Frugal Friendly Foods: Pancakes For Only 3 Cents Each

Hey, I'm gonna let you in on a secret that nobody's talking about. Hey Provident Preppers, I'm Sam and I'm Kyleen and today we actually have kind of a big deal like like this started out to be a super simple video because for our frugal friendly foods we're looking for all kinds of different ways to be able to feed your family for less money as the food prices escalate right we're gonna have to get a little bit creative well we did some cost comparison and this video is actually devoted to Sam because you see these two bags right here I bought these a couple weeks ago but I haven't had a chance to make the video and Sam has been nagging me like every day to make this video because I don't usually buy this I usually make all my stuff from scratch right but we did some calculations and I have to share these calculations with you so this bag of Krusty's mix it's a it's a 10 pound bag right so at Costco we bought it for $7.69 this is from Sam's Club and it was $6.14 that and they're complete mixes right and that means that they cost add water yeah you just add water three cents a pancake for a four inch pancake right totally cool so think about the possibilities talk about your college days Sam well the reason that I was so excited about this stuff is very near and dear to my heart back in two years ago ish two and a half years ago when I first moved away and went to college on campus for the first time I was a poor starving college student as one might expect and I lived off of this stuff breakfast you know whenever I needed a snack sometimes if I was just feeling I'd have pancakes and eggs for dinner because I didn't have money to like buy other nice foods and so especially back then I was doing a lot of athletic type competition and I was trying to eat simply but also in a way that I was going to be able to fuel my body for the training that I was going through and it's interesting because this is a complete mix so you only have to add water but if you make it with milk and egg then suddenly you've got a higher protein pancake right but it's it's kind of a good basic thing now I'm not a fan of white flour like I don't usually feed my family a lot of white flour do I know that's why it's such a treat for him um but in this video so what we're going to do is we are going to show you how to make your own mix which um I'll talk a little bit but it's actually more expensive to make your own mix the one of the reasons why I think it's good to make your own mix is because you control the ingredients that are in here because there are a few ingredients in here that I'm not overly happy about but quite frankly well okay I'm not overly happy about the white flour but that's what we'll be making we'll be making the other one with but we'll show you how to make your own mix and how to cook it I'm also going to show you how we make pancakes from our sourdough start right and so that's what we've got ahead for you and then at the end of this video I'm going to show you the best way to store pancake mix okay before we get into the rest of it there's something I forgot to show you and this actually goes more with storing it but but I need you to see something so back when I used to buy some of this it didn't have all these little holes in it like if you look at this bag the whole back of it has holes so the shelf life for this is about two years it says April of 2024 and so you've got a couple years on the shelf just like this but all these little holes mean that this bag is not going to be shelf stable for a really long time because you're going to get oxygen and moisture in and out of this bag but the bag is pretty tough and so far I'm not seeing I'm not seeing any of it come out so go like this can you see any of it come out when you know I so I'm not looking I can't hit it like he does okay I'm Sam we will be cooking with this one but um Sam we're gonna need to improvise we're not gonna we're gonna show you first how to store it because because he is stronger than he realizes okay so wallaby I think you guys know is one of my favorite um mylar bags and um one of the things I've got this new package out that has three different sizes in it and the reason why I would like to do that because now theoretically you could put this in like a five gallon but obviously this isn't going to just fit in here right I like these the bigger ones are seven mil and they have the gusseted bottom so they'll stand up like this like that used to be able to stand up before Sam met it um so when you go to store this you can store it in a glass canning jar you could store it in a plastic peat bottle we'll leave a link so you can see the post that we did on that um or you could do it in a mylar bag but the thing that I liked about this kit was that it had all kinds of different sizes so if you want a single serving say you want to put this in your survival kit right your 72 hour kit or your grab and go bag whatever it is you're going to call it you can have just a small amount in here and this one is more like a dinner amount right but then this one's kind of a longer term storage and in this package they have the oxygen absorbers and they're all 400 cc and we'll use that for this size and even for this size we'll use the same size for all of it now if you want to know how long the shelf life is for pancake mix it's only about nine percent um moisture so it's below the 10 so there's no problem at all they're storing it but one of the ingredients that it has in it is baking powder and I know there's a lot of people who say that baking powder will store indefinitely but it won't what'll happen over time is this pancake mix will um decrease in its ability to leaven it won't be able to rise as well is it gonna hurt you no but you'll get kind of a baking powder kind of taste over time and it won't taste as good so personally I you know flour really has about a five-year shelf life you can eat flour that's stored I mean we have that whole video in fact I'll leave a link