The Bready Addition That Makes Pancakes Much Fluffier

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Pancakes are often viewed as a vehicle for butter and syrup or chocolate sauce and fruit, but even the fanciest stack is only as good as its foundation. For perfect, pillowy flapjacks, try swapping in yeast for the baking powder found in most recipes. Yeast, which is commonly used to raise breads, produces a super fluffy, soft texture as well as a subtly tangy depth of flavor that makes your breakfast more exciting.

While baking powder is a mix of baking soda and cream of tartar, yeast is a live organism that leavens baked goods via fermentation. It needs at least an hour (or up to overnight) to feed on sugar or flour and release CO2 bubbles before you cook the pancakes. While not ideal if you need breakfast ASAP, it's a foolproof way to prep delicious pancakes in advance and cut down on morning stress.

Yeast also helps the batter to rest and rise more reliably. Letting the batter sit after mixing is one of the best tricks for making fluffy pancakes, as it hydrates the flour for a softer texture. However, this can be tricky with baking powder, since it initially activates when combined with liquid, and its leavening ability decreases as the minutes go by. Waiting too long to cook the batter results in flat, dense flapjacks. Yeast is the solution to this conundrum: It allows the mixture to sit for hours and still achieve full lifting power when cooked, creating a pancake that's both fluffy and tender.

Whether you're riffing on bright and fluffy lemon ricotta pancakes or roasted berry and buttermilk pancakes, the first step is to feed and activate the yeast. The most popular choice here is active dry yeast, which differs from the cake or instant kind. Some pancake recipes mix it with flour and warmed milk (or buttermilk, or whatever other liquid you're using), while others combine the leavening agent and milk with sugar in place of flour. Once you create the yeasty mixture, cover the bowl and let it sit on the counter for an hour or in the fridge overnight. Once it doubles in size, it's ready to combine with the other ingredients. If you've refrigerated it, let it sit at room temperature for 10 to 15 minutes first before making the batter, to ensure that the pancakes cook evenly.

Want faster pancakes? Replace dry yeast with an instant version, like Fleischmann's Simply Homemade RapidRise Yeast. This product can be combined with the other batter ingredients from the start and activates in as little as 10 minutes, but you then need to cook the pancakes ASAP, as instant yeast can't retain its power for long or sit in the fridge.

From there, cooking the flapjacks is pretty straightforward, but yeast isn't a perfect shield against common ways to ruin pancakes. To ensure fluffiness, never overmix the batter and always use fresh yeast. The expired stuff won't produce any rising action. Packets of instant and dry yeast last about two years when left unopened.