Pro Chefs Blind Taste Test Every Boxed Pancake Mix

[Presenter] We've gathered three professional chefs

to blind taste test every pancake mix

we could get our hands on

to see which ones meet their standards.

All of the pancakes have been prepared

following the cooking instructions

in the back of their packaging.

Natural variants may occur.

Betty Crocker Bisquick Original Pancake and Baking Mix.

[Neil] They have a nice color.

They're already sugared inside. I can smell it.

Love the little dip in the center.

What I think of like as a waste of a pancake,

there's no heat that really touches the side.

It dips in slightly because of that lack of heat.

It tells me that the pancake has enough strength

to rise enough.

I love it.

What I'm looking for in a pancake is something

fluffy and tender.

We wanna balance flavor.

Not too sweet and not too blend.

Neutral enough to take the maple syrup.

I love a pancake that has crispy edges.

You want texture in that little ring is good.

You wanna make sure your pancake has enough moisture in it.

And if it has the acidic tang of something like buttermilk

or sour cream, that's an added bonus for me.

This tastes kind of flat.

It's actually less sweet than than I thought.

There's a slight bitterness towards the end of this.

It's fluffy and it's tender, but it's a bit dry.

It feels a little dense. It feels a little sticky.

Really admirable rise.

Height in a pancake is usually

in relation to how much leaven there is

and the correct balance of them.

Generally a thicker batter will rise more

and a thinner batter will kind of spread out.

Bisquick, maybe?

Oh, Bisquick.

Oh no way.

It says pancake and baking mix.

Two cups of the mix, one cup of milk,

two tablespoons of vegetable oil and two eggs.

The fact that we only add two tablespoons of oil

might go towards explaining why this feels quite lean to me.

There's a lot of starch inside, corn starch, flour.

This is very dense.

Usually in ingredient labels,

ingredients are listed by the weight or volume

in a descending order.

The sugar and salt are towards the end,

it means there's very little,

so I think that kind of translates

into why the pancakes taste pretty flat to me.

[Presenter] Betty Crocker Bisquick Shake 'n Pour

Buttermilk Pancake Mix.

They look a little flat. There's holes in them.

The holes are usually coming from the flour

or the dry ingredients not mixed properly

and dissolving enough into the wet.

[Shilpa] These are a bit thinner than the previous ones.

You don't have enough fat

and so then you're not getting

that nice golden crispy ring on the outside.

You see how there's no waist in this one?

It tells me that the pancake batter

was probably a bit thinner than the previous one.

That little stretch and pull,

I think this is going to taste a bit gummy,

but let's find out.

Oh!

Strange texture. Very stretchy.

Not fluffy enough, not tender enough.

It's way more sweet.

The flour's been cut with something else.

I'd be curious if there was like some kind of starches.

Bisquick Shake 'n Pour.

Oh God, what did our world come to?

Yeah, that's why.

Shake 'n Pour. What a revolutionary concept?

Just add water.

So if you take all of these dehydrated, dry ingredients

and you just add water to it,

it's gonna taste like a sponge, chewy and dense.

The sugar and the dextrose,

this is why this is more sweet.

Defatted soy flour.

Oh, that kinda explains the gumminess a little bit.

Usually soy flour is added as a tenderizer.

It also makes a batter a bit more viscous

and it helps to trap air a bit better.

Oh yes, there's datem in there,

Datem.

It's essentially like a fatty acid

or an emulsifier and it's used to just bring

and keep all the ingredients together in a way.

It's structuring the batter while it's cooking it.

It can replace the eggs.

Might as well have just added the water to this,

put it out in a squeeze bottle and then made like glue.

[Presenter] Trader Joe's Buttermilk Pancake

and Baking Mix.

They seem a little dense.

They don't seem fluffy like they're springing back.

You can hear the cut.

It's like I'm sewing through something. It's dry.

These taste much drier than the other two.

I'm sorry.,there's actually a pancake stuck in my throat.

The thing about like batters like this

that you shouldn't overmix it.

If you keep mixing it and keep tinkering with it,

that flour and the dry ingredients,

they get stretchy, they get tough.

Do you see the crumbs just from cutting it?

It feels fluffy like a sponge, you know? Like a dish sponge.

You would need a lot of maple syrup

to kind of moisten this one.

It's very dry, is very bland.

Trader Joe's.

Oh, Trader Joe's!

I guessed!

You did me dirty.

I guess you're not that good at making pancakes.

I don't taste much buttermilk in this.

