Flapjacks are not pancakes!

[Ellyn]

Okay, well, technically, in some regions--they are. Flapjacks and pancakes refer to the same food, which is a somewhat runny dough of flour, sugar, salt, eggs, baking soda (which makes it bubbly inside unlike a crepe) and milk or water poured into a frying pan and turned over when golden-brown.

But a flapjack is also a bar of oats mixed with butter and syrup in a frying pan and then baked in an oven, as I have very recently discovered out of a passing curiosity as to why "pancakes" should be spelled so differently.

Now I wonder if there's a recipe out there that combines both sorts of flapjacks. Oat flour and whole porridge oats instead of flour, maybe... butter flavoring... and if made with an obanyaki pan, it could have a honey(comb) or syrup center.

Maybe with bacon or sausage bits. It will be like the ultimate breakfast! (Disregard this line, I'm just having fun getting carried away.)

 

[SatNavSaysStraightOn]

Where I grew up, pancakes are thin and the size of a dinner plate, served with lemon juice and sugar and rolled up to be eaten. They are made with wheat flour, eggs, milk & sugar.

Then there are Staffordshire/Derbyshire oatcakes (dinner plate sized, and thin) which are savoury, made with water, finely milled oatmeal and yeast. Served traditionally with cheese & bacon, melted over a huge (specially made) griddle that will take around 12 oatcakes. (At home you would just put them under a grill instead and like crumpets are best tasting when reheated...)

Then flapjacks are the sweet porridge oats, butter, oil, sugar recipe than gets baked in the oven and forms a chewy thick biscuit type.

Drop Scones appear to the closest thing to American pancakes that I can come up with, but then we also have pikelets as well which are another regional variation and at that point I have given up trying to identify what they approximate to! These are kind of a sweet and slightly thinner crumpet which is made with wheat flour, yeast & water and cooked over a griddle using a special crumpet ring and traditionally served with melted butter dripping through the holes!

Confused? You should be, because there are also Scottish Oatcakes to take into account which are a kind of savoury hard biscuit made of ground oatmeal (not porridge oats) butter, salt and baking powder.

I hope you have kept up there at the back... !

I'm sure I could come up with a few more if I try hard enough @welsh dragon can you think of any I have missed?

Edit: I have missed out tatty scones & potato farls, plus griddle scones (made with buttermilk)...

 

[Ellyn]

Ah, so for its shape, obanyaki would be closer to Japanese crumpet than Japanese pancake (which I thought it should be at first because it's sweet and uses pancake batter, but for some reason "Japanese pancake" searches lead me to okonomiyaki...which it's not! Okonomiyaki is salty! Where did that equivalence come from?? How on earth could it have caught on?)

(To be fair, thinking up equivalents is evidently tricky.)

Judging from those pictures, English pancakes have been what I've been making by accident all these years of trying to make American pancakes but putting too much butter in the pan and leaving off the leavening. I like that pancakes and Staffordshire/Derbyshire oatcakes seem flexible enough to be treated like crepes. American pancakes usually break if you try to roll them, which is no fun!

 

[Rickshaw Phil]

You didn't mention Welsh cakes @SatNavSaysStraightOn. Sort of like a drop scone, but with fruit in them.

Glad you mentioned the Staffordshire oatcakes - I love those!

 

[SatNavSaysStraightOn]

You didn't mention Welsh cakes @SatNavSaysStraightOn. Sort of like a drop scone, but with fruit in them.

Glad you mentioned the Staffordshire oatcakes - I love those!

How could I forget welsh cakes - humm - hate sultanas/currants etc when they are not the entire cakes, so never really got the hang of welsh cakes. Solid fruit cakes I can do, but even scones with dried fruit get to me!

But I could not miss Staffordshire oatcakes out - must try making some of my own again sometime soon. I grew up on them living in the Stoke-on-Trent area of the Potteries. Nowadays I prefer to fill them with curry or indian/dhal that I make at home...

I rather like la socca (chickpea flour pancakes) as well which I have recently taken to making with a touch of cumin in them and I also rather like dosa as well.

 

[Food4thought]

I like flapjacks made oats that also contain dried fruits and/or nuts. You can make chocolate flapjacks too, wither by adding chocolate drops or melting chocolate into the mix.

Mostly I like flapjacks made with nuts and raisins, or with dried apricot pieces. I also like cherry and cocnut flapjacks.

Pancakes I prefer to be plain and served with sweet or savory fillings. I used to eat out at a Dutch Pancake House which served pancakes filled with a wide range of fillings.

 

[firelily99]

Okay, well, technically, in some regions--they are. Flapjacks and pancakes refer to the same food, which is a somewhat runny dough of flour, sugar, salt, eggs, baking soda (which makes it bubbly inside unlike a crepe) and milk or water poured into a frying pan and turned over when golden-brown.

But a flapjack is also a bar of oats mixed with butter and syrup in a frying pan and then baked in an oven, as I have very recently discovered out of a passing curiosity as to why "pancakes" should be spelled so differently.

Now I wonder if there's a recipe out there that combines both sorts of flapjacks. Oat flour and whole porridge oats instead of flour, maybe... butter flavoring... and if made with an obanyaki pan, it could have a honey(comb) or syrup center.

Maybe with bacon or sausage bits. It will be like the ultimate breakfast! (Disregard this line, I'm just having fun getting carried away.)

Thank you for clearing that up. Pancakes are thinner batter and flap jacks have more substance. Its the oat bar that makes them that way and they are really good like that!

 

[Sweetkymom]

I actually never knew the difference and variations into all these different types. My neighbor always called her "pancakes" as flapjacks. I never knew or even tasted a difference as I ate them with butter and syrup. I honestly thought pancakes and flapjacks were the same. Now I know otherwise.

 

[Ellyn]

My neighbor always called her "pancakes" as flapjacks. I never knew or even tasted a difference as I ate them with butter and syrup. I honestly thought pancakes and flapjacks were the same. Now I know otherwise.

It just gets confusing because so many regions of the world speak English now so the same word could mean different things. Compare the American "condom" and English "eraser", both are colloquially "rubbers"--which can cause far more controversy in the confusion than expecting a tasty pancake and getting a tasty granola bar instead.

Pancakes being the same as flapjacks is correct in American English, and it's correct language if anybody else hears the word and you both know what it refers to, so both you and your neighbor were and are correct.

(Still, doesn't "drop scone" sound so much more economical and descriptive? Granted, it also sounds a bit like an accident that happened, but... I'll be using that from now on!) (No, no, wait... yeah, I'll go with flapjack. Because it sounds like a cool supervillain in a comic book. I want to eat supervillains for breakfast.)