Do You Find Chocolate Chip Pancakes Too Sweet? Get A Dollop Of Sour Cream

Who doesn't enjoy a tall, buttery stack of pancakes? These traditional pan-fried cakes are neutral in taste and can be dressed up or down in various ways depending on the flavor profile you're after. While sitting down to a hot stack of classic pancakes with maple syrup has become quite commonplace over the years, these once extremely flat cake-like snacks serve as one of the first examples of how our ancient ancestors processed foraged foods over 50,000 years ago. Today we often use plain flour over coarsely smashed nuts and seeds, but the general idea remains the same.

What has changed, however, is how we enjoy these rich, bread-like delicacies. Over time, pancakes became fluffier with modern tweaks added to the standard line of suggested ingredients. Bisquick, a prepackaged pancake mix, helped carve an easy path for pancakes to become a modern convenience in American households in the mid-1930s. Once pancakes became an everyday breakfast food, creativity took over, and foodies far and wide began adding all of their favorite extras to these basic carb-heavy treats. A traditional pancake recipe calls for flour, sugar, eggs, butter, milk, and baking powder, but people often want to level up their cakes by adding additional ingredients. If you accidentally added too many chocolate chips to your last round of pancake batter, sour cream may be the solution to level out the overall flavor of your homemade cakes.

No one can argue that an ultimate chocolate cake is the dessert of choice for many sweet treat lovers across the U.S. Therefore, adding chocolate chips to a big bowl of neutral pancake batter probably seems like a match made in pancake heaven for many. In fact, National Today surveyed 1,000 Americans about their pancake preferences and discovered 18% of respondents preferred chocolate chips in their snack stacks.

However, you may often find yourself going overboard with those tiny chocolate morsels and then you end up with a stack of hot cakes way too sweet to enjoy. Sure you can add some extra salt or less sugar to counterbalance all that chocolate goodness, but you may want to try adding sour cream for a tangy flavor. Chef Tracy Wilk says lactic acid bacteria in sour cream not only enhances the texture of your favorite baked treats but provides an almost sour flavor that can perfectly counterbalance the excessive sugar often found in sweet confections, per Martha Stewart. The extra fat found in sour cream also adds moisture and softness to a variety of baked goods. Yet if you're running low on sour cream or want to try a completely new pancake variation, you have endless options.

Before we move away from chocolate chip pancakes, there is another benefit to adding sour cream. Mixing just one cup of sour cream directly into your batter will sweeten the stack and you might not even need maple syrup. If you don't have any sour cream handy but still want that tangy flavor, you could substitute yogurt or go for a more indulgent ingredient like ricotta cheese. But if you're looking for more subtle ways to sweeten your next batch of flapjacks, or just want to ditch the dairy, you have a plethora of options to try.

You can't go wrong with your favorite fruit combinations to add some natural sweetness to your pancakes. While you could go with the standard addition of blueberries, you could also try something new like apple-cinnamon buttermilk pancakes. If you have your heart set on using maple syrup, you could counterbalance the sweet amber syrup by adding something savory like cooked chopped bacon or sausage. Whatever additions you decide to use when sprucing up your standard pancake recipe, you might want to keep the idea of using sour cream in your back pocket. Even without chocolate chips, this dense milky food can enhance your pancakes in a variety of ways.