I haven't found yet a buttermilk powder

that replicates the richness

and lactic tang of liquid buttermilk.

Buttermilk dehydrated is really taking out all the fat

and the tang of what buttermilk is supposed to do and be.

[Presenter] Jiffy Buttermilk Pancake and Waffle Mix

[Pierre] The crust and the edges

and the color is very nice.

[Neil] Little brown and caramelized.

There's a faint whiff of maple for some reason.

Now you're talking.

Flavor is nice.

Certainly bounced between salt and sugar.

They feel a little lighter but not as dense in the middle.

You can see the crumbs on my plate here, which indicates

that it's reasonably dry.

It's nice.

These are I think, the best out of anything

I've tasted today.

Oh, Jiff!

Buttermilk, pancake, and waffle.

The picture on the box is beautiful.

The first thing that jumps out at me is it says lard in it

and that's what makes the flavorful.

Cornstarch is good too. Cornstarch makes things crispy.

The soy flour, but it also has wheat starch,

both tenderizing products

that reduce the gluten overall gluten content.

Maltodextrin, corn syrup plus regular sugar in second,

so this is very high sugar.

Natural and artificial flavors.

They've put maple syrup in here.

That's what I'm tasting in the batter, I think, is

that maple flavor, which is like a sweetener,

but it also tenderizes like sugar.

It caramelizes and it breaks down the gluten in the flour.

[Presenter] Pearl Milling Company,

Original Pancake and Waffle Mix.

Nice edge crispiness.

I actually like the look of these.

They feel very homemade to me in a way.

There's something promising about them.

I have a feeling these are going to be tender

but also a bit moist.

This one is very nice.

It's very fluffy and very tender.

Yeah, it's still a bit drier than I would like.

It doesn't feel as chemical.

I would say it feel more fresh.

There is some kind of odd aftertaste,

Some sort of like citrus peel or lemony.

Right now it's my favorite.

Oh.

[Shilpa laughs]

Pearl Milling Company, Original Pancake and Waffle Mix.

America's favorite pancake brand.

Pearl Milling? I don't know that one.

Same. I'm no one to argue with America right here.

So I see on this recipe it says to add milk.

Some box mixes will ask you to reconstitute with water.

Milk has a bit more fat and it has protein

and it has sugars in it, which help to tenderize a pancake

and also help with the browning

[Presenter] Hungry Jack, Original Pancake and Waffle Mix.

This looks good.

[Pierre] It looks fluffy. The color is nice.

I can see that they have a nice even crumb.

No sign of gumminess.

They are tender. They are moist.

It's nice.

I would say this one and the other one are very close.

They're very tender.

[Pierre] The syrup is soaking well enough.

They taste like they might have a bit of fat in the dough.

Oil is going to give it moistness and tenderness.

Probably has eggs as well

because it's very yellow all around.

[Neil] It has a nice balanced flavor.

It has the crispy edges.

I feel like this is something I would get at a diner.

Hungry Jack.

Hungry Jack.

[Crew Member] What?

Wait, for real?

Shut up!

I said Hungry Jack. Stop it! That's wild.

It says bleached wheat flour.

But the other one, it was unreached.

Wheat flour, it just has more flavor.

Very nice instructions for pancakes, a bit above the rest.

Let your prepped mix stand for three minutes.

That helps hydrate the flour a bit more evenly.

And it could also translate into a loftier rise.

A perfectly serviceable pancake.

And I would say, somebody asked me now

which one I would pick, of the ones that I've tasted so far,

this is the one I would pick.

Go Jack! [laughs]

[Presenter] Dolly Parton's Buttermilk Pancakes.

They're little and perfect and very cute.

They had that crispy edge.

It's kind of peeling in a way.

Like you know when you have a cashmere sweater

and it creates those little pills.

It kind of has that same texture when I cut it.

So I think it might be a bit gummy like it's pulling,

it's almost like stretching, like pizza dough.

A little tough, a little dry.

It's getting like a paste in your mouth.

Not very pleasant texture I will say.

I don't think the flavor is so good here.

It feels really bland.

There's a lack of salt in it,

which makes the sweetness stand out a bit more.

Bed, Bath, and Beyond.

[Crew Member] It's a singer.

Really? Berry Manalow.

Oh, Dolly Parton. I love her.

Whose idea was to put Dolly's name on a pancake mix?

It's dehydrated eggs and dehydrated buttermilk.

So this is a complete mix, which means you just add water.

I hope you are using good quality water.

