Add Vegetables To Your Pancake Batter For A Colorful Breakfast

Making pancakes more fun is possible using an unexpected ingredient — vegetables. Our brains are wired to like colorful foods, and brightening up a morning stack of pancakes is as easy as blending your favorite veggies into the batter. Vegetables with highly saturated colors work best to tint the mixture, and they have the added bonus of more nutritional value. Beets are high in fiber and vitamins and have an earthy sweetness that enhances the pancakes' sweet profile without extra sugar. Beets also come in dozens of varieties to create the brightest of red, orange, yellow, and violet pancakes. 

Another superfood, spinach, adds a delightful green hue to the batter without compromising the flavor. Blue carrots offer subtle shades of blue and a touch of sweetness, while a specialty ingredient, butterfly pea shoots (either fresh or in powder form), are capable of the most intense blues. The key to achieving vivid colors in a pancake is adding vegetables to the batter in the right way.

It is important to add vegetables in their most vibrant state to develop deep color. Hard, root vegetables, like beets, are best roasted to maintain the intensity of hue and the sweetest flavor. For the green, leafy vegetables, like spinach or herbs, fresh blends in best, while peas should be thawed from frozen.

Here is the important step — the batter must be prepared in the blender. Pureeing the vegetables ensures they will saturate the batter with color once the dry ingredients are added. Chopping or even grating the vegetables will not adequately incorporate the pigment. For a pancake recipe that yields 20 pancakes, two to four ounces of beets or one cup of spinach are sufficient to develop deep color. The butterfly pea shoots or powder need to be added slowly to achieve the preferred indigo or blue. Once the batter is your desired color, make pancakes as normal, but for extra light and fluffy pancakes, follow some tried-and-true diner methods.

Consider vegetables like paints on a palette — capable of an endless array of colors — to mix and match for the perfect magenta flapjack or turquoise stack. If time is tight, vegetable powders are also a great, natural option. These powders are available in most natural markets or online, and are relatively easy to make (especially with a food dehydrator). The sheer range of vegetables and powders means that rainbow stack of pancake is as tall as your appetite for experimentation.