A week or two ago, the New York Times published a recipe for Sam Yoo’s Golden Diner Pancakes, fabulous, tall pancakes served with a fruit compote and honey-butter syrup and topping. The recipe was quite a hit, based on how often it appeared on social media. You can stand in line for hours at the Golden Diner near the Manhattan Bridge to sample these pancakes, or you can make them yourself.

There are several unique things about Mr Yoo’s recipe (as scaled down for the Times by Genvieve Ko): the most important one is that you “pre-ferment” the flour, yeast and buttermilk for an hour or so, before mixing up the batter.  The other thing is that in the Golden Diner kitchen, they cook each pancake in a 7-8 inch non-stick pan, so the pancakes are wider and taller  than conventional pancakes.

When we first made them, we used a couple of skillets about the size Ko recommends, and since we were making for a couple of us, we had to make two, and keep them warm while we made two more. This worked pretty well, and they were delicious, but we had a lot of difficulty controlling the heat to keep the pancakes from browning too much.

But we noted that that pre-fermented batter also had developed a lot of gluten stretchiness and the  batter was very cohesive. So, we wondered if you could make them on a griddle and cut out a couple of steps (the pans and the warming). This was a great success, and we report on the slightly revised recipe here.

Pancake batter

Pre-ferment ingredients

• 2 ¼ tsp active dry yeast
• 1 cup of all purpose flour
• 1 ¼ cups buttermilk
• ¼ cup water

Batter ingredients

• 1 cup all purpose flour
• 2 Tb sugar
• ¾ tsp baking soda
• ½ tsp salt
• 2 large eggs
• ¼ cup canola oil or other neutral oil

Maple-Honey Butter

• ¼ cup (1/2 stick) Kerrygold butter, softened
• 3 Tb honey
• 2 Tb pure maple syrup
• ¾ tsp fine salt

Maple-Honey Syrup

• ½ cup (1 stick) unsalted butter
• 1/3 cup honey
• 1 ½ Tb maple syrup
• 1 tsp soy sauce
• ½ tsp fine salt

Berry Compote

• 16 oz mixed berries, such as blueberries and strawberries cut up
• ½ cup sugar
• 2 tsp cornstarch
• 1 lemon

1. First thing in the morning, combine 1 cup of flour and the yeast in a modest sized bowl. Put the buttermilk and water in a pitcher and warm it in the microwave until luke-warm. (This takes 4-50 seconds. We suggest trying 15 second steps until the milk mixture seems lukewarm. Don’t let it get over 100˚F (37˚ C) or you could kill the yeast. Mix the warm milk mixture with the flour and yeast until smooth and cover with plastic wrap and let it ferment for at least an hour. You can make the honey-butter, the syrup and the fruit compote while you are waiting.

1. Make the maple-honey butter, by mixing the honey, maple syrup and salt into the softened Kerrygold butter with a wooden spoon. We chose KerryGold over the original unsalted butter because it has a lot more flavor. Let butter mixture sit out until you need it, unless you are doing this long in advance. Then, chill it and warm it back up when serving.

1. To make the maple-honey syrup, combine the butter, honey, syrup, soy sauce and salt in a small saucepan, and heat with whisking until the butter melts completely. Add 1 ½ tsp water and keep whisking until emulsified. Leave the pan on the stove so you can rewarm it before serving.

1. To make the berry compote, mix all the ingredients in a large cast-iron skilled, and stir and mix while heating. Heat until some of the blueberries pop. Keep the berries in the pan and rewarm before serving.
2. Heat a griddle to 375˚F. Mix the remaining 1 cup of flour with the sugar, baking soda and salt in a small bowl. In a large bowl, mix the canola oil and the two eggs. Add the pre-ferment batter and mix. Mix in the flour/sugar mixture until no flour is unmixed. The batter may be lumpy and this is OK.
3. Heat the butter-honey syrup and the fruit compote.

1. Scoop the batter onto the hot griddle using a rounded half-cup measure. You can make them bigger if you want, but these will be about 6-7 inches each. You can make 4 at once, or 6 at once if you have a bigger griddle. Cook on each side for around 2 minutes.
2. To assemble, put one pancake on each of two (or three) plates, and pour the maple-honey syrup over them. Spread fruit compote on top of that, and then place the second pancake on top. Again, add the maple-honey syrup and the fruit compote, and top with a rounded spoon of the hone-butter. Serve at once.

These pancakes are a fabulous special breakfast. They may seem to take some time, but you can make the syrup, butter and fruit compote while the batter is fermenting.

So, while this is Yoo’s (and Ko’s) recipe, we make the following simplifications.

1. We warmed the buttermilk and water in a microwave instead of on the stove.
2. We used Kerrygold butter in the honey-butter and decreased the butter by half: you don’t need that much for 2 or 3 diners.
3. We increased the fruit compote to 16 oz. 14 didn’t seem like quite enough.
4. We cooked the pancakes on a griddle instead of pans.
5. Ko suggested using two spoons to make little oblong pats of butter to go on top, but this didn’t work as well with the Kerrygold, so we skipped it.

If you have batter left for another day, Kat Lieu says it will keep, refrigerated for a week. She also tried making the large pancakes in a big rice cooker with some success, but only one at a time.

And, if you have any of that honey-butter left, it is great on English muffins!