Tuesday, January 12, 2021

Harmonic Oscillation Pancakes



It's occurred to me that I haven't posted here about my attempt on the Third Day of Christmas to make Harmonic Oscillation Pancakes! 




I've seen pancakes where the batter is dropped onto a griddle to make letters or the Eiffel Tower or a smiley face.  What I wanted to do was load pancake batter into a pendulum, set it swinging over a hot griddle, and have math-artsy pancakes with harmonic curves on them.  






I was aiming for a family-friendly of mad-science-cookery, something that the entire family could eat and appreciate.  So it needed to be gluten-free.  After a failed attempt at making batter from an American Test Kitchen cookbook, I went out and got a gluten-free pre-mix.  




My first thought was that I could have a dual spout pendulum by using two plastic bags like frosting bags, hung far enough on a stick so that there would be two lines of batter spiraling around a common pivot point, which itself would be swinging back and forth over the griddle.  

The pendulum apparatus ended up looking like a found art installation from a beach-side hospital.  I hadn't really put the thickness of the batter into my calculations, so instead of a steady stream of batter coming out in a line, it was more like a dribble of Jackson Pollock-esque micro-pancakes. 

Part of the difficulty was that the batter was adhering to the sides of the bags and not really coming out.  I abandoned the plastic bags for a yogurt container with a hole drilled through it.  I had to drill the hole several times to widen it, and I ended up adding some more milk to the batter to try to thin it.  The end result was closer to what I was aiming for, but still didn't deliver pancake batter as quickly as I would have liked.  

By this time several hours had elapsed from initial pendulum setup to final yogurt container swing, and I could tell the mad-science cookery was getting on my family's nerves.   

The batter that did come out spread on the griddle more than I expected; so I didn't get a narrow, brown, and overlapping curve.  Instead, I got a twisted ring of batter that was fairly featureless.

I think if I'd turned up the heat on the griddle a little more, the batter might have cooked and browned more quickly.   I'll have to try with a larger hole in the pendulum, too -- or possibly a pendulum with two off-set holes that will allow me to have more interesting compound curves.   Or maybe a balloon or air pump to provide pressure that would expel the batter out more quickly....

I can neither confirm nor deny that I might have eaten all the results myself.

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