Tuesday’s Tip with The Kitchen Whisperer – freezing leftover pancake batter

Have extra pancake batter but not a lot of room in the freezer to store your cooked pancakes?  No problem, just freeze the batter!  Find out how today!

In my house freezer space is a premium. Like we’re talking trying to find 5 acres of prime real estate in Malibu for a bargain. It’s pretty much impossible to find and when you do find it, it’s costing you an arm and a leg. Or in my case I’m forced to make a whole ham, turkey, 2 roasts and warm up 2 containers of chili just to make room for new stuff. LOL  I can’t help it, it’s how I was raised. Growing up we had 2 HUGE chest freezers. One was in the kitchen (with a regular fridge/freezer) and the other was 12′ long and you could pretty much fit a horse in it. And Mom kept all of them stuffed to the brim with homemade foods. Mom was a kitchen GENIUS when it came to making something out of nothing AND making it delicious. She cooked for pretty much a football team every night as it never was just the 8 of us. Oh no. We always had some neighbors, random friends and heck, even the mailman stop by for one of her delicious meals.

So that style of cooking – cooking for an army was how I was trained. Now it’s taken me DECADES to learn how to cook for just the two of us but if you ask Mr. Fantabulous I still cook way too much of something at a time. I can’t just cook a meal that there are no leftovers. There were times when we couldn’t afford to go to the store to buy something but Mom came to the rescue with one of her bulk freezer meals.  One thing she always, ALWAYS made in bulk were pancakes. We’re talking 30-40 dinner plate size pancakes easily were in our freezer at one point. Having 4 brothers that were bottomless pits, Mom refused to spend every waking moment in the kitchen catering to them. So when they were starving (which was pretty much ever 30 minutes) they could grab a frozen pancake, toast it and they were good to go.

I’ll do that now though not make 30-40 but rather 4-6 at most. This is something Mr. Fantabulous can make himself when he gets the midnight munchies (he’s a night owl) or when I’m not home and he’s starving. They freeze beautifully but like I said, I don’t always have freezer space for that. Well, what I started doing was freezing the pancake batter. Now keep in mind this is ONLY for pancake batter, not Belgian Waffle batter. You can’t freezer that batter as you’ll deflate the eggs. Don’t try it – I already tested it and it failed.

Now freezing the pancake batter only requires 1 thing – a freezer-safe plastic food bag. Easy right? Just put the batter in there, close it up almost all the way, push the air up and out then seal completely. You can roll it up and push out the air while you’re sealing it but that’s a pita if you ask me as I always end up pushing batter out. I just fill it up about 3/4 of the way, close the bag most of the way then start to push the air up and out (you can also insert a straw in about an inch, suck out the air (don’t suck up the batter) and as the bag becomes concave, pull the straw up and seal. Mark the bag and date it, plop it into the freezer flat. You can essentially freeze a whole batch of pancakes the thickness of a dinner plate.

To use, just put the freezer bag in a container in the fridge overnight. In the morning, push all of the batter to the seal leaving one corner empty, snip off the corner and pour/pipe the batter out onto your hot pan.  This way you have no bowls to clean up. If you want you can pipe the batter into a bowl or squeeze bottle as well. Go with what’s easy!

The hardest part out of all of this is figuring out what you want to top your pancakes with!  I vote for bacon and peanut butter with a drizzle of honey.