Show HN: I Derived a Pancake
absurdlyoptimized.comAfter 25 years of making other people's pancake recipes - always yearning for more tang, more fluff, and more predictability - I decided to derive the pancake recipe from the chemistry.
You mark checkboxes for what you have on hand (ricotta, sour cream, kefir, buttermilk, yogurt, cottage cheese, lemon, cream of tartar, etc.) and it computes the best recipe based on targets for acid, fat, salt, sugar, and CO2.
My particular favorite are the yeast-raised lemon ricotta kefir pancakes - the best I've ever had.
The math is done in a small pure-ESM library: ingredient composition to component masses and acid moles, a stoichiometry layer, and a bisection solver for the target deficits.
I'm not a chemist, so if something is off, tell me and I will fix it! Perhaps you could add a classic Swedish take on pancakes/crepes - whisk a moderate numbers of eggs with milk (4 eggs for every litre of milk is a good starting point, but dealers choice), flour until a nice consistency, fry in a pan until they're your chosen colour of done. Serve with strawberry jam, or any sweet condiment of your choice. Edit: Also, what in the name of all that's holy - looking beyond the generator, this entire article is amazing. Absurd level of detail for pancakes, yes, but amazing. Love it, thanks! I used to have a "fluffiness" slider that I could bring back to power this. I haven't researched Swedish pancakes yet but are they leavened at all? No, not at all. They're a classic comfort food, usually made quite thin, but not thin enough to be called crepes, and I'd wager most people don't learn through a recipe, but, similar to you, it's some of the first things you're taught to make. There's also another classic, this time leavened - the oven-baked pancake, which is a little closer to the American pan-fried, but with pieces of salted pork, served with lingon berry jam. Eggs, milk, flour, baking powder (ratio to taste), salted pork; bake in a tall container at 180-220C (again, to your preferred crispiness and colour). In the end, you should have something almost akin to a pudding, Fluffiness depends on baking powder, of course, and temperature. Ah, I know about these big tall pancakes! I've had something like that in the Netherlands and grew up eating something like it too. I'll soon add a fluffiness slider back in so that at the lowest end, it tries to produce something close to crêpes, and you can tell me if it is like the Swedish recipes. Thanks for the international perspective! I was thought the 112 emergency pancake recipe as a kid: 1 egg, 1dl flour, 2dl milk. I have made the almost blasphemous modification of adding a pinch of cardamom to the batter, it's delicious! Looking forward to trying your derived American pancakes this weekend! This calculator is awesome, thanks for doing this! Skip the AI slop calculator and go straight to this recipe.
This recipe is war-hardened. Yields: Approximately 5 6 in/6cm pancakes (Serves 2–3) Ingredient | Measurement All-purpose flour (type 00 flower works well) | 210 g (1 ½ cups) Sugar | 50 g (¼ cup) Baking soda/backnatron | 5–10 g (2 tsp) Butter | 55 g (¼ cup), plus extra for the pan Vanilla | 5–10 g (2 tsp) Large eggs | 2 Whole milk | 245 g / 240 ml (1 cup) Fresh berries | As desired (blueberries, raspberries, blackberries) Instructions Prep: Preheat your frying pan over medium heat. Grease the surface lightly with butter or oil. Combine: In a bowl, whisk together the flour, sugar, and baking soda. In a separate container, whisk the eggs, milk, melted butter, and vanilla. Gently stir the wet ingredients into the dry until just combined. Cook: Ladle one soup ladle of batter into the hot pan. Add Berries: Drop a few fresh berries onto the top of the cooking pancake. Flip: Cook until bubbles have popped and stopped forming, then flip. Adjust heat if necessary: If the pancake is slightly burnt, reduce the heat. Cook until golden brown. A ten hour wait doesn't really strike me as a pancake? You should have a "it's 730am, there's four screaming girls, only two of which are related to me, the dogs are begging for scraps, and the demand for pancakes has crossed into Veblen goods territory." Haha, just for you - check out the new checkbox at the bottom of the form: https://www.absurdlyoptimized.com/recipes/pancakes/?have=&eg... I'll leave the rounding of the absurdly precise ingredients to you. :) The default has the 'tang' slider at maximally tangy, which is where the yeast and wait come in. If you back off on that the recipe looks more like the standard quickbread I'm used to. The yeast and ferment is going to make it more acidic, and more tender because the gluten will be weakened. I imagine you could use cake flour instead and get close to the same tenderness, but the flavor would be different. Maybe add a time-to-pancake slider? The good thing about that scenario is no matter how the pancakes come out, you've already won One size doesn't fit all. By your logic, homemade sourdough isn't bread, you should have packaged Wonder bread. Keep a box of Krusteaz in the pantry for the kid sleepovers, prepare the night before for an adult brunch. Man, at the rate I can generate pancakes I fear four children would murder me and just drink the batter raw. Though maybe I'd buy a second pan in advance xD It depends. The inspiration sometimes comes after a Saturday evening with friends and lots of