You mark checkboxes for what you have on hand (ricotta, sour cream, kefir, buttermilk, yogurt, cottage cheese, lemon, cream of tartar, etc.) and it computes the best recipe based on targets for acid, fat, salt, sugar, and CO2.
My particular favorite are the yeast-raised lemon ricotta kefir pancakes - the best I've ever had.
The math is done in a small pure-ESM library: ingredient composition to component masses and acid moles, a stoichiometry layer, and a bisection solver for the target deficits.
I'm not a chemist, so if something is off, tell me and I will fix it!
https://www.absurdlyoptimized.com/recipes/pancakes/?have=&eg...
I'll leave the rounding of the absurdly precise ingredients to you. :)
The yeast and ferment is going to make it more acidic, and more tender because the gluten will be weakened. I imagine you could use cake flour instead and get close to the same tenderness, but the flavor would be different.
Keep a box of Krusteaz in the pantry for the kid sleepovers, prepare the night before for an adult brunch.
While I can confirm sourdough pancakes are quite nice, I am satisfied with Krusteaze :)
In the same week:
https://www.absurdlyoptimized.com/recipes/grilled-meats/ http://absurdlyoptimized.com/recipes/brisket/ https://www.absurdlyoptimized.com/recipes/french-fries/ https://www.absurdlyoptimized.com/recipes/miso-salmon/
Parametric recipes are fun idea. I almost want to try them, but the sheer volume of content by one author gives me no reason to trust this will be any good.
Did the author actually try these recipes? Unless the author was cooking and writing 24/7 or just had a massive backlog of publishing, it's hard to trust anything here (although I'm sure most people will.)
Yep. From the site's about page:
> This site is produced with substantial help from large language models: they assist with the literature search, the drafting, and the arithmetic.
https://www.absurdlyoptimized.com/about/
> how much scrutiny did this get for accuracy?
The inclusion of references without hyperlinks suggests it wasn't thoroughly checked: they were probably put there by Claude, and as they aren't links the author probably hasn't read them (they could possibly have read them in hard-copy at a library, but given the rate at which articles were produced this seems very unlikely).
(One such reference is 17 - "Weijers, M. et al. “Heat-induced denaturation and aggregation of ovalbumin at neutral pH described by irreversible first-order kinetics.” Protein Science 12(12): 2693–2703, 2003")
> " Ovalbumin coagulates irreversibly at 80°C (Weijers et al., 2003), permanently setting the foam structure.",
and the paper by Weijers et al. says:
> "A strong temperature dependence on the reaction rate was observed. At 80°C, half of the protein was denatured and aggregated in less than 2 min (half-time, th), while at 68.5°C this took approximately 6 h."
So, the citation is generally true-ish although a little bit imprecise.
At which temperature range Ovalbumin coagulates seems quite irrelevant for the whole article, however. To me it's unnecessary fluff, others might like that kind of detail.
(This does not imply anything regarding the article as a whole - it's just one thing I checked.)
- First, take a look at the other articles. There are 30+ articles all with the same author published this week on topics from cooking to home appliances. Either he's extremely prolific or had help.
- There's so much click-baity LLM language: "The radial gradient: why edges undercook on every hob" "What “crispy” actually means: acoustic fracture mechanics" "What Actually Matters"
It's clear to me that at least some of this is LLM generated, so all of it might as well be.
The browning claim is the contested one, so it is worth pinning down. "
Is classic Claude-speak.
i won't eat pancakes that are not crispy, or that were but were stacked up steaming in a pile till there were enough to serve to everybody at once: nope.
pancakes should be served individually as soon as they come out of the pan, round robin till nobody wants any more.
mouthfeel is everything.
light blonde pancakes taste the best IMO, but char being carcinogenic seems compelling enough on its own to warrant turning down the heat
It really does not matter. Both because variation doesn't matter and because weights vs volumes are not going to give a big enough variation to really be detectable.
There's a reason that every bakery measures by weight. If you value consistency, and recipes should be consistent, you go by weight. You can say it doesn't matter, and in some cases it might not, but the entire baking industry doesn't agree with your statement.
