I Cooked Pancakes Every Single Weekend for a Year and Discovered the Easy Secret to Making Them Extra Fluffy

If it’s Saturday, I’m making pancakes. I could blame my two- and four-year-olds, but if I’m being totally honest, I look forward to that fluffy short stack all week. I love our easy oatmeal pancakes, Christine’s new-and-improved basic pancakes (she’s been making them for over 10 years!), and our fonio pancakes (they’re SO fluffy!). But the recipe I turn to most often is the winner of our most recent pancake recipe showdown. To find the best of the best, recipe developer and pancake aficionado Melissa Gaman tested six of the most famous recipes on the internet. The winner: Alison Roman’s buttermilk pancakes. 

Pancakes are highly subjective, and I know people have strong feelings about which recipes they use (or even which boxed mix is superior) — I’m not here to argue about what’s best. The thing I desperately want you to take away is this: If you’re making homemade pancakes, the very last thing you should stir into your batter is melted butter. Since learning this from Roman’s recipe, my pancakes have gotten 100x better. 

Here’s the thing. If you have time in the morning to let your eggs and buttermilk come to room temperature or let your melted butter cool down considerably, more power to you. Even pre-kids, I was never that person. So, when following the instructions to combine the milk, eggs, and butter, the butter would always seize and re-solidify. I’d tell myself it was okay, that the batter is supposed to be lumpy and those little butter shards would melt during cooking. 

But then I read Gaman’s review of Roman’s recipe and everything changed. The fix for my problem: simply add the melted butter last. “ This added step helps prevent the butter from seizing in the cold dairy. The batter wasn’t completely smooth — it still had a few small lumps you expect in a pancake batter — but everything was well dispersed,” she says. 

I’ve done it this way ever since, and my pancakes are definitely fluffier, probably because I’m not feeling the need to stir the pancake batter quite as much. The batter also has a better consistency and each pancake comes out (and tastes) the same. I’ve always loved eating pancakes, but now I enjoy cooking them even more.

Have you heard of adding the butter last? I’d love to hear what other pancake tips you have!