Brown Banana Pancakes

Betsy and I are in the smoothie days of summer. We have a smoothie almost everyday for breakfast (this smoothie actually). Without fail, we will end the week with a few decrepit looking bananas hanging in our fruit bowl.

If you ask anyone what to do with these suckers, they will inevitably tell you to make banana bread with them.

That’s fine. Banana bread is good.

But what you should really be doing is making Brown Banana Pancakes with them.

Trust me on this one.

Brown Banana Pancakes

Go Bananas

It’s important to note that this Brown Banana Pancakes recipe will not work with normal bananas. They need to be near-black and really mushy.

You should be almost able to squirt them out of the banana skin. That’s the kind of ripeness we are going for here.

You’ll need about two bananas for this recipe, but you should measure your mush just to make sure it’s close to one cup.

Scoop these into a bowl and mix them like crazy with a fork.  This will turn them into some sort of strange banana slime that looks and feels gross but smells and tastes amazing.

Making the Batter

This is actually a pretty standard pancake batter. I cut back on the sugar and butter that I would normally use just because the bananas add a lot of sweetness and some moisture to the pancakes.

The dry stuff, besides the sugar, stays basically the same though.  Just mix up all of the dry stuff in a large bowl.

To your banana mush bowl, mix in the other liquid ingredients (milk, eggs, vanilla, melted butter).  Then pour the wet into the dry and just stir everything together!

The batter should be thick and a bit lumpy.

I always tell people not to stress to much about the consistency of pancake batter.  If you make one and it is too thick, just add more milk to thin it out.  It’s unlikely that your batter will be too thin to start unless you didn’t measure correctly.

I normally end up adding an extra 1/4 cup of milk to my batter after I test it out.

Also, it’s fine if your batter is a bit on the lumpy side since it has some banana chunks in it.

Cooking the Pancakes

Again, this is standard pancake business.  Heat your skillet or griddle to medium heat and add a teaspoon of butter to melt.  Once it’s melted, add your batter using about 1/3 of a cup per pancake.

I would recommend doing a tester pancake just to make sure your batter is the right consistency.

You’ll want to cook it for about 3 minutes on the first side. You know it’s ready to flip when the edges start to firm up a bit and there are large bubbles forming on the top of the pancake.

Moment of truth! Give it a flip!

My tester came out perfect so I knew I was ready to roll.

In all honestly, even though I make a lot of pancakes, I still normally screw up the first one.  Don’t let it get you down.

Assuming you have a decent sized griddle or skillet you can probably make more than one at a time once you know that your batter is good to go.

Serve these as soon as possible when they come off the heat.

I liked mine with some diced strawberries and a healthy drizzle of real maple syrup.

It’s kind of hard to see the bananas because they pretty much melt into the batter, but trust me.  You can smell them and taste them.

I’ve made a lot of pancakes over the years, but these were some of my favorite.

There’s nothing wrong with a good loaf of banana bread, but the next time you find yourself facing some brown bananas, give Brown Banana Pancakes a shot.