From the pancakes I've tasted thus far,

those that have been reconstituted with just water

have proven to gummier than the rest.

I think maybe even something as little as balancing the salt

and sugar a bit more would've helped a lot.

It's not worth it. I'm sorry.

Even if I like country music.

[Presenter] Krusteaz Light & Fluffy

Complete Buttermilk Pancake Mix.

Eh, the color's a little light.

I feel like these don't have a lot of fat in the batter.

I would be curious to see if this is also

like a mix-with-water kind of situation.

So I'm working too hard to have to cut a wedge out of it.

I could feel that stretchiness

and chewiness, that toughness.

Quite hefty.

Double the size, I would say, of some

of the others that we've tasted.

Smells like bleached flour.

Like if you have a swimming pool,

but it's made out of metal, if that makes sense.

It has a chlorine and iron smell.

That's enough for me.

It's puffing, but it's not airy.

It can be that the butter was too thick.

Okay, Krusteaz.

Complete pancake mix, just add water.

So first of all, there's no eggs on that one.

Which explains why there's not much richness.

Oil and buttermilk are towards the end

of the ingredient list,

which means there's very little of it

compared to the rest of the ingredients.

Food starch, modified.

Modified starch.

That means it's a starch that can do its job,

which is primarily thickening without the need for any heat,

it'll activate just by the action of friction or shearing.

The baking soda might be trapped inside

and can't really go out because there's so much starch

that he can't really does his work.

And that's why I think it's so thin and dense.

[Presenter] Annie's Organic Classic Pancake

and Waffle Mix.

I think first glance flat didn't raise at all,

Indicates to me that the batter might be a bit thinner

than some of the previous ones.

It could also be a function of the leavening makeup.

Baking powder generally makes things go up,

where baking soda spreads rather than springs up as much.

It looks dry.

Something tastes like artificial or off.

No flavor.

Very blend.

Not fluffy, not tender.

I think it's maybe the leavening on it.

[Pierre] It didn't work that well.

And they do have a little crispy edge, which is good,

but I don't know.

The flavor's not good.

Oh, Annie's.

Baking powder and you have baking soda.

When you combine too much leavening together,

it's either going to overpuff or not doing anything.

You can see it puffing in the pan,

Oh, I'm gonna have nice and fluffy pancakes.

And then you put it up and it shh.

Oh, it says you can make it vegan

and swap an egg for a third of a cup of applesauce.

Apples are high in pectin

and applesauce has this thickness and viscosity

that can act like eggs

and allow air to be trapped within it,

which makes it a wonderful substitute.

And this is the one with vegan is applesauce.

And now all of a sudden, I could tell immediately

when I cut this that this is gonna be better.

[Pierre] The one with the apple sauce looks fluffier.

I can taste the apple sauce in it.

It's still blend,

but the apple sauce bring a better taste.

The texture of the vegan version

is much better than this one.

The eggs added too much livening.

This is why I think it got flattened.

And I think the baking powder and the baking soda

work very well without the eggs.

[Presenter] Stonewall Kitchen Farmhouse Pancake

and Waffle Mix.

These look flat, kind of like a crepe, no crispy edge.

These are different.

They have like a bumpy kind of browning.

When the batter hits the griddle,

they're not rising properly.

Either not enough leavening agents in the batter

or too heavy other ingredients in it.

This smells like waffles that you get

at a self-service hotel breakfast setup.

Dry, a little bit of crispiness.

A pronounced bitterness to this.

It feels like this baking soda that hasn't been balanced

by enough acidic ingredients

and has this metallic kind of taste.

Smells like vanilla. Tastes like licking a pole.

Cermet.

A Stonewall Kitchen, Farmhouse Pancake and Waffle Mix.

Boy is that bad.

Company classic.

Wow, what a posh little name for not very great pancakes.

Enriched wheat flour, niacin, reduced iron,

thiamine mononitrate, riboflavin.

So that's all nutrients added back in

because it's bleached flour.

Multi barley extract is like molasses. It's very sweet.

And on top of that you still have regular sugar

and also artificial flavor.

And here it says mixed with whole milk or buttermilk.

And both of those ingredients are kind of different.

Buttermilk would have neutralized the baking soda

in this mix, but if this was made with milk,

I fear there wasn't enough acid

to neutralize the baking soda.

And that's coming out in this metallic,

kind of iron pole sort of taste.

[Presenter] Birch Benders Organic Classic Pancake

and Waffle Mix.

These look amateur

like my 4-year-old grandson could have done these.