to it um where we had really old flour that we were trying and is it edible yes but sometimes being edible doesn't mean you really want to eat it oh no so and we'll leave a link to that but it's super easy to package these so we're gonna package this up real quick and Sam's gonna control him his big muscles I won't we'll be right back the same mistake okay one of the big mistakes that people make with mylar is they think these ones with the zip top that once you zip them you're done and you're not oxygen can flow through there and so um if you don't have an impulse sealer this is just my hair straightener what I used on my hair I hope I do a better job on here than I did with my hair for this video but all you have to do is go over the top like this and seal it sometimes it takes a little bit of work but the oxygen absorber there's an oxygen absorber in each one of these and the reason why is because it will stop the oxidation process and it will if there's any critters any bugs that happen to be in the milled products or the eggs it will prevent them from from hatching right and from from growing and taking it'll kill them all all right Sam tell us about how much is in all this all right so luckily we were able to salvage most of that disaster um obviously we didn't save what fell on the counter and stuff but this bag right here held five pounds oh that's still hot um held a little over five pounds um each of these um held um about one and an eighth pound um and then these little ones each held five ounces and so ultimately um I just barely had Ben do some math for me and uh we salvaged about nine and a half pounds not including the stuff that we had already put in or that we put in here and so we salvaged most of it luckily um but the mylar bags definitely will help a lot you know what would be really funny so this is a seven mil bag and these are five mil bags wonder which one you could break first comment below if you want to see that video that would be kind of funny huh um actually it's pretty expensive so I'm not sure that I would I would do that but do you see how easy it is just to seal this you want to make sure that it's a good tight seal that you it's labeled and then like I said your shelf life your your good quality shelf life is going to be about five years your edible shelf life will be longer than that much longer than that but um you know I just I just wouldn't push it so now that we've um put all this away and Sam has settled down just a little bit um well let's get making pancakes remember how we talked about the homemade mix well um we're going to show you how we're going to do that so Sam's going to start by putting 10 cups of just regular all-purpose white flour in this this bowl to make the mix now um the recipe that we're going to use I love going to garage sales and collecting these older cookbooks and you can find things like this so cheap all kinds of different places but the one that we are going to use today comes from a and um it it works really well and so that's who I give credit to right it's back I think 1972 or something this is a really old book and it's been used for a really long time now you notice he's using white flour personally I would not use wheat flour now if you purchase your wheat flour you're okay making a mix with it but um if you're grinding it fresh it doesn't have anything in it to stabilize it it makes it super healthy for you but that flour is best if you use it within three days or put it in the freezer so if you were going to use this with whole wheat you could make it up and then you could store it in the freezer and use it like that but um just just know that about the whole wheat so he's going to put in 10 cups of white flour just general all-purpose flour and the next major ingredient is instant non-fat dry milk and this is what's making it so expensive right now because the non-fat dry milk didn't used to be so expensive he's going to put in two and a half cups of that um and this has been in my storage okay you're not supposed to store it this long you're supposed to store it about 10 years but this is from 1998 and it's still good and this is the really expensive part so if you have some that's in your food storage that it's time to use up I would absolutely do that rather than buying some of this other stuff but um if you're buying it new um it it just might be cheaper to go that way because according to Jonathan's calculations which are always correct um it would cost $10.83 to make the same thing that's in these bags um and by the time you added because this isn't a complete one you still need to add oil and eggs when you make it and so it would be a total of about $12.53 so it is more expensive but if these are the ingredients that you have on hand because you've been storing food for a while and now what you need to do is use it up by all means do that he just put in a half a cup of sugar and then he's gonna put in a quarter of a cup of baking powder and two tablespoons of salt and then we're just gonna mix this right just gonna mix I'm not sure how much I trust him there you go I trust him totally that was really funny we'll harass him about it forever okay once we've got this all mixed then we're gonna put it in some type of a an airtight container and personally I reuse things all the time so this is just a container that had held what was it pretzels peanut butter pretzels but now it's it's actually a really good container so after we mix this up we'll make sure that we mix it really well and we're gonna put it in this and then it will be shelf stable and it will store for 10 to 12 weeks on your pantry shelf quite frankly it'll probably store longer than that but if you are gonna store it longer you'd want to drop an oxygen absorber in here so that the oxidation process stops all right so I'm gonna teach you how to take the mix that we just barely put together and make it good make it ready for the table so first of all we're gonna mix our wet ingredients we're gonna add an egg one cup of water and then three