About 10 years ago, I was browsing brunch menus when I was in Atlanta, looking for ideas, and one place had lemon ricotta pancakes on their menu. I was intrigued and set out to create something similar. The first iteration started with boxed pancake mix with the simple addition of the ricotta and some whipped egg whites and lemon zest. It was serviceable—but far from perfect. They weren’t terribly stable and had to be cooked almost immediately after mixing or they just didn’t come out right.
Somehow, I lost that first recipe and had to recreate it sometime later at a different property, to similar effect; they were good but still needed work, especially on the stability part.
I was never serving these every weekend—rather, once in a blue moon—so it got left on the back burner for years. At some point, it clicked in my head that Italian meringue was the answer for the stability problem, but it took some time before I had a call to serve these again and thus needed to retool the recipe.
Last fall, that time came. I decided to get more elemental and not rely on boxed pancake mix—not that there is inherently anything wrong with that, just a step I wanted to take in further refining this recipe. Then I needed to dial in exactly how much Italian meringue I needed. This took a few tries to get everything lined up.
The work was well worth it, as this came together really nicely. It’s a pancake that isn’t just a pancake—it makes a statement. I top them off with a blueberry spoon jam and a sweetened whipped ricotta topping. You could dust them with powdered sugar, but they’re already incredibly rich and decadent.
I have the recipe scaled for appropriate batch size at home—my three-year-old son thoroughly enjoys them. At the club, we multiply the recipe times eight for our batch size and sometimes need to make more.
