If you follow Food Network on social media, chances are you’ve seen one of their bizarre videos showing off some recipe. Well, they are at it again with one of their latest recipe reels on Instagram. It’s about making pancakes for a crowd. How could that go wrong? Let’s take a look.
It starts off badly from the very beginning. They use a sheet pan (deep sigh). Part of the reason pancakes are called pancakes is because you make them in a pan or on a griddle on top of the stove. Not in a cookie sheet/sheet pan. When you put pancake batter into a sheet pan, you are pretty much just making a cake. Not pancakes.
But maybe it gets better (Reader, it does not). The next step is to put different toppings on each quarter of the batter in the pan. They use strawberry jam and sliced strawberries, sliced bananas, chocolate chips, and make a cinnamon and brown sugar swirl with leftover batter.
As someone in the comments mentioned, by the time you do all this prep work and place the toppings on, you could make quite a few pancakes.
Food Network tries to make pancakes for a crowd in new video
The next step is to preheat the oven to 500 degrees and then reduce it to 400 degrees and then bake the sheet of pancake batter for 20 minutes. I imagine you could make quite a few pancakes in 20 minutes plus the time it takes to preheat the oven to that high a temperature. But this recipe does mean you don’t have to stand over the stove, so I will give them that.
But let’s be real. If you really have a crowd over for breakfast, you’re going to need a couple of sheets of these cakes to have enough. So are you really saving time? Or just energy? If it’s just energy, cool, awesome, amazing. It can be difficult to stand at a stove for a while. But saving time? Probably not.
As for calling these pancakes when they aren’t made or shaped like what most people would call pancakes, I’m saying no to that as well. If you’re putting batter into a sheet pan, it’s a cake. If you have to cut slices of it to serve people…it’s a cake.
Sorry, Food Network. While this might work for breakfast and it will certainly save some energy, calling these pancakes just doesn’t feel right.
What do you think of this Food Network recipe video? Would you call these pancakes? Would you try this recipe? Let us know in the comments below!