When I am being lazy, or didn’t prepare in advance, my kids get cereal and milk for breakfast, and I scrounge around in the fridge for leftovers to eat since I can’t eat the cereal and milk… But I vastly prefer to have a yummy breakfast food that is “breakfasty” and is gluten free, dairy free, egg free, refined sugar free, healthy, full of protein, cheap, and easily digestible. Tough to come up with that, though. These chocolate pancakes fit the bill, though. I’ve made them many times, just threw things together, but finally the last time I made them, I measured out the ingredients so I could share the recipe here with you. The biggest issue with these pancakes is that for them to be more easily digestible, because they are made with chickpea flour, they need to be soaked overnight, either with a fermented medium, or with something acidic, to help break down the phytic acid. I use kombucha to soak it, but you could also use water kefir, or 3 additional cups water and 1-2 tablespoons apple cider vinegar instead of the kombucha.
If you don’t want to soak your pancakes, feel free to leave out that step entirely.
I use minimal sweetener in this, also because coconut sugar isn’t so cheap, but also because I’m trying to get myself and my kids used to having less sweet things, breaking the “sugar craving” overload that most people have in their life. I find these pleasantly sweet as it is, and don’t eat them with any syrup, and neither do my kids, but you can either increase the amount of sweetener in the recipe if you want, or eat them with syrup or any other sweetener.
High Protein Chocolate Pancakes Recipe- Gluten Free, Vegan, Soaked, Refined Sugar Free
Ingredients:
2 cups chickpea flour
3 cups raw/green buckwheat flour
1 1/2 cups cocoa powder
1/3 cup-1/2 cup ground flax seeds
1 cup potato starch
3 cups kombucha or water kefir
3 cups water
1/2 cup coconut sugar, sucanat, brown sugar, or white sugar
1/2-1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking powder
Oil for frying
Instructions:
1. Mix all the ingredients together other than the sweetener, salt, and baking powder.
2. Leave on the counter, covered, overnight.
3. Add the rest of the ingredients in the morning.
4. Fry in oil on medium heat, flip over, and cook on the other side until fully cooked.
5. Eat plain or with syrup.
Variations: If you are trying to keep this as low cost as possible, and don’t need to be gluten free (and don’t really care if this is as high in protein), you have many options for variations. You can use whole wheat flour or spelt flour or white flour to replace either some or all of the buckwheat or chickpea flours. You can also replace the chickpea flour with more buckwheat flour.
What is your go to healthy breakfast for your family? Does this look like a recipe you’d try?