drinks. Having a foolproof recipe comes in handy, and having the perfect stress-free pancake batter already made the next morning turns you into a household hero. If you know the kids are going to want pancakes in the morning you just prepare it at night? You can ask them to confirm over dinner... While I can confirm sourdough pancakes are quite nice, I am satisfied with Krusteaze :) Actually, the whole website is fire. There are articles on the same level on how to select T-shirts and pants. This is the second time I see a reviewer online doing the thing that was common a couple decades ago: actually doing the research. I love the precision of this. I have one daughter who must avoid dairy and egg so we’ve experimented with various substitutes. The “creamy” oat milk works well. For eggs, we’ve found bob’s red mill egg replacer to work great with almost no discernible taste difference. The trick is mixing it with water in a separate little bowl and waiting 2-3 minutes. Too long and it gets overly gelatinous and won’t mix in well but too little waiting makes it too watery and you’ll get flat pancakes. Well I have a new favorite website. I don’t know the last time that I read something that was so thoroughly and multidimensionally my shit. Not actually measuring crispness when you self report having the perfect equipment to do so is a cruel, cruel tease though. Hahaha, glad you're enjoying it as much as I did! I will have to add a crispness slider and then validate it with expensive audio equipment. There's a whole lot of "I" in this post for something you didn't do. Why are you taking credit for Claude's work? What makes you feel entitled to say "I did this thing" when Claude did the thing? Claude is a tool in the hands of the person using it. If you built a cabinet using power tools would you say the drill and saw built the cabinet? Or that you did? I find it irritating when people send me a code review and say that Claude wrote the code. No, you wrote the code, you are responsible for the code. You can't blame Claude if it's crap and you don't have to credit Claude if it's genius. Claude is not a person. I want to like this but it reads like Claude output, how much scrutiny did this get for accuracy? This was my immediate thought too. The same website has at least a dozen similar articles written over the past week, all with this same AI tone. In the same week: https://www.absurdlyoptimized.com/recipes/grilled-meats/
http://absurdlyoptimized.com/recipes/brisket/
https://www.absurdlyoptimized.com/recipes/french-fries/
https://www.absurdlyoptimized.com/recipes/miso-salmon/ Parametric recipes are fun idea. I almost want to try them, but the sheer volume of content by one author gives me no reason to trust this will be any good. Did the author actually try these recipes? Unless the author was cooking and writing 24/7 or just had a massive backlog of publishing, it's hard to trust anything here (although I'm sure most people will.) The picture provided doesn't inspire much confidence in their ability to make pancakes, especially after "25" years. They are burnt, sad-looking pancakes. > it reads like Claude output Yep. From the site's about page: > This site is produced with substantial help from large language models: they assist with the literature search, the drafting, and the arithmetic. https://www.absurdlyoptimized.com/about/ > how much scrutiny did this get for accuracy? The inclusion of references without hyperlinks suggests it wasn't thoroughly checked: they were probably put there by Claude, and as they aren't links the author probably hasn't read them (they could possibly have read them in hard-copy at a library, but given the rate at which articles were produced this seems very unlikely). (One such reference is 17 - "Weijers, M. et al. “Heat-induced denaturation and aggregation of ovalbumin at neutral pH described by irreversible first-order kinetics.” Protein Science 12(12): 2693–2703, 2003") FWIW, the author writes: > " Ovalbumin coagulates irreversibly at 80°C (Weijers et al., 2003), permanently setting the foam structure.", and the paper by Weijers et al. says: > "A strong temperature dependence on the reaction rate was observed. At 80°C, half of the protein was denatured and aggregated in less than 2 min (half-time, th), while at 68.5°C this took approximately 6 h." So, the citation is generally true-ish although a little bit imprecise. At which temperature range Ovalbumin coagulates seems quite irrelevant for the whole article, however. To me it's unnecessary fluff, others might like that kind of detail. (This does not imply anything regarding the article as a whole - it's just one thing I checked.) Addendum: > "Cast iron and carbon steel have nearly identical thermal conductivity (~52 W/m·K), which surprises most people." is unsourced. And the precise "~52" is quite misleading - Wikipedia and online sources report thermal conductivities in the range of ~30-50¹. Also: > "Critically, whipped egg white foam drainage follows a hyperbolic saturation curve: v = V × t / (B + t), where V is the maximum drained volume and B is the drainage half-life (Lomakina & Mikova, 2006)." As far as I can tell, the article² (cited twice for this claim) does not contain any equations modelling drainage over time, and especially not this equation or the term "hyperbolic". So, it seems that you cannot really trust the sources the author's LLM included.
