BLT Cornmeal Pancakes – a breakfast twist on a BLT

This is probably the most fun breakfast I’ve made in a very long time. I was flipping through a magazine at the gym the other day and saw a picture here of a BLT corn cake and got the idea to make my own. This is a very creative and usual twist on a bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich, the all time best sandwich in the whole wide world as far as I’m concerned.

The day we made these we invited Meakin’s brother Stuart for breakfast. I’m the first to admit that this is an unusual breakfast and I could tell by the look on both of their faces that they weren’t so sure if they were going to like this for breakfast. Being a good hostess, before I served I asked if they wanted theirs stacked, or the bacon and tomato on the side. They chose bacon & tomato on the side. When we sat down, I took a couple of bites of mine, stacked like the pictures, and commented, “These are really good.” They took a few bites of their tomatoes and bacon with the cornmeal pancakes and agreed they were excellent and gave their stamp of approval.

Let’s deconstruct the stack.

These savory cornmeal pancakes are the star of this show and act as the bread for the BLT. I added lightly blanched fresh corn kernels to the pancake batter to pump up the corn flavor. If you’ve been reading My Carolina Kitchen for a while, you may remember these cornmeal pancakes from a previous post.

B is for bacon. We chose thick cut apple-wood smoked bacon from Nueske’s, our family's go-to favorite for the apple-wood flavor. When we’re in the mood for a hickory smoked flavor, we always use Benton’s country bacon from Tennessee. We’ve actually toured Benton’s smoke house in Madisonville when were coming home from a blogger get-together at Larry’s, aka Big Dude’s Eclectic Ramblings, house one year, post here. If you’ve never been inside of a smoke house, do take a look. If you have reluctant diners, you might tempt them to eat this BLT stack by using candied bacon, recipe below. The sweetness of the candied bacon will make up for the syrup normally served over pancakes.

L is for lettuce. We replaced the lettuce with big leaves of fresh basil, picked straight from our herb garden. With all of the rain we’ve been having, our basil has grown like a weed.

T is for tomato. Cherokee purple heirloom tomatoes are our favorite heirloom, but any good homegrown or garden fresh tomato will work. As you will notice in the pictures (your eyes aren’t deceiving you), the Cherokee Purples are a purplish red wine colored tomato, instead of being a brilliant red.

You’ll notice that the stacks of pancakes lean slightly instead of standing up straight. As much as I tried to straighten them for the picture, the tomatoes keep sliding and it ended up looking like the leaning tower of Pisa. Oh well… not quite perfect makes them look more homemade.

BLT Cornmeal Pancakes
Inspired from Better Homes & Garden, serves 4 – 1 stack each

1 recipe of savory corneal pancakes, recipe below
8 slices of thick bacon, apple-wood or hickory smoked, or candied bacon, recipe below
8 slices of tomato, preferably an heirloom
Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
A small bunch of fresh basil
For garnish, cooked corn kernels, grape tomato halves, and small fresh basil leaves
Sweet butter or syrup if desired

Prepare the cornmeal pancake recipe and keep the cakes warm in the oven while you fry the bacon and slice the tomatoes. Season the tomatoes with plenty of salt and freshly ground black pepper. To assemble, start with a pancake, then a couple of big basil leaves, a slice of tomato (you may have to trim it to fit), and a half of a piece of bacon. Repeat and top with a cornmeal pancake. Garnish if desired and serve with butter or syrup. Recipe easily doubles if you have those who want more than one stack. Left-over pancakes keep well in the refrigerator for a couple of days using the method below.
 

Savory Cornmeal Pancakes
Adapted from Joy of Cooking – yield twelve 4” cakes

1 cup yellow cornmeal
1 teaspoon salt
¾ teaspoon sugar
1 cup boiling water
1 large egg
½ cup milk
2 tablespoons canola oil
½ cup all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 cup cooked yellow corn kernels
Sweet butter for serving, optional

Combine the cornmeal, salt and sugar in a large bowl. Pour boiling water over the mixture, stir well, cover and set aside for 15 minutes. In a separate bowl beat the egg, milk and oil until combined. After 15 minutes, add to the cornmeal mixture and stir until smooth. Meanwhile in a small bowl, combine flour and baking powder. Stir into the hot cornmeal mixture, then add corn.

