Orange zest and juice delicately flavor these from-scratch, Beautiful Orange Buttermilk Pancakes. Dried orange slices provide a boldly-flavored garnished. Don’t underestimate how satisfying they are leftover and reheated.

The zest and juice give the pancakes a beautiful, muted, delicate orange flavor to which the dried orange slice provides a bold accent. Although you certainly could pour maple syrup over these cakes, I think powdered sugar and soft butter is a better match. They’re plenty moist enough without syrup. If you just can’t imagine pancakes without syrup, consider a homemade, lightly spiced or espresso syrup.

Ingredient and Cooking Notes:

If you were making these pancakes without orange juice, you’d use three cups of buttermilk. The orange juice substitutes for some amount of the buttermilk, but it’s impossible to know how much until you’ve squeezed the orange. Most oranges produce between 1½-2 oz juice, so you can estimate that on average, you’ll need three-cups-minus-1½-2-oz of buttermilk.

I get sweetened, dried orange slices from Trader Joe’s. (I’ve never seen them anywhere else.) I love them so much, my friends sometime gift them to me. (Thanks, Tammy!) They’re out of stock at Trader Joe’s about half the time, so when I find them, I buy a bunch. They seem to last indefinitely. They soften up during the cooking process just enough to be perfect in the finished pancake. There is more than enough flavor in one dried orange slice to provide ample accent to a short stack of cakes, so I’ll usually give only half, one third, or one quarter of the cakes (depending on how many pancakes I’ll serve per stack) a dried orange slice, and only the top pancake in the stack will have a slice. 

My cooking timing is based on using two pans, thereby cooking two pancakes at once. There’s no reason that you couldn’t cook them on a large griddle and make more at once; I just don’t happen to have one. The one I used to have was a dedicated accessory to my stovetop, and I moved to a new house, and the owners of my old house won’t let me come over to use my old stove. Go figure. Should’ve written it into the contract.

Guest Worthy

I would absolutely serve these pancakes to guests – especially with one of the homemade syrups that I mentioned earlier, plus maybe a dollop of nutmeg-flavored whipped cream. It’d be spectacular. Add a cappuccino, and now we’re talking.

Serving Sizes

In terms of serving sizes, I’d count on two cakes per person. So, this batch serves seven. Although the last pancake is always either markedly larger or smaller than the rest and won’t stack well because of that. That’s where my “serves six” recommendation comes from. That’ll leave one person with and optional third cake, and one person with an optional odd-ball-sized cake if they want it. Adjust your expectations if you know you’ll have eaters who want only one cake, or if you think they’ll want more than two. You can always add sides like bacon or toast.

Leftovers

Compared to my usual go-to pancakes, these are more crepe-like. Even when leftover and refrigerated, they’re still bendy and flexible. That makes them less suitable for reheating in the toaster, which is my preferred pancake reheating method. If you have leftovers, you’ll have to reheat them in the microwave. 

Cooling the cakes on racks will prevent them from sticking together when you later stack them. That way, you can keep a huge stack in the fridge, and easily peel off as many as you want to microwave later. They’re quite good microwaved. Maybe slighly less nuanced than they were when fresh, but way better than a boring bowl of cold cereal for breakfast. 

Social Learning

Pancakes in the broad sense – flat cakes made from a starchy batter and cooked on a hot surface – are one of the oldest and most widespread foods in human history. Archaeological evidence shows pancake‑like foods going back tens of thousands of years, including prehistoric flat cakes cooked on hot stones. I was around back then, so I know.

Pancakes are made not with a dough, but with a batter. “Batter” as a noun is not at all coincidentally related to the verb “batter.” You “batter” the ingredients to form a “batter.”

When you cook a batter, its starches absorb water and gelate. This provides the primary structure of the cooked pancake. Gluten provides structure only secondarily. This is the reason that you don’t want to over-beat a pancake batter. Too much beating will overdevelop the gluten, which will make the pancake chewy rather than delicate and tender. So as a rule, most pancake batterers stop battering the batter before all the lumps are gone. They rely on the liquid in the batter to hydrate those remaining lumps. Buttermilk also contributes to tenderness, as do chemical leaveners. If you want to lean even more into making your pancakes light and tender, try using pastry flour or a non-gluten flour. 

Beautiful Orange Buttermilk Pancakes

Credit for images on this page: Make It Like a Man! This content was not solicited by anyone, nor was it written in exchange for anything. References: Harold McGee, “Thin Batter Foods: Crepes, Popovers, Griddle Cakes, Cream Puff Pastry,” in On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen (New York: Scribner, 2004), 550–52. Thank you, Kesor. Thank you, ⌘+C. Make It Like a Man! is ranked by Feedspot as #2 in the Top 30 Men’s Cooking Blogs. 

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