Here's a thing: a given measure of flour (by any means, volume or weight), a single one kept in a cupboard, not remeasured, is going to have a different weight on different days that have different ambient humidity levels.
The tools of the kitchen are imprecise. The environment is not well controlled. And human taste is robust against micro variations.
Look, this is arm chair, YouTube cooking. There is so much variation in recipes that 10% here and there is not going to make or break any recipe.
There is zero ability to make a "universally better" version of a recipe by micro optimizing ingredients. For one thing, you can't easily control temperature and humidity variations on your environment. If people think 2% difference in flour content is going to make or break their bread recipe, then daily humidity variations will definitely have an impact. But it doesn't, really. It's the sort of thing people blame when they don't have good process or good technique.
For another thing, there is no way to evaluate the outcome as "better". Better for you, perhaps, but even then, it's mostly psychosomatic. I've doubled the amount of baking soda in a recipe before and it has had zero impact. I've never measured flour by weight and my cookies come out exactly the same as my wife's when she breaks out the microscale
I've been cooking for a long time. I have family members who refuse to come to Easter Dinner unless I'm the one cooking. I barely measure anything, ever. Even when I'm baking. It matters to have things in the right ballpark, but 5% variations don't matter.
Edit: Also, what in the name of all that's holy - looking beyond the generator, this entire article is amazing. Absurd level of detail for pancakes, yes, but amazing.
There's also another classic, this time leavened - the oven-baked pancake, which is a little closer to the American pan-fried, but with pieces of salted pork, served with lingon berry jam.
Eggs, milk, flour, baking powder (ratio to taste), salted pork; bake in a tall container at 180-220C (again, to your preferred crispiness and colour). In the end, you should have something almost akin to a pudding, Fluffiness depends on baking powder, of course, and temperature.
Source: Frank Proto's pancakes
I use buttermilk powder for quite a few recipes so that I can control the liquid content independently of the acid and fat content.
I find it irritating when people send me a code review and say that Claude wrote the code. No, you wrote the code, you are responsible for the code. You can't blame Claude if it's crap and you don't have to credit Claude if it's genius. Claude is not a person.
I don't want them to say "I wrote it." They're still responsible, but it's helpful to know they weren't deeply involved in its creation.
So maybe that cabinet wouldn't exist without the human element but I think it's fair for other humans to feel that's not quite the same as building it yourself.
this is the go-to recipe in my home. You can sub in GF flour (Bob's 1:1) and they're consistently excellent. https://smittenkitchen.com/2011/06/blueberry-yogurt-multigra...
[1] so I can enjoy it!
Anyway, I'm more interested into good flour blends, from wheat, buckwheat to rice and tapioca flour. Flour can make everything different but it can also make pancakes pretty much impossible to bake correctly if it's not the right blend, and I find it difficult to predict.
https://www.absurdlyoptimized.com/recipes/pancakes/?have=soy...
Seriously though, it's a good format! It works!
Not actually measuring crispness when you self report having the perfect equipment to do so is a cruel, cruel tease though.
This is the second time I see a reviewer online doing the thing that was common a couple decades ago: actually doing the research.
Personally I don't love a lot of those things; they taste spoiled to me. But I'm in a minority of "foodies", who find those flavors interesting, and find my preferred versions flat and boring. They are also very traditional flavors; that's how food was preserved before canning and leavened before baking powder and packaged yeast. De gustibus.
The Hunt for Dark Breakfast
https://moultano.wordpress.com/2026/02/22/the-hunt-for-dark-...
As a lemon ricotta pancake and yeast enthusiast, I look forward to trying your recipe! Thanks for sharing!
Are you sure it was a batter and not a dough? That would make it an archaic flatbread rather than pancake :)
(tho I guess cattails have no gluten to make kneading possible, but there are other flatbreads made of roots)
What if I have bottled lemon juice and can't zest an actual lemon?
Also I hoped to see heavy cream listed as an ingredient.
Interesting nonetheless.
https://www.seriouseats.com/light-and-fluffy-pancakes-recipe
Isn't this the point of a pancake? To get as much maple syrup into your body as possible?
The only real answer is to make a bunch of pancakes and get feedback from the people eating them.