Heat a pancake griddle or 12” lightly oiled skillet until hot. Drop the batter by spoonfuls onto the griddle. When the pancakes begins to bubble in the center and start to dry around the edges, turn and cook until done. The second side takes only about half as long as the first side and never browns as evenly, so serve them first side up.

Remove the cakes and keep in a warm oven while you make the remaining cakes. When all pancakes are done, serve immediately with sweet butter if desired.

For leftover pancakes: I cut small pieces of wax paper, place the paper between each cake and refrigerate them in a covered airtight container. The next morning reheat the pancakes on a sheet pan in a 250 degree F oven for about 10 minutes until they are warm. They are every bit as good as the originals.

Candied Bacon
From Better Homes & Garden

Line a 15x10x1 inch pan with foil. Arrange bacon strips about 1 ½” apart. In a small bowl, stir together 3 T packed brown sugar and ¼ teaspoon cayenne pepper, then spoon mixture evenly over the bacon. Bake for 14 to 16 minutes, until bacon is browned & crisp. Transfer to a paper towel to cool. Halve slices. Great for nibbling.

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This will be shared with Foodie Friday at Rattlebridge Farms, Miz Helen’s Country Kitchen Full Plate Thursday, Foodie Friday at Simple Recipes, Foodtastic Friday at Not Your Ordinary Recipes, and Seasonal Sunday at the Tablescaper.

Have a great weekend everyone.

Start your morning off right with this 3 ingredient Cranberry Maple Syrup

If you are as fond of cranberries as I am, you will love this recipe for cranberry maple syrup. The tartness of the cranberries is offset with the sweetness of the maple syrup, making this a very versatile year-around syrup for pancakes. With only 3 ingredients, it couldn't be more simple.

I actually hoard cranberries in my freezer and use them throughout the year. For this recipe frozen cranberries work just as well as fresh ones. Be sure to use the best quality maple syrup you can find, because the imitation syrup, to my taste, has a faux flavor and not worth using.

I’ve served the syrup over cornmeal pancakes, but use any pancake you like. Wattles would also be delicious. If you are looking for a homemade gift idea, the deep ruby red syrup would be very festive in a pretty glass jar tied with a holiday ribbon.

Enjoy!

Cranberry Maple Syrup
Coastal Living Magazine – yield 1 cup

¾ cup pure maple syrup
1 cup fresh or frozen cranberries, divided
1 tablespoon unsalted butter

Bring maple syrup and 3/4 cup cranberries to a boil over medium-high heat. Reduce heat to low, and simmer 3 minutes or until cranberries pop. Crush cranberries in saucepan using a spatula or potato masher. Stir in remaining 1/4 cup cranberries; simmer just until they begin to pop (about 2 minutes). Remove from heat, add butter, and stir until melted. Keeps well covered in the refrigerator.

Printable recipe

Cornmeal Pancakes
Adapted from Joy of Cooking – yield twelve 4” cakes

1 cup yellow cornmeal
1 teaspoon salt
¾ teaspoon sugar
1 cup boiling water
1 large egg
½ cup milk
2 tablespoons canola oil or other neutral flavored oil
½ cup all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder

Combine the cornmeal, salt, and sugar in a large bowl. Pour boiling water over the mixture, stir will, cover and set aside for 15 minutes.

In a separate bowl, beat the eggs, milk, and oil until combined. After 15 minutes, add the cornmeal mixture from above and stir until smooth.

Meanwhile in a small bowl, combine the flour and baking powder. Stir into the hot cornmeal mixture. If the mixture seems a little thick, stir in a bit of milk.

