The Secret to the Best Pancakes

Humble as they are, oats can work miracles in dishes, lending their natural sweetness and a scent like warm, clean hay. Aside from softening into creamy hot oatmeal and chilled overnight oats, they crisp into granola or crunchy crumble toppings, add a bumpy chew to cookies and make muffins hearty. And they can cross the breakfast-dessert bridge with this dish, which is startling in the best way: It tastes like cozy, steaming porridge, but looks and feels like delightful buttermilk pancakes.

Tiny quick oats soaked in buttermilk, along with flax and honey, give these pancakes a unique tenderness. Biting into a round, crackly with butter and caramelized from honey on the outside, reveals the pleasant, familiar creaminess of oatmeal in the center. Flax meal softens alongside the oats, amplifying their nutty flavor and binding the batter, eliminating the need for eggs, which are expensive and hard to find right now. (A test of this recipe with eggs worked, but the pancakes were stiffer and sort of boring.)

Quick-cooking and instant oats are the ideal varieties for these pancakes because they’re small and flat, having been finely chopped as groats, then steamed and rolled thin into flakes before packaging. All types of oats readily absorb liquid,: Snowy instant flecks soften the most, while gravelly steel-cut oats keep their bite. The flat teardrops of old-fashioned, or rolled, oats fall in between.

“Instant oats are going to be thinner than quick-cooking,” said Sarena Shasteen, a culinary content specialist at Bob’s Red Mill. “Both are precooked to shorten the cooking time.” For straight oatmeal, instant oats need only to be covered with hot water to “cook.” Ms. Shasteen encourages their use as an ingredient for a “slight bit of chewy texture” to contrast uniform softness.

That’s exactly what they do in these pancakes. Even after sizzling for just a few minutes on each side, the oat-filled disks end up hot and rich. The length of the oats’ initial buttermilk bath determines the pancakes’ ultimate texture: The minimum 10 minutes yield fluffier pancakes, while the full hour turns out pudding-soft centers.