Sophia's vegan banana pancakes

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to another video for the British Council’s LearnEnglish Teens website and their YouTube channel. In today’s video, I wanted to share this very simple and yummy vegan banana recipe – wait, vegan banana pancakes recipe. That’s what I meant to say!

A quick disclaimer – I myself am not vegan, but I love to make this recipe because it is so easy and simple. You literally only need three ingredients, which you probably have already in your house, and on top of that I like to call this the ‘healthy’ version because it doesn’t use a lot of oil, it’s not heavy, it’s not thick like traditional pancakes, so I can get away with eating this a lot more. It also has banana in it, so that can be counted as one of your five a day. Let me know at the end of the video in the comments below what you think of this recipe. If you do try it out, let me know how you find it – if you think it’s tasty or you prefer traditional pancakes, and let’s get on with the making!

The three main ingredients we need for this recipe are bananas, flour and some kind of milk. If you’re not vegan, you can use just normal milk. I’m using a soya milk, which is a plant-based alternative milk. You can use almond milk, oats milk, coconut milk, whatever milk you usually use. The little pink sachet is actually bicarbonate of soda, and this is optional. You can add this just to make the pancakes fluffy, but it’s not essential by any means.

So, the first thing we’re going to do is to peel our bananas and then to dice them up. We are then going to transfer it into a bowl, or I’m using this kind of measuring jug. That way I can just pour the mixture afterwards. And, as you can see, I’m very messy because I was trying to balance my camera! I don’t have a tripod and I was also trying to mush at the same time. So, sorry if you get a couple of close-up angles. OK, so we’re going to mush the banana until it’s basically a very nice paste. It doesn’t have to be lump-free. You can do this with a blender or a food processor, but mashing it with a fork works just as well.

Next, we’re going to pour in our flour, and I would use 500 grams of plain flour for the two bananas. And now we’re going to combine the flour and the banana well. At this point, the banana and flour mixture should kind of make a doughy consistency, and that’s when you want to add in your cup of milk and mix it up to thin out the batter. Once you have a thin enough batter, just like normal pancake batter, it’s not too runny, kind of yogurt consistency, but it drops off the spoon – that’s the best way I can describe it. You’ll know when it’s there.

And once we’re there we’re going to get out a pan, and you’re going to need to use either butter, a fat or some type of oil to stop the pancake from sticking to the pan. I’m using an olive oil spread. Now, the next part is really up to you how thin or thick you want your pancake to be. The only thing I would say is just to make sure it’s not too thick – otherwise, it won’t cook in the middle because these banana pancakes are quite dense. So, once it’s cooked on one side, I’m just going to flip it over and cook it on the other side. That’s the first one done, and a couple more to go.

And this is what it looks like when it’s ready. I’ve just chopped up some strawberries and put on a bit of sugar to serve it. You can put whatever toppings you want – blueberries, any fresh fruits, more bananas if you like, yogurt, honey … it really is up to you. I hope you guys have enjoyed this video, and let me know what you think, as I said, in the comments below, and happy pancake-making! See you guys in the next one. Bye!