tablespoons of vegetable oil you really could use any oil that you want to butter butter is always good I personally I've never done pancakes with olive oil and I've heard bad things about doing so I've heard it tastes weird so anyway I like actually coconut oil but you can see you can use shelf stable stuff and as far as the eggs go if you go I did an article or a post and it has 25 shelf stable egg substitutes so if you don't have eggs there are all kinds of things that you probably have in your pantry that you can replace the eggs in the recipe with so don't let that stop you yeah and then to all those wet ingredients we're gonna add a cup and a half of our mix so we're just gonna gonna whip into that hopefully not spill and with pancakes it's okay for it to be lumpy we don't we only want to mix it till it's moistened because we don't want tough pancakes we want it to be nice and light and fluffy and so over mixing is actually a really bad thing if you let the batter sit for like five minutes you're going to get your true texture have you ever started with pancakes and then all of a sudden it gets thicker and thicker as you go along so you have to add more water so I'd let it sit for a few minutes I would but you don't have to I don't know I'm hungry you're hungry all right whatever you want to do cat boy no all right all right so um the way that I usually know how it's time to turn them is there will be all these bubbles that come up through the pancake on the griddle and most of the time in the early stages those bubbles come through they pop and then it closes back up for me especially around the outside you can really tell when it's time because those bubbles on the outside and getting closer towards the middle will pop but then they'll stay open and so usually then it's time to turn it you get nice golden brown pancakes are you just going to put maple syrup on it like what are you going to do with these pancakes um I mean you could just put maple syrup on them my favorite way to do it is to do peanut butter and strawberry jam get like a pb and j kind of action there so we make the most amazing um homemade jam right jams and jellies and that's one of the things that we do because quite frankly if you have this in your food storage and this is what you're going to be able to eat you want to really mix it up it's super cheap to buy the syrup like this but this kind of syrup is absolutely devote of any devoid of any nutrition or anything good or happy in it other than it it tastes right but you can you can put all kinds of things in these pancakes um you could chop up an apple and put a little bit of cinnamon right you could um do any type of fruit in them but think about this you could also do let's say bacon bits and chives and make it into a savory pancake and serve it along you know with eggs on top but when you look at these pancakes and think okay I can make them for three cents each or with this homemade one I can make them for five cents each that's some really incredibly cheap food as the college student knows right it's a poor starving college student approved and I think one of my favorite things that I've done um especially when I you know I mentioned I was doing some heavier training was you just take a scoop of your whey protein powder and put it in there and it mixes really well you got to have some extra water and it does dry it out just a little bit but it's a great option especially if you have something like this to put on top of it so or like real maple or real maple syrup I mean it's so much more expensive and this is frugal friendly foods right so we're not really talking about the more expensive stuff but one of the other things like when Sam was growing up we had a lot of kids and not very much money and so I'd even take the leftover waffles or pancakes from breakfast and I would use them as bread and I would put like peanut butter and jelly in between them or sometimes frosting or Nutella and so they were like home lunch yeah um but we don't want these to go to waste you can put sprinkle them with cinnamon and sugar and actually roll them up these are kind of thick but you can make them thinner and then make them so that you could just roll up different different things in them whether that's um make it you know into a sandwich like turkey or or anything that you want to you could actually spread um like a little layer of cream cheese and some jelly on it and roll those up all kinds of things that okay this is a pretty cheap lunch right if you just spread it with some peanut butter and jelly three cents apiece or five cents apiece whatever um it it can go a long way and when you're hungry and you're really trying to make stretch those dollars pancakes just might be the answer I mean not really because I'm gluten intolerant so they're not the answer for me well it depends on what I put in the pancakes right buckwheat pancakes and oats you can put in different grains in these right and and make a huge variety we talked about this before but if you were to take this mix and add like a quarter either a vegetable flour or a bean flour suddenly you completely change the nutritional content in it okay these are freeze dried greens from my garden and I just stuck them in my freeze dryer and then I ground them and I put them either in my smoothies or you can add a tablespoon or two to the batter and suddenly you've got some vegetables in here right um and it doesn't change the taste it changes the color a little bit but not the taste now these are freeze dried but for years I've done it just by drying them and greens will dry very easily you don't have to have a dehydrator I used to actually put them in the van when it was parked outside in the summertime and within a day or two I'd crack the window just a little bit so that there's a little bit of ventilation within a day or two they're really crispy and you just crumble them up or blend them and put them in a jar like this if you can use an oxygen absorber they'll stay a lot good longer but if you're just working