Very chubby pancakes.

They're tough and gluey

and really kind of almost raw in the middle,

even though I know they're cooked.

It has almost like a yeasted dough pull.

I'm expecting this to be a little bit chewy and tough.

It's a shame about the texture

because actually they taste quite good.

There's a nice level of sweetness, a decent amount of salt.

Without any toppings, it's hard to chew. Yeah.

[Neil] I pull that out and you could see

it's like stretching.

Unleaven flour could make an elastic pancake.

Too much starch in the mix or in the batter.

I wonder if it's a slightly leaner mix

that doesn't have too much fat,

so then it's activating a lot of the gluten in it.

Birch Benders.

It's a cute name.

Organic tapioca flour. Okay.

The tapioca starch making it very stretchy

and very gluey-like.

Tapioca has this sort of elasticity.

It's hard to use, I would say.

When you let let the bed sit too long,

the tapioca fall at the bottom.

So this is something that you have constantly need to mix.

Wow. Okay.

No fat, no eggs, no dairy.

That's all that needs to be said. We're down here.

[Presenter] Bob's Red Mill

Organic Multi-Grain Pancake and Waffle Mix.

I feel like we're in the organic whole wheat section

of this segment.

I wonder if it's like a seven grain.

Vegetarian, vegan, no gluten, something like that.

It's very dense, but there are some darker brown speckles

and maybe even some yellow.

So I think there's some kind of green in this.

God help me if it's quinoa.

[Pierre] You can see that it's very dry by this

Zero leavening.

This is more dense.

Whole grains because of the very nature of their makeup,

that is they still have their husks

and all of that is ground down.

They're a lot more heavier, they're not as starchy

as like their white flower counterparts.

It's good for health, good for digestion,

it's good for protein, but it doesn't taste that good.

They need a little bit more liquid usually.

They might need a little bit more leavening,

and counter to your instinct,

whole wheat products can sometimes benefit from being mixed

a lot more because you need actually gluten to develop.

Oh yeah, Bob's Red Mill. Okay.

Multi-grain. You know what?

I actually love Bob's Red Mill.

Maybe with just whole wheat flour it might work,

but with the combination everything is not working.

Those flour tend to want to be dense.

If I had to make this at home,

I would probably use half a cup of this mix

and half a cup of all purpose flour.

[Presenter] Good Dee's Pancake Plus

Keto Friendly Baking Mix.

Wow. Very yellow.

A lot of eggs maybe. Looks like a [indistinct].

I love the coloring on them.

Okay, this is gluten free.

As soon as you start to do anything

with non-gluten flour, everything falls apart.

Wow. Really bad.

I thought it was gonna be really good.

Very blend.

There's no gluten in it.

I could tell the texture as soon as I cut it.

I knew it crumbled

And there's no pull or chew.

Which also leads me to believe that there's no gluten.

Look at that.

It's like really, really dry and crumbly and granular.

I feel like there's almond flour in here.

I got some kind of grittiness to the tooth.

There we go.

Good Dee's.

There's a lot going on with the branding.

Made with almond flour, makes 24 pancakes.

No sugar, alcohols, or stevia.

That's a good call.

Good Dee's still sweet pancake plus low carb baking mix.

This is a lot of stuff.

I do like the almond flour in this.

I do taste it now it's coming back to me.

The thing about using almond flour is

it doesn't absorb moisture like a regular kind of flour.

There's a lot of eggs in here,

so for one cup of the mix it calls for three eggs,

and some of the previous ones it was one egg

usually at most.

That's why it's so yellow and tastes like frittata.

It tastes like these ingredients

and good job, I guess, in making a mix

that tastes exactly like your ingredients.

[Presenter] Arrowhead Mills Organic Gluten-Free

Pancake and Waffle Mix.

These are stunning, lovely pale golden.

Oh wow. Weirdly very acidic.

Is a really bad aftertaste.

Maybe some sort of a additive or preservative in the flour.

First thing that coming to me is the sugar right away.

It's very sweet.

A little bit of sandiness and texture in the batter,

like a grain.

It almost has the texture of cornbread.

I would think it's also either a gluten-free

or a certain kind of flour.

Jiffy Pop.

Oh, Arrowhead. I know them.

[Pierre] Arrowhead Mills Organic, gluten-free.

It's not the worst, honestly.

Rice flour, that's the grit.

Organic tapioca flour that mimics some of that properties

of gluten because it's a bit stretchy.

All of that type of flour

is not the same size of the grain.

