Ina Garten's Delicious Pancakes Come Straight From The Oven
Did you know that Ina Garten has been eating the same breakfast every day for over a decade? That's right, every morning after the cookbook author rises out of bed, the menu calls for a bowl of Garten's favorite comfort food: Irish McCann's quick-cooking Irish Oatmeal alongside a cup of coffee. While that makes Garten a bit of a creature of habit when it comes to her daily breakfast, her breakfast recipes are a different story.
Some of the dishes in the Food Network star's A.M. repertoire include breakfast hot dogs and scrambled eggs that she makes like pasta as well as pancakes that come straight from the oven. No, that wasn't a typo. Garten ditches the breakfast staple's namesake for her tri-berry oven pancakes because who wants to stand over the stove making one pancake at a time? Not the Barefoot Contessa.
When making her pancakes in the oven, Garten makes things even simpler by throwing all of her ingredients into the Kitchen Aid. Once the batter is ready, she divides it evenly into pre-heated gratin dishes with a healthy amount of butter to prevent sticking. She then returns the batter-filled dishes to the oven to bake for about 15 minutes, after which her guests enjoy a breakfast that Garten calls "delicious and dramatic." Even better, you can also serve these pancakes directly from the oven in the dishes they baked in. How fun is that?
Ina Garten's oven-baked pancakes have a unique look
Even if you've already made the switch from making pancakes in a skillet to batch-making them using a sheet pan in the oven, we still encourage you to give Ina Garten's oven pancakes method a try. Not only does it relieve you from having to execute the dreaded flap-jack flip until your wrist falls off, but the result is an elegant crossover between a pancake and a popover that is just as much fun to look at as it is to eat. The pancakes' aesthetic appeal might be part of the reason this recipe has earned a slew of 5-star reviews.
"Excellent recipe – tender, tasty...Puffed beautifully," wrote one reviewer on Food Network, who also applauded the dish's presentation. "Will do again. And again," they added. A second reviewer said their husband wanted to head to the Hamptons to personally thank Garten for such a delicious meal.
Somewhat similar to a Dutch Baby, the puffed-up outer edge of Garten's oven-baked pancakes gets slightly crispy thanks to the wide opening of the gratin dishes. Meanwhile, the middle starts to settle after the cakes are out of the oven, creating the perfect pocket to load up with toppings. Butter and syrup are natural options here, although Garten chooses to fill the middle with a mixture of berries and granulated sugar. However, as a third reviewer suggested, you could also take these oven-baked pancakes the savory route and fill them with sausage and cheese.