Heat a pancake griddle or 12” lightly oiled skillet until hot. Drop the pancake batter by spoonful’s onto the griddle. When the pancakes begin to bubble in the center and start to dry around the edges, turn and cook until done. The second side takes only about half as long as the first side and never browns as evenly, so serve them first side up.

Remove the cakes from the griddle and keep warm in a pre-heated 200 degree F oven while you make the remaining cakes. Do not stack the cakes or they will become soggy. When all of the pancakes are done, serve immediately.

Printable recipe

This recipe will be shared with Foodie Friday at Designs by Gollum and Pink Saturday at How Sweet the Sound.

It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas at the Waterside Shops in Naples, Florida. I hope you’ll enjoy this glimpse of the lovely holiday decorations among the swaying palm trees and beautiful water fountains at this very classy, best-in-class shopping destination that features such stores as Nordstrom, Hermes, Louis Vuitton, Tiffany, Kate Spade, Michael Kors, Salvatore Ferragamo, Guicci, Cartier, De Beers, and Saks Fifth Avenue. Whoever said you can't get in the holiday spirit in sunny Florida hasn't been to the Waterside shops.

Make your own homemade pancake mix and fill with freshly picked, sweet and juicy North Carolina blueberries & topped with blueberry syrup

A while back a blogger friend showed us the inside her pantry, but apologized for having Bisquick on her shelf. She said her children beg for pancakes, so she kept a mix handy. I sent her an email and asked why she didn’t just make her own mix. It’s so easy, much less expensive, and requires only eight ingredients, all of which are either in your pantry or in your refrigerator.

While we don’t personally have an objection to using Bisquick and occasionally use it ourselves, the partially hydrogenated oil found in the list of ingredients is reason enough to make your own mix. You’ll find a recipe for pancakes (or they're sometimes called griddle cakes) in any basic cookbook, such as The Joy of Cooking or Fannie Farmer. In How to Cook Everything author Mark Bittman says about his basic pancake mix recipe, "Americans must have been sadly alienated from the kitchen for pancake mixes to ever have gained a foothold in the market, for these are ridiculously easy to make."

Roadside farm stands here in the mountains of North Carolina are selling fresh, juicy, sweet blueberries, some for as little as fifty cents a box. As you know from my last post, we buy fresh and local whenever we can. We probably ought to have a bumper sticker (if I didn’t dislike stickers so much) on our car saying, “We break for farm stands.”  Sometimes they taste so good we eat the entire box in the car on the way home, but today we intentionally saved some for blueberry pancakes.

My husband Meakin made these delightful cakes for breakfast and topped them with luscious blueberry syrup that puts them over the top in taste. Enjoy.

Homemade pancake mix with fresh blueberries & Meakin's blueberry syrup
Adapted from The Fannie Farmer Cookbook

Dry ingredients:
1 cup all purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
2 tablespoons sugar
½ teaspoon salt

In a bowl, mix all of the dry ingredients together with a whisk. Store in an air-tight container until you’re ready to make pancakes.

Liquid ingredients:
½ - ¾ cup milk at room temperature
2 tablespoon sweet butter, melted
1 large egg, beaten to blend
½ to ¾ cup fresh blueberries

To add the liquid ingredients, whisk together the milk, butter and egg lightly in a separate bowl. Start out using ½ cup milk. You can always add more if necessary. Add the premixed dry ingredients all at once to the wet mixture, stirring just enough to dampen the flour. Add the blueberries, but don’t over mix.

Lightly grease a griddle or frying pan and set over moderate heat until a few drops of cold water tossed in the pan begin to sizzle and dance about. Drop about 2 to 3 tablespoons of the batter onto the pan. Cook until the tops of the cakes are full of bubbles, slightly dry on the edges, and the undersides are lightly browned.

Flip cakes over and cook the other side until done. Place finished cakes on an ovenproof plate in a warm, 200 degree F oven until you have enough to begin to serve. Top with a pat of butter and Meakin's blueberry syrup (recipe below). Makes 2 to 4 servings.