So this is why when you eating it you can feel it.

Xanthin gum.

Almost all gluten-free recipes

will contain some amount of xanthin gum.

It's kind of like pectin they use in jams and jellies

to kind of thicken things.

It adds a sort of extensibility and viscosity

to the mixture and it can trap air

in the same way that egg whites can.

This is why you can do this, you know?

Otherwise it would break

like a piece of dry bread, you know?

[Presenter] Kodiak Power Cakes, Flapjack and Waffle Mix.

Nice crispy ring.

It's probably whole grain flour

or seven grain flour or something like that

'cause it's very brown.

And tastes very raw.

It's wet almost, like it's fully cooked. It's not raw.

There's nothing oozing out on the middle of the pancake,

but it's still gummy, like you can ball it up essentially.

What makes a pancake gummy

is putting too many wet ingredients in it

or not putting your ingredients in at the correct time.

You want to do all your dry first,

then you want to fold in or incorporate your wet.

Oh, Kodiak!

A hundred percent whole grains, power cakes,

flapjack and waffle mix.

I love when a pancake is called the flapjack.

I have no idea what the difference is,

but I feel like you need to be wearing a flannel jacket

and you're somewhere in Upstate New York.

Whey protein concentrate as well.

Okay, I mean it's high protein

because they added a bunch of protein powder.

That doesn't feel very groundbreaking to me.

There's a lot of protein inside,

so you're going to eat like one, two pancakes.

It's going to fill it up very fast.

Oat flour was an interesting one that I didn't guess,

but it makes a lot of sense.

It behaves in many ways, like traditional flour.

It's like soft, it has a nice balance of like starch,

fat and protein.

Some people would not like it

because it's a specific taste,

but you for sure have way more flavor, I would say,

inside a whole grain than on a regular flour.

[Presenter] Cracker Barrel Buttermilk Baking

and Pancake Mix.

These look really nice.

They look beautiful.

They have like lots of frilly edges,

a little defined waist.

But I feel like the batter was calibrated just right.

Airy, is bubbly.

The bubbles are almost fossilized in there,

which really, that's what a pancake is.

I think these are good.

Have a little bit of saltiness, which I like.

It's not too sweet.

The flavor, I think, it's well balanced.

These are made with bleached flour.

The process of bleaching the flour changes its structure

in a way that it makes for a much softer,

more tender end result.

Moist enough, fluffy enough.

The color is nice. Flavors are here.

Out of all of the things I've tasted today,

these are the least offensive.

[Shilpa] This is a pancake that I would be very happy

to eat at a diner.

IHOP.

[Crew Member] No.

No? Cracker Barrel.

Cracker Barrel.

Bubby's.

[Pierre laughs]

Oh, it is Cracker Barrel.

Palm and soybean oil, sorbic acid, aluminum phosphate.

I'm sure that's really good for you.

Palm oil has its own controversies attached to it.

It's not really sustainably harvested,

but it is used a lot in food businesses

and also cosmetics just because it's a stable fat.

For something commercial

I'm not surprised by any of the ingredients.

There you have it.

[Presenter] Now let's see,

which pancakes are chefs like the most and the least.

My favorite is the Jiffy.

I think it had the most flavor, the best texture,

the least amount of additives

that would make it seem artificial.

My favorite pancakes today were Pearl Milling

with the Cracker Barrel, Was like very in the same scale,

very fluffy, very moist, and flavorful.

They were all terrible, mind you,

I'm sorry to be that person.

I think Hungry Jack, to me, was the closest

to a homemade version.

It had a nice balance of like sweet and salty.

It felt neutral enough

to be able to take maple syrup and butter.

It was fluffy without being dry and cottony.

My least favorite on the pancakes were the Good Dee's.

They were gluten-free, flavor-free.

The one made with almond flour and lots of eggs.

They were crumbly and had a weird aftertaste.

It was too eggy, it was gritty

and not at all what I expected from a pancake,

My least favorite was Bob Red Mill.

There was too many flours edited inside,

the flavor were not here, it was not fluffy at all.

This is a big feat trying 16 pancakes

in I don't know how many hours.

If you are making pancakes from a box mix,

you don't have to be beholden to the instructions

on the back of the box.

You could add richer ingredients like milk or eggs

or sour cream, and you could cook it in a little bit of fat

to have a much more flavorful end result.

Don't get tricked by one you can buy.

If you can make your own, go for it.

The best ones are the ones that are made from scratch.

I can't believe I raw dogged these pancakes

without maple syrup.