The Secret to Better Blueberry Pancakes Year-Round

One of my daughter’s favorite Trader Joe’s buys is a bag of dried berries. (This likely correlates to another passion of hers, Starbucks, and the dried strawberry slices swimming in their “Refreshers.”) At home, these berries won’t find their way into a drink or a baked good; they’re simply a snack.

But after listening to Julia Sherman on our podcast, Play Me a Recipe, I discovered a new, more interesting vehicle for dried berries: Pancakes.

The buckwheat pancakes from Julia’s cookbook, Arty Parties, is unlike any pancake I’ve ever met. Instead of flour, or even buckwheat flour, she uses buckwheat groats. This gluten-free berry of the buckwheat plant (whose toasted cousin is kasha, found in some of your beloved cereal brands) is less bitter than buckwheat flour—the first tip I learned from her Easter-egg-filled recipe. Soaked overnight, they become soft enough to blend, as she instructs, with dates, bananas, and almond extract, an addition I love more than almonds themselves. (Just be sure to give those groats a really good swirl in their soaking water and then pulverize them completely in the blender—a few hard, errant groats caught me by surprise in one of my pancakes.)

The dried blueberries get a short, rehydrating dunk in boiling water before adding them to the batter, which yields a slightly sweet, nutty pancake with deep berry flavor. I also added paper-thin slices of dried strawberries straight into the batter—no soaking first—for even more fruit in each bite.

Julia says Heidi Swanson turned her on to using dried berries in baking, which now she prefers over fresh. As she says in the episode, “It really is awesome the way that it adds intense, amplified berry flavor, without adding any moisture.” I personally love those little puddles of plump, burst berries when using fresh fruit. But winter is coming, and dried berries are a great failsafe—the second key takeaway. Tip number three? Julia keeps the berry-soaking liquid to sweeten teas and other drinks.

I learned two more tricks from this one recipe: ghee works even better than butter to cook and crisp pancakes around the edges, and Julia’s utensil of choice to flip them is a fish spatula. I don’t have one, but I imagine it would be a more nimble instrument.

These pancakes are such a staple in Julia’s home, and were such a large part of her diet while pregnant, she jokes in the episode that her son is 90 percent buckwheat pancake. But her storage method for any remaining batter—her fridge, for up to a week—gave me pause, so I froze my leftover batter to be safe.

For her own family, she halves this recipe, which was developed with company in mind. It comes from her cookbook devoted to entertaining, and one thing she says she likes to do is have people over for pancakes, and invite them to bring their favorite toppings—a kind of DIY pancake party.

“You’ll find that people have very passionate feelings about what should go into a pancake or on top of a pancake,” she says. I followed Julia’s suggestion to try yogurt, my daughter chose standard-issue maple syrup. Hers was the better choice.

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What are your favorite pancake tricks? Let us know below!