Rye Pancakes with Lemon Butter Sauce

After my recent experiment with rye flour in muffins last week, I’m craving the taste of rye again — which is good because I now have a whole bag of Bob’s Red Mill dark rye flour in my cupboard. It’s a snowy (sort of) Saturday here in Brooklyn and I wanted pancakes, rye pancakes. This simple recipe made 5 small but very thick, fluffy, and hearty pancakes.

If your baking powder has aluminum in it (as the stuff I had been using until recently did) you may want to read David Leibovitz’s great article about why seeking out aluminum free baking powder – and keeping it fresh – is worth the trouble.

Rye Pancakes

Adapted from Food.com recipe #182315

• 1 cup rye flour
• ½ cup all-purpose flour
• 3 teaspoons baking powder
• dash of salt
• 1 tablespoon butter, melted
• 1 egg, beaten
• 1 cup milk

Combine the flours, baking powder, and salt in a large bowl.

Beat the egg in a medium bowl, then whisk in the melted butter and milk.

Stir wet ingredients into dry until just mixed.

Drop scoops of around 1/3 cup onto a hot, oiled skillet and cook a few minutes, until bubbles start to rise (because these were thick there weren’t many bubbles) or browned on one side, then flip and brown the other side. While the pancakes cook, start melting butter for this improv lemon butter sauce.

The light lemon and sugar flavors work really well on these hearty rye pancakes — and the apples = delicious.

Lemon Butter Sauce with Apples

• 4 tablespoons butter
• 4 tablespoons sugar
• one apple, chopped
• juice of one lemon

Melt the butter over low heat. Mix in the chopped apple pieces and let them heat up. Then stir in the sugar. Let it cook a few minutes, then squeeze in the lemon juice. It started smelling really delicious at this point.

I let it cook down a little bit, just a few minutes more while I finished up the last of the pancakes in the frying pan. The sauce was just starting to show a light browning when I considered it done and poured it over the pancakes. Yum!