Why our pancakes have no sugar in them (and still taste like pancakes)

Sammy's pancake batter has been the same since 2016. Organic wholegrain wheat flour, organic buttermilk, eggs from a Dutch farm, a pinch of salt, no sugar. He still makes it by hand before the doors open. The playlist's not even warmed up yet.

That's it. That's the recipe.

People ask if it's a health thing. Not really. It's a flavour thing.

Most pancake mixes — the boxed stuff, the chain stuff — have sugar baked into the batter. So when you put maple syrup on top, you're stacking sugar on sugar. The pancake loses its job. It stops being the base of the dish and turns into another topping. The maple gets buried, the fruit gets buried, the chocolate gets buried.

Pull the sugar out of the batter and the toppings come back. Real Callebaut Belgian chocolate on The Infamous tastes like Belgian chocolate. The organic Canadian maple from New Brunswick on the Wu Tang tastes like maple. Our homemade blueberry sauce on the Blue Magic tastes like blueberries. The pancake holds them up.

The buttermilk thing

Most spots use milk plus a splash of vinegar to fake buttermilk. We don't. We use the real thing — organic, full-fat — and we use a lot of it. It's what makes the pancakes fluffy without sugar doing the work. The proteins in the buttermilk react with the bicarbonate in the batter and lift everything up.

It's also why our pancakes have a slight tang to them. Once you eat the real buttermilk version, the boxed mix tastes flat.

The wholegrain wheat

Wholegrain wheat flour, not white flour. More texture. More fiber. Slightly nuttier. The batter goes a bit darker — that's the wheat doing its thing. It's the difference between a pancake that vanishes in three bites and one that holds up to a stack of toppings.

You see it on The Mancake — bacon, cheddar, grilled onions, maple — where the pancake has to stand up against three savoury elements and a sweet one. White flour pancakes collapse. Wholegrain ones hold.

The Golddigger test

Every menu has its centerpiece. Ours is The Golddigger — three blueberry pancakes, saffron pistachio ice cream (our own secret recipe), Ruby chocolate, 22-karat edible gold leaves, edible flowers, caramelised pineapple, on a Versace plate with a glass of Luc Belaire Rosé champagne. One per hour, by request.

The gold leaves get the photos. The pancakes get the reorders. If the batter were sugary, the dish would taste like one note. Sugar-free batter lets the saffron pistachio do its thing, the Ruby chocolate do its thing, the champagne do its thing. Three flavours, one plate, nobody fighting.

Eight years later

We've changed the menu a bunch of times since 2016. New collabs, new toppings, the rebrand from MOOK to MOAK. The batter has stayed exactly the same.

Come taste it. Sweet stack, savoury stack, vegan stack — whichever you go for, the batter underneath is the part Sammy still mixes by hand. That part's not changing.