Making decent pancakes

Recently my knack for making pancakes seemed to have faded beyond recognition. A few weeks ago I made a batch that turned out depressingly heavy despite the detectability of the baking powder in the flavour (tasting baking powder and baking soda is one of my pet recipe peeves). It's true that I'm used to winging it a bit when it comes to proportions and maybe I've veered far enough off course to warrant an informed correction. By my tried-and-sometimes-successful method of trawling the internet for recipes that look about like what I think they should look like and then averaging them a bit, I hit upon a method that's turned out well twice in a row.

My net search yielded a plethora of similar recipes. It seems there should be just a bit less milk than flour, but there's not an agreement about the flour-to-egg ratio at all. Here are the approximate quantities I settled on:

1c flour

1tsp baking powder (leaning toward less)

dash salt

1tbsp or a bit more sugar

3/4c milk

2 eggs, separated

1tbsp butter (optional -- soften it first)

1tsp vanilla

The general method is this: combine the dry ingredients, except the sugar. Mash the butter into that if adding butter (I added butter the second time to see what it was like: it was fine either way). Whip the egg whites until foamy, and add the sugar to that. Mix the egg yolks and milk in with the dry stuff, add vanilla essence if desired, and finish with the whipped whites and sugar. Fry, obviously, hot enough to cook and not hot enough to burn. Also obviously, serve with maple syrup.

The pancakes turned out pleasingly fluffy and free of baking-powder taste. The quantities above (maybe a bit more) made three large pans of pancakes (I made two adjoining pancakes per pan, covering the whole pan surface) which was enough pancakes for two (one male, one female) to have a reasonable brunch, with something else available to top it up, like bacon or strawberries.

The big differences I can see between this and my old "method" are that I probably would have used more flour and milk per egg before, and that I have never whipped the whites before. I don't know if the latter step is crucial to the outcome or if it was just the proportions, but the results have made it worth my while to write it all down and refer to it -- and sort of measure quantities.

Another popular variation seems to be to use buttermilk instead of milk: looking for examples I searched for "pancakes light" and came upon this recipe posted by Jim Macdonald at Making Light.

I never have buttermilk in the house and I'm not sure whether or not it's easily available in the UK. (...tries to check for that on Tesco website, is prompted to register, tries bugmenot, gets DNS failure on www.bugmenot.com (?!?!?), tries Google's cache, gets some name/password combos that don't work, gives up, sorry Tesco, you seem determined to keep my potential business in the realm of the imagination, guess you don't need it anyway...)

Update: bugmenot reappeared: whew! There was one more login that wasn't in the cache, and it worked. Tesco had one brand of buttermilk in the catalogue, in a 284ml package. Now I feel obligated to check Waitrose. (...) No login required at least. Their offering is the same product. I won't bother checking other supermarkets: I checked Tesco because it's big and checked Waitrose as a sort of anti-Tesco.

So if I were the type of person that thinks about making pancakes ahead of time I might try the buttermilk variation.