I customized this recipe for pink beet pancakes a little, as I wanted to use a little less sugar, but the result is still sweet enough because of the roasted beets always slightly caramelize.
While my in-laws were visiting for the Holidays, I wanted to pull something really impressive out of the bag for breakfast, and remembered a pancake recipe that I’d seen in the excellent book on baking, Good To The Grain, by Kim Boyce. It’s for beet pancakes, and just by virtue of the way they looked, I wanted to give them a go. I also got a huge bunch of beets in my farm box and no one was in the mood for a beet salad.
I highly recommend roasting a bunch of beets the day before, because you can always use the rest of them for other recipes.
Suffice to say, my in-laws were tickled pink (sorry!) by the color and couldn’t believe how wonderful they tasted – a sweet earthiness provided by the beets and the quinoa flour – spectacular and well worth the extra bit of effort.
This recipes for pink beet pancakes serves four.
Ingredients
- 2 medium beets
- 1/2 cup quinoa flour (if you can’t get hold of this, use whole wheat instead.)
- 1/2 cup wholewheat flour
- 1 cup all-purpose flour
- 1tbsp Coconut Palm Sugar (I love this because it’s low -glycemic and deliciously nutty, but use an extra tbsp of maple syrup if you can’t find it.)
- 2tbsp maple syrup
- 1tbsp baking powder
- 3/4 tsp salt
- 1 1/2 cups of whole milk (or soy if you prefer)
- 1/3 cup plain yogurt
- 1tbsp unsalted butter, melted and cooled (you can substitute with Earth Balance, but it won’t taste as good!)
- 1 egg
Instructions
- Pre-heat oven to 400 degrees F
- Roughly wash your beets, cutting off tops and lay them on a foil lined baking sheet. Bake for about one hour or until they are tender when a knife is inserted. Leave to cool and then wrap in foil and refrigerate until you are ready to use them.
- When you are ready, peel them – the skins come off easily, and roughly chop them. You then want to puree them. I used my Magic Bullet, which worked great. You need to end up with about 1/2 cup of puree.
- Place the dry ingredients in a large bowl.
- In another bowl, whisk the milk, yogurt, butter, egg and beet puree.
- Fold the wet ingredients into the dry, until you have a batter which should be the consistency of heavy cream – bright pink too!
- Heat a griddle or frying pan and melt a little butter making sure it had evenly covered the bottom of the pan. Add a ladle at a time of batter to the pan, creating the size of pancake you want.
- When bubbles appear in the top, flip them over and fry until the bottom is golden brown.
- Keep them warm in the oven and serve topped with either butter, a dollop of virgin coconut oil and maple syrup or agave nectar – heavenly!
- Enjoy your pink beet pancakes!
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