If you love pancakes as much as I do, then you probably already know that it’s one of the worst foods to eat if you’re trying to get fit (due to its high carbohydrate and high fat content).
Fortunately, there is actually an ideal time for you to be feeding yourself such sweet soul food, and that time is during the post workout feeding window.
Ideally you’d want to be eating food high in carbohydrates and protein immediately after an intense workout so that you can restore your spent glycogen stores and provide amino acids for muscle repair.
Pancakes alone won’t do you as much good in the post workout feeding window without some protein, so it’s best to HACK it to amp up its protein content. Here’s the recipe for the high protein blueberry pancakes that I made and ate this past Saturday.
Ingredients
- 3/4 cup fat free milk
- 2 tablespoons white vinegar
- 1 cup all-purpose flour
- 2 scoops (64g) of vanilla whey protein powder (I use ON Whey at 24g of protein per scoop)
- 2 tablespoons white sugar
- 1 teaspoon baking powder
- 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
- 1/2 teaspoon salt
- 1 egg
- 2 tablespoons butter, melted
- cooking spray
- 1/2 cup blueberries
Directions
- Combine milk with vinegar in a medium bowl and set aside for 5 minutes to “sour”.
- Combine flour, protein powder, sugar, baking powder, baking soda, and salt in a large mixing bowl.
- Whisk egg and butter into “soured” milk.
- Pour the flour mixture into the wet ingredients and whisk until lumps are gone.
- Heat a large skillet over medium heat, and coat with cooking spray. Pour 1/4 of the batter onto the skillet
- Just when bubbles start to appear on the surface of the pancake, add blueberries by pushing them into the batter.
- Flip with a spatula, and cook until browned on the other side.
Macronutrients
Makes 4 pancakes with each pancake having the following macronutrients:
- Calories: 260
- Fat: 6.7g
- Carb: 33g
- Protein: 17g
- Ratio (Protein/Carb/Fat): ~30/58/12
You can try to experiment to see if you can add more scoops of protein into the mixture, but I found that doing 1 scoop gives the protein the best texture and consistency (really can’t tell there’s extra protein in there). 2 scoops still gives the pancake pretty decent consistency but you can start to tell the difference. Try and experiment to see how many scoops you can throw in!
If adding more scoops break your consistency, you can always throw the extra scoop of protein powder into a shaker bottle along with some milk and use it as your beverage. Ah.. the wonders of protein powder. Enjoy!
