, along with a step-by-step recipe.

There isn't anything more obvious than needing flour when it comes to making pancakes. All-purpose flour is the one we need. If you have a gluten issue, you can use gluten-free flour — and it's a one-to-one substitute, however, we'll need an extra ingredient to help it out. If you go gluten-free, add a teaspoon of our dear friend xanthan gum to 1 ¼ cups of gluten-free flour. For the traditional route, it's just 1 ¼ cups of all-purpose flour.

The pancakes are actually called buttermilk pancakes, so there better be some buttermilk in there. If you're expecting that acidic taste you get from buttermilk, it's not present in the pancakes. The buttermilk is there for a chemical reaction mainly, but an important one. We need 1 ½ cups of buttermilk to make the magic happen.  

If you thought baking soda was just for sticking in your fridge to keep things fresh and for scrubbing pans, well, you're not wrong. Baking soda is an often overlooked ingredient in cooking. Sodium bicarbonate, which is what baking soda is, causes things to rise in the presence of acids. That's why there's buttermilk in here — that's what makes the pancakes fluffy. The question is, how much baking soda do you need? At a minimum, you need two teaspoons of baking soda. Between you and me, you can throw another half teaspoon in there and it's not going to hurt anything.  

There are many different oils out there, but you definitely don't want to use anything but vegetable oil. You need something that's neutral in flavor — so that knocks olive, sesame, and peanut out — and something that has a high enough smoke point that we don't have to worry about it burning and causing funky flavors. Vegetable oil is practically made for baking. There's a school of thought that you can go with something in the "vegetable" family here; corn, safflower, sunflower... don't. Just stick with the good ole vegetable oil. We'll need a quarter of a cup.  

A pancake simply isn't a pancake without butter. Get a nice stick of butter and keep it cold until we need it. As usual, I'll kindly suggest you go with no- salt butter because you don't need the extra salt.  As mentioned earlier, you're really just eating the butter and syrup, so if you want to splurge on a "high end" butter, go right ahead. I do anyway because I'm a butter snob — yes, we exist.  

You probably have a ladle, but what size should you go for here? If you get your pancakes too big they're... well, simply too big to eat. You're really looking for a nice "medium" size. Rather than going with a ladle, just pull out a measuring cup — use that ⅓ measuring cup that you never ever use and that'll get us the right size pancakes.  

In a different bowl, throw all the dry ingredients together. The order doesn't really matter, but just to assure you get a proper mixture let's start big and work our way down. Begin with the 1 ¼ cups of flour, and then 2 tablespoons of sugar, followed up by 2 teaspoons of baking soda, a half teaspoon of baking powder, and a half teaspoon of salt. Give that a thorough mixing with a whisk to get the dry goods all stirred up.  

Take that non-stick spray and hit big pan with it. If you have a flat top, that'll be optimal for cooking these. For the rest of us, just a large pan. As you can tell, I'm using a non-stick pan and still using non-stick spray because I don't want anything sticking anywhere. We want the heat to be somewhere in the 5-6 range on your stovetop setting, which is somewhere in the 350 to 375 degrees Fahrenheit range, depending on how golden brown you like your pancakes. I'm more of a 6 setting guy because I like them nice and golden brown.  

After that 2 ½ to 3 minute mark, flip the pancake over — quickly but not like some short order cook from an 80s tv show. We don't want the pancake to go splattering everywhere, so keep the spatula close to the pan and flip it over. It's important to use a spatula big enough to get under the pancake, which is just another reason to make sure we're only making them from a ⅓ measuring cup. The flipped side needs to go for about the same time as the other side, so whenever you flipped, set the timer and then you're done!

If you're cooking these one at a time, just set the first cooked one aside and cover with a tea towel, that will assure they're all nice and warm they hit the plate.

Look, it's pancakes. It's hard to not make a pancake taste like a pancake, so what we're looking for here is, did we get the fluffy height that IHOP achieves? Sort of. We're close, we certainly got some levitation from your average flapjack, but we didn't reach the stratospheric heights that IHOP gets. I toyed around with adding a bit more baking soda but at some point you just have to say "these pancakes are high enough" and live with what you have. They certainly have the light fluffy taste of an IHOP pancake, and perhaps a bit more flavor than the real thing. But as I said before, the pancake is just a way to get butter and syrup into your belly, but that doesn't mean we can't make a tasty vessel. This pancake is just that.