Easy Banana Pancakes
If you’re looking for something a bit different from your average pancake recipe, you need to try these banana pancakes! The taste is reminiscent of banana bread in pancake form. They’re soft, fluffy, packed with flavor, and the kids and I are equally in love with them.
Why You’ll Love This Recipe
Light and fluffy texture, (just don’t over-mix the batter!). My recipe includes plenty of tips to avoid over-mixing, including using room temperature ingredients, mixing by hand, and stopping once everything is just combined. Simple; no fancy ingredients or equipment required. Anyone can make these at home and have success. Incredible flavor from ripe bananas, vanilla, and cinnamon. They don’t even need toppings–my kids will eat them plain! Finishes in the same amount of time as cooking bacon in the oven, so you can have a full breakfast in just 20 minutes!
Ingredients
This recipe works best if all of your ingredients are at room temperature. This helps your batter combine easily and prevents over-mixing. Here’s what you need!
Bananas. Almost anytime you’re baking with bananas, aim for ripe, spotty, well-browned (but not rotten) fruit. This is just as true with banana bread or banana muffins as it is with banana pancakes. These riper bananas are the most flavorful and sweet, so if you can, try to let yours get nice and spotty before making this recipe. Also a great way to use up any neglected, desperate-looking bananas on your countertop. Milk. While buttermilk plays an important role with flavor and texture (and is a critical ingredient in my blueberry pancakes and cornbread), regular milk actually works just fine with today’s recipe. Thanks to the afore-mentioned overripe bananas, we actually don’t need the extra moisture and flavor from buttermilk here. Brown sugar. Brown sugar offers a beautiful complement to the banana flavor that you just can’t get from classic white granulated. I stick with light brown sugar, while dark brown could work in a pinch it’s a bit richer in a way that doesn’t suit the pancakes. Cinnamon. While not a critical ingredient in banana pancakes and you can leave it out if you’re averse, this ingredient adds to the flavor and gives the end result a real banana bread feel. Vanilla and salt. These two ingredients add to the overall flavor of the other ingredients on the list. I love using my homemade vanilla extract.
SAM’S TIP: The key to fluffy pancakes is to not over-mix the batter. Batter that is mixed too much will yield dense, flat, rubbery pancakes. Because of this, you should NOT use an electric mixer with this recipe–just stick with a whisk and spatula/spoon. Today’s recipe was a little tricky to perfect; adding bananas adds additional moisture and sugar to the recipe so it’s not as simple as just mixing mashed bananas into any old pancake recipe. I ultimately ended up modifying my pumpkin pancakes to strike the perfect balance (in both the flavor and texture department).
How to Make Banana Pancakes
SAM’S TIP: I like to use an ice cream scoop to add my pancake batter to my pan. I find this to keep things pretty neat and tidy, especially when working with a thicker pancake batter like this one. If you like banana pancakes, try my banana coffee cake next! Enjoy! Let’s bake together! Subscribe to my newsletter to be notified of all the newest recipes, and find my free recipe tutorials on YouTube 💜
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