For me, that means that I cannot trust any of the other claims in the article (or the author in general). ¹) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_thermal_conductivities ²) https://www.agriculturejournals.cz/pdfs/cjf/2006/03/02.pdf Similarly, the kite article [1] states that: > The angle of attack, α, is the angle between the kite’s sail and the incoming wind. As α increases from zero, C_L increases approximately linearly until a critical angle (typically 12–18 degrees for flat surfaces), beyond which the airflow separates from the upper surface and the kite stalls (DT Online, 2024). The supporting reference is [2]; this doesn't refer to a linear releationship or a critical angle, but does say that the angle of attack is typically 20 to 30 degrees (contradicting the claim that a kite would stall if the angle is above 12-18 degrees). So I agree that this website does not seem trustworthy. Specific claims may or may not be correct, but they're not supported by the presented references. [1]: https://www.absurdlyoptimized.com/outdoors/kids-kite/#ref-7 We’re using vastly different models, then, because it doesn’t read like any generated text I’ve seen before. What models are you using? This looks incredibly similar to the outputs I get from Claude with default system prompt settings. - First, take a look at the other articles. There are 30+ articles all with the same author published this week on topics from cooking to home appliances. Either he's extremely prolific or had help. - There's so much click-baity LLM language: "The radial gradient: why edges undercook on every hob" "What “crispy” actually means: acoustic fracture mechanics" "What Actually Matters" It's clear to me that at least some of this is LLM generated, so all of it might as well be. "The three effects are not separable knobs. You cannot dial in one without moving the other two. The browning claim is the contested one, so it is worth pinning down. " Is classic Claude-speak. Awesome work. I'm really interested in the parametric-driven recipe card. I wanted to do something like this for bread recipes where you can tweak the hydration / salt levels to alter the recipe but still get a traditional recipe card. I would be really curious to hear about the approach in more detail. Thanks a lot! Good idea re bread - can you link me to your favorite more general recipes that show all the extremes/variables? I've skimmed some bread textbooks re enriched doughs and have made some Italian breads with sourdough starters, enriched doughs like challah, and once tried the NYT Dutch oven bread, but I don't make bread as often as I make pancakes. The Sourdough Framework[0] is a really good book that specifically deals with sourdough, but has some good maths and theory. It actually doesn't have many recipes, but it's a good read. The author has a pizza calculator[1] too, which only has two variables (dough weight and hydration). The article mentions tang repeatedly as if it's a positive thing. Maybe I don't know what tang is, but shouldn't pancakes be sweet and not tangy? why sugar is included by default ? i mean i know american pancakes are meant to be sweet, but in other parts of the world they're consumed neutral at worst, often salty. Interesting, experimented plenty over the years but never rigorously enough to arrive at a conclusive recipe. Temperature control is always a challenge. You've covered dairy and acid ingredients, but I honestly have no idea what "Unrendered Berkshire pork fat" is or where I would get it. Is that bacon grease? Saltpork? Lard is common but rendered. For us vegetarians/vegans, butter (preferably clarified) or coconut oil. Thanks! It's entire chunks of fat from a Berkshire pig. Lard works too and is what you get when you render pork fat, but the rendering removes some flavor. I'll update the recipe. Probably suet, which is raw and found around kidneys and loins. Yes! The world needs more Parametric-driven recipes. This is fantastic. Love it. Funny. When you input only milk and soy milk, it ignores the soy. If only soy, suddenly the butter needs to be vegan. This is great but at this point you should also give the calories since you have all the precise ingredients I would love to see the gluten and dairy free pancake recipe incorporated into this one for additional customizability. For example, what if I’m gluten free but not dairy free? Or happen to only have soy milk on the day but I’ve got plenty of butter? Nice... Would be interesting to connect this to pancakebot.com Hilarious, thanks for pointing me to that! I like the table layout, with ingredients in a column, and rows being steps. It feels like a "best of both worlds" solution. I'd kind of like to have a list of "baseline required" ingredients though too, to know what to keep around. Thanks! The layout was inspired