Meakin's Blueberry Syrup

1/3 cup fresh blueberries
¼ cup water
2 – 3 tablespoons sugar (depending on the sweetness of the berries)
1 slice (not chopped) of fresh gingerroot, about 1/8” thick
1 tablespoon honey

In a saucepan add all of the ingredients except the honey. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat to medium low and simmer until the blueberries have burst and you have a syrupy consistency. Remove and discard the slice of gingerroot. Add the honey and serve warm over buttered pancakes.

Savory cornmeal pancakes with warm tomato salad and organic greens

I enjoy adapting recipes to suit my taste and needs. I was flipping through an old Gourmet and saw a wonderful idea for lunch – Corn Fritters with Arugula and Warm Tomato Salad. Corn meal pancakes, slathered with butter and maple syrup or honey, are a favorite breakfast in my husband’s family and he frequently asks for them in the mornings. He loves to reminisce about Gramps, his grandfather, and how he loved to cook. But after Gramps finished, the kitchen would look like a bomb went off. The first time I made corn meal pancakes I messed up every bowl in the kitchen and, when we sat down to eat, I said, “Don’t go in the kitchen, it look like Gramps was there.”

The idea of turning sweet breakfast pancakes into savory ones and having them for lunch intrigued me. The fritters in the magazine recipe turned out dry and had a raw cornmeal flavor. We critiqued them, which we often do with meals, and decided to give a new twist to our old stand-by cornmeal pancake recipe from Joy of Cooking. In Joy’s recipe the cornmeal is covered with boiling water for 15 minutes and looses it raw taste.

The most important addition we made was to add freshly cooked corn kernels, which was not in the Gourmet recipe. The addition of the corn lifted the pancakes to a whole new level. Grilled corn would have given it even more depth of flavor. Since we were making a savory pancake I also reduced the sugar in the original recipe and also substituted canola for the melted butter in the batter.

We served the pancakes for lunch with an organic green salad mix tossed with my house mustard vinaigrette and roasted grape tomatoes that I salted and peppered and baked in a 400 degree F oven for 10 minutes, then sprinkled with chopped fresh basil right before serving.

Our new savory cornmeal pancake version came out terrific, but we had leftovers. We could have eaten the entire dozen between the two of us, but decided to watch our waistlines and experiment with saving the leftovers similar to how we save crepes. The experiment was a success – yielding great left over pancakes. I cut small pieces of wax paper, placed it between each cake and refrigerated them in a covered airtight container. The next morning we reheated the pancakes on a sheet pan in a 250 degree F oven for about 10 minutes until they were warm. They were every bit as good as the originals. Now we have a new savory recipe converted from an old sweet favorite and a great new way to save the leftover pancakes for another meal.

Cornmeal pancakes

Adapted from Joy of Cooking

Yield: Twelve 4” cakes

1 cup yellow cornmeal

1 teaspoon salt

¾ teaspoon sugar

1 cup boiling water

1 large egg

½ cup milk

2 tablespoons canola oil

½ cup all-purpose flour

2 teaspoons baking powder

1 cup cooked yellow corn kernels

Sweet butter for serving, optional

Combine the cornmeal, salt and sugar in a large bowl. Pour boiling water over the mixture, stir well, cover and set aside for 15 minutes.

In a separate bowl beat the egg, milk and oil until combined. After 15 minutes, add to the cornmeal mixture and stir until smooth. Meanwhile in a small bowl, combine flour and baking powder. Stir into the hot cornmeal mixture, then add corn and mix well.

Heat a pancake griddle or 12” lightly oiled skillet until hot. Drop the batter by spoonfuls onto the griddle. When the pancakes begins to bubble in the center and start to dry around the edges, turn and cook until done. The second side takes only about half as long as the first side and never browns as evenly, so serve them first side up.

Remove the cakes and keep warm in a 200 degree F oven while you make the remaining cakes. Do not stack or they will become soggy. When all pancakes are done, serve immediately with sweet butter if desired. Save leftovers as described above.