Martha Stewart's Hack For Keeping Pancakes Warm While Cooking

A stack of fluffy pancakes soaked in syrupy goodness is a morning breakfast hard to beat, especially on days when you have family over and it feels like you're feeding a small army. A basic recipe (per BBC Good Food) calls for very few pantry staples — just some flour, eggs, milk, oil, and you're good to go.

The only problem with cooking this next-to-perfect breakfast item is that by the time you've cooked enough to put a stack on everybody's plates, the pancakes at the top might be hot enough to burn someone's tongue, but the ones at the bottom end up being cold and soggy. How do you make sure that all your pancakes remain warm and everyone gets served equally hot pancakes?

If you're thinking that microwaving them for a few seconds may do it, Martha Stewart suggests otherwise. She says that placing them in the oven is a far better way of keeping pancakes warm.

The trick to perfectly warm pancakes is to keep the temperature of your oven high enough so that the pancakes remain warm, but not so high that they get overcooked. According to Martha Stewart, 200 degrees is the sweet spot. Place your pancakes on a baking sheet or any oven-safe dish and pop them in the oven until everyone is ready to eat.

To see whether this really proved to be the best way of keeping pancakes warm, The Kitchn put Stewart's hack to test. They used a pancake warmer (yes, such a thing exists), tried covering pancakes in an aluminum foil, and tested the oven method to compare the pancakes for how warm they came out and whether their crispy golden edges remained intact. While the pancake warmer did nothing much in the way of keeping pancakes warm and turned out to be a pretty wasteful gadget, covering pancakes in aluminum foil turned out to be way better. The pancakes came out warm; however, since aluminium foil traps heat, they were considerably soggy. The winner? Martha Stewart's oven hack. It kept the pancakes the right amount of warm, crisp, and fluffy.

To make the most of this hack, make sure that you don't stack the pancakes on top of each other in the oven. That will form steam and make your pancakes soggy. Stewart also warns not to leave pancakes in the oven for too long if you want them still tasting like they're fresh off a hot griddle.