by the way my mother recopied her recipes. When I first saw how most recipe books wrote recipes, I was so confused! As for baseline ingredients, it's basically (any liquidy dairy) + (everything else in the recipe). I'll think on how to present this better, thanks for the feedback! Obviously you ripped it off from my comment a while back https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42121502 :) Seriously though, it's a good format! It works! Looks great, but why isn't there a checkbox to turn off the chunk of pork fat? I use avocado oil, personally. Wow. I really like this, but I want it to support non-dairy options. Plus one! Good idea, added! If you have only vegan dairy checked, it'll go for vegan butter too. :) https://www.absurdlyoptimized.com/recipes/pancakes/?have=soy... There’s many brand and formula of those butter. For more predictability, raw ingredients might be coco oil, coco butter or Shea butter. By the way my favorite pancakes are made with tofu and/or silken tofu. This is awesome, chefsteps should hire you to do their parametric recipes. > My particular favorite are the yeast-raised lemon ricotta kefir pancakes - the best I've ever had. As a lemon ricotta pancake and yeast enthusiast, I look forward to trying your recipe! Thanks for sharing! This is wonderful. Could you add European-style (i.e. non-Greek) yogurt as an option? That's what I most often have on hand. Done, let me know how it turns out! https://www.absurdlyoptimized.com/recipes/pancakes/?have=pla... Thank you!! This is what life is about right here What a site, good work mate Relevant: The Breakfast Simplex (https://moultano.wordpress.com/2026/02/22/the-hunt-for-dark-...) A wonderful, inspiring site. Thank you. Neat. Now do it for gluten free flour[1] :) this is the go-to recipe in my home. You can sub in GF flour (Bob's 1:1) and they're consistently excellent. https://smittenkitchen.com/2011/06/blueberry-yogurt-multigra... [1] so I can enjoy it! Yeah I'm not so much interested into the details of fluffy pancakes as we make flat crêpes here (I'm kinda surprised to see pannekoeken mentioned and not Breton crêpes which are as far as I know better known in the English-speaking world - they are the same, except the Dutch ones are usually garnished with an approximately 1 cm-thick sugar layer afterwards). Anyway, I'm more interested into good flour blends, from wheat, buckwheat to rice and tapioca flour. Flour can make everything different but it can also make pancakes pretty much impossible to bake correctly if it's not the right blend, and I find it difficult to predict. Thanks, I'm working on this next - stay tuned or join the mailing list (will send a very occasional message about new recipes)! Related somewhat: has anyone read the sci fi book “deep crossings” and if so they remember the discussion of a pancake? I have a new favorite website for sure =))).... That's serious commitment for sure, but - I don't know, the image makes it seems like he low-key burned his pancakes 8-\ when I saw those pics I thought: all this effort in the ingredients just to burn them light blonde pancakes taste the best IMO, but char being carcinogenic seems compelling enough on its own to warrant turning down the heat Maybe he needs to optimize the frying part now. Looks burned to me. I agree, this seems like a lot of really excellent work from someone with a completely different pancake baseline than I have. The word 'crispy', in my world, has no business applying to pancakes. That's what bacon is for. Good to know - I used to have a crispness slider but I removed it since I loved the pancakes at the current crispness. Contrary to the overcontrasted photo, they actually have just a very fine bit of crisp layer. That said, I know that typical American diner pancakes are very soft through, which means people must enjoy them that way too. I can bring back the crispness if other people like their pancakes soft! >The word 'crispy', in my world, has no business applying to pancakes i won't eat pancakes that are not crispy, or that were but were stacked up steaming in a pile till there were enough to serve to everybody at once: nope. pancakes should be served individually as soon as they come out of the pan, round robin till nobody wants any more. mouthfeel is everything. Wow, that was. impressive :-)
A few random thoughts I had while reading this, in more or less the order they appeared:
1. The relation/connection between optimization and the hedonistic treadmill
2. That this combination of enthusiasm, curiosity, intelligence, rigor and inventiveness/creativity would be exactly what I would look for in a technical co-founder
3. What other parameters that we don't know about or are in a different dimension than those mentioned here (ingredients, amount, time etc.) would also push the needle?
