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Love it, thanks! I used to have a "fluffiness" slider that I could bring back to power this. I haven't researched Swedish pancakes yet but are they leavened at all?

My goto is a crepe recipe from an old Betty Crocker cookbook. eggs, flour, bit of sugar, vanilla extract and butter I think. Toppings I like are home made berry compote, blueberry being my favorite along with raspberry and blackberry, and maple syrup. I've also made blintz by adding farmers cheese with compote to sweeten.

Crepes / pannekoeken are tough because they are almost always a “you know it when you see it” amount of flour and milk to get the batter right.

Haha, just for you - check out the new checkbox at the bottom of the form:

https://www.absurdlyoptimized.com/recipes/pancakes/?have=&eg...

I'll leave the rounding of the absurdly precise ingredients to you. :)

The good thing about that scenario is no matter how the pancakes come out, you've already won

The default has the 'tang' slider at maximally tangy, which is where the yeast and wait come in. If you back off on that the recipe looks more like the standard quickbread I'm used to.

The yeast and ferment is going to make it more acidic, and more tender because the gluten will be weakened. I imagine you could use cake flour instead and get close to the same tenderness, but the flavor would be different.

One size doesn't fit all. By your logic, homemade sourdough isn't bread, you should have packaged Wonder bread.

Keep a box of Krusteaz in the pantry for the kid sleepovers, prepare the night before for an adult brunch.

Man, at the rate I can generate pancakes I fear four children would murder me and just drink the batter raw. Though maybe I'd buy a second pan in advance xD

It depends. The inspiration sometimes comes after a Saturday evening with friends and lots of drinks. Having a foolproof recipe comes in handy, and having the perfect stress-free pancake batter already made the next morning turns you into a household hero.

If you know the kids are going to want pancakes in the morning you just prepare it at night? You can ask them to confirm over dinner...

While I can confirm sourdough pancakes are quite nice, I am satisfied with Krusteaze :)

Hahaha, glad you're enjoying it as much as I did! I will have to add a crispness slider and then validate it with expensive audio equipment.

This was my immediate thought too. The same website has at least a dozen similar articles written over the past week, all with this same AI tone.

In the same week:

https://www.absurdlyoptimized.com/recipes/grilled-meats/ http://absurdlyoptimized.com/recipes/brisket/ https://www.absurdlyoptimized.com/recipes/french-fries/ https://www.absurdlyoptimized.com/recipes/miso-salmon/

Parametric recipes are fun idea. I almost want to try them, but the sheer volume of content by one author gives me no reason to trust this will be any good.

Did the author actually try these recipes? Unless the author was cooking and writing 24/7 or just had a massive backlog of publishing, it's hard to trust anything here (although I'm sure most people will.)

> it reads like Claude output

Yep. From the site's about page:

> This site is produced with substantial help from large language models: they assist with the literature search, the drafting, and the arithmetic.

https://www.absurdlyoptimized.com/about/

> how much scrutiny did this get for accuracy?

The inclusion of references without hyperlinks suggests it wasn't thoroughly checked: they were probably put there by Claude, and as they aren't links the author probably hasn't read them (they could possibly have read them in hard-copy at a library, but given the rate at which articles were produced this seems very unlikely).

(One such reference is 17 - "Weijers, M. et al. “Heat-induced denaturation and aggregation of ovalbumin at neutral pH described by irreversible first-order kinetics.” Protein Science 12(12): 2693–2703, 2003")

We’re using vastly different models, then, because it doesn’t read like any generated text I’ve seen before.

Claude is a tool in the hands of the person using it. If you built a cabinet using power tools would you say the drill and saw built the cabinet? Or that you did?

I find it irritating when people send me a code review and say that Claude wrote the code. No, you wrote the code, you are responsible for the code. You can't blame Claude if it's crap and you don't have to credit Claude if it's genius. Claude is not a person.

Adding a can of coconut milk for your liquids works really well, too. We skip the egg replacement altogether, and it just works.

Thanks a lot! Good idea re bread - can you link me to your favorite more general recipes that show all the extremes/variables? I've skimmed some bread textbooks re enriched doughs and have made some Italian breads with sourdough starters, enriched doughs like challah, and once tried the NYT Dutch oven bread, but I don't make bread as often as I make pancakes.

Thanks! It's entire chunks of fat from a Berkshire pig. Lard works too and is what you get when you render pork fat, but the rendering removes some flavor. I'll update the recipe.

For us vegetarians/vegans, butter (preferably clarified) or coconut oil.

Probably suet, which is raw and found around kidneys and loins.

A lot of people like a sour flavor to contrast with sweet or savory, especially with fermented notes. It's why people like sourdough, cultured butter, yogurt, etc.

Personally I don't love a lot of those things; they taste spoiled to me. But I'm in a minority of "foodies", who find those flavors interesting, and find my preferred versions flat and boring. They are also very traditional flavors; that's how food was preserved before canning and leavened before baking powder and packaged yeast. De gustibus.

Plus one!

Hilarious, thanks for pointing me to that!

Thanks! The layout was inspired by the way my mother recopied her recipes. When I first saw how most recipe books wrote recipes, I was so confused! As for baseline ingredients, it's basically (any liquidy dairy) + (everything else in the recipe). I'll think on how to present this better, thanks for the feedback!

Done, let me know how it turns out! https://www.absurdlyoptimized.com/recipes/pancakes/?have=pla...

when I saw those pics I thought: all this effort in the ingredients just to burn them

light blonde pancakes taste the best IMO, but char being carcinogenic seems compelling enough on its own to warrant turning down the heat

Maybe he needs to optimize the frying part now. Looks burned to me.

I agree, this seems like a lot of really excellent work from someone with a completely different pancake baseline than I have. The word 'crispy', in my world, has no business applying to pancakes. That's what bacon is for.

Yeah I'm not so much interested into the details of fluffy pancakes as we make flat crêpes here (I'm kinda surprised to see pannekoeken mentioned and not Breton crêpes which are as far as I know better known in the English-speaking world - they are the same, except the Dutch ones are usually garnished with an approximately 1 cm-thick sugar layer afterwards).

Anyway, I'm more interested into good flour blends, from wheat, buckwheat to rice and tapioca flour. Flour can make everything different but it can also make pancakes pretty much impossible to bake correctly if it's not the right blend, and I find it difficult to predict.

Thanks, I'm working on this next - stay tuned or join the mailing list (will send a very occasional message about new recipes)!

This works with dairy-free milk too. My daughter has a dairy allergy and figuring out we could turn pea milk into pea buttermilk with a tbsp of white vinegar upped her pancake experience significantly.

For sure - if you check "milk" and "lemon" and select maximum tang, you'll get nice tangy pancakes. I opted away from vinegar due to taste but would be curious to hear if someone tests vinegar vs lemon!

Sometimes. Note that both your ingredients are liquids, however.

I use buttermilk powder for quite a few recipes so that I can control the liquid content independently of the acid and fat content.

It doesn't matter for small items like salt or baking soda, but you can get pretty different results scooping flour depending on how compressed the flour storage is, and how much the scooping packs down that flour.

There's a reason that every bakery measures by weight. If you value consistency, and recipes should be consistent, you go by weight. You can say it doesn't matter, and in some cases it might not, but the entire baking industry doesn't agree with your statement.

It's true. But it's also so much easier to measure weight that I don't understand why some (mostly American) recipes still use volumes for solids. In practice most people I know also measure liquids by weight when cooking, anyway. You you put your bowl on a scale and everything's easy and you don't need to make a measuring cup dirty.

It certainly can matter for proper baking (which this recipe seems to be?), though for traditional pancakes I would never bother. But there's a reason that bakeries weigh their ingredients. It's more consistent and allows for different people to get more similar results.

Haha, already researched the thermometer but haven't pulled the trigger yet! https://www.absurdlyoptimized.com/cooking/ir-thermometer/

Added! Let me know how it turns out! https://www.absurdlyoptimized.com/recipes/pancakes/?have=lab...