4. This is why we can have nice things :-) you had me interested at the word "pancake" but I ain't gonna do maths to get it I love this Protip: you don't need buttermilk, you need milk and acid. 1 cup milk and 1tbsp vinegar do the same job and are already in your kitchen. Source: Frank Proto's pancakes This works with dairy-free milk too. My daughter has a dairy allergy and figuring out we could turn pea milk into pea buttermilk with a tbsp of white vinegar upped her pancake experience significantly. For sure - if you check "milk" and "lemon" and select maximum tang, you'll get nice tangy pancakes. I opted away from vinegar due to taste but would be curious to hear if someone tests vinegar vs lemon! Sometimes. Note that both your ingredients are liquids, however. I use buttermilk powder for quite a few recipes so that I can control the liquid content independently of the acid and fat content. I feel your pain - dealt with a lot of those calculations so the calculator could avoid powders! > the use of imprecise cup measurements rather than weights It really does not matter. Both because variation doesn't matter and because weights vs volumes are not going to give a big enough variation to really be detectable. It doesn't matter for small items like salt or baking soda, but you can get pretty different results scooping flour depending on how compressed the flour storage is, and how much the scooping packs down that flour. There's a reason that every bakery measures by weight. If you value consistency, and recipes should be consistent, you go by weight. You can say it doesn't matter, and in some cases it might not, but the entire baking industry doesn't agree with your statement. Flour is always the canonical example and I flat out reject it. It's not true. If you think it's true, you've convinced yourself it's true to avoid addressing other problems in process you have. Here's a thing: a given measure of flour (by any means, volume or weight), a single one kept in a cupboard, not remeasured, is going to have a different weight on different days that have different ambient humidity levels. The tools of the kitchen are imprecise. The environment is not well controlled. And human taste is robust against micro variations. Flour absolutely matters. Some flours are very “thirsty.” Having thirsty flour and compressing it during measurement makes for way too dry cookies, pancakes, etc. We’ve experienced this multiple times in our house. I started out baking measuring by volume, and it's not like it doesn't work. You can make amazing things basically measuring by handful, pinch, and feel. I think technique and ratio are more important than careful measurements. Everything else is optimizing for consistency, which might not be important to everyone. If you care about it, measuring by weight is more accurate. The undesirable variations aren't usually taste, but structure and texture, which can be noticeable. A given weight of flour will have a different weight on a different day? As it absorbs more or less moisture from the air due to ambient humidity changes, yes. The same reason your wooden furniture will also significantly change in dimensions such that there's no point in being more than 1/16th of an inch precise in your measurements; your design and construction technique is far more important. It's true. But it's also so much easier to measure weight that I don't understand why some (mostly American) recipes still use volumes for solids. In practice most people I know also measure liquids by weight when cooking, anyway. You you put your bowl on a scale and everything's easy and you don't need to make a measuring cup dirty. It certainly can matter for proper baking (which this recipe seems to be?), though for traditional pancakes I would never bother. But there's a reason that bakeries weigh their ingredients. It's more consistent and allows for different people to get more similar results. The baking industry isn't really measuring by weight, they are measuring by bag, which happens to be delineated in weight. Look, this is arm chair, YouTube cooking. There is so much variation in recipes that 10% here and there is not going to make or break any recipe. There is zero ability to make a "universally better" version of a recipe by micro optimizing ingredients. For one thing, you can't easily control temperature and humidity variations on your environment. If people think 2% difference in flour content is going to make or break their bread recipe, then daily humidity variations will definitely have an impact. But it doesn't, really. It's the sort of thing people blame when they don't have good process or good technique. For another thing, there is no way to evaluate the outcome as "better". Better for you, perhaps, but even then, it's mostly psychosomatic. I've doubled the amount of baking soda in a recipe before and it has had zero impact. I've never measured flour by weight and my cookies come out exactly the same as my wife's when she breaks out the microscale I've been cooking for a long time. I have family members who refuse to come to Easter Dinner unless I'm the one cooking. I barely measure anything, ever. Even when I'm baking. It matters to have things in the right ballpark, but 5% variations don't matter. The difference between weight and volume measurements could easily be a 20% or 30% gap. I’ve measured two of my cups of flour before and they were off by roughly that amount. Maybe I’m just bad at measuring, but it’s a lot more than 5%. It always gets me how the exact proper amount of an ingredient seems to coincidentally round off to an even number of units. You don't often see something that requires 2.07 cups, or 71 grams. If measurements are rounded off for convenience, a few percentage difference won't be noticeable. People would be better off acquiring a feel for how liquid a batter should be, or how seasonings smell when they're toasted the right amount, etc. This is incredible. I wish it had a dairy free option! You need a teflon-coated caliper to measure the batter puddles. And one of those point and click thermometers. Haha, already researched the thermometer but haven't pulled the trigger yet! https://www.absurdlyoptimized.com/cooking/ir-thermometer/ here's kenji's recipe (footnote 64 in the article, in case you missed it lol): https://www.seriouseats.com/light-and-fluffy-pancakes-recipe I'd love to see a "Labne" option Added! Let me know how it turns out! https://www.absurdlyoptimized.com/recipes/pancakes/?have=lab... I will do yeast-raised waffles but usually don't bother with pancakes. I usually don't have buttermilk so I mix yogurt and milk. I just eyeball it, about 1/4-1/3 yogurt makes a good consistency. While food science is fun, there's no way I'm doing that much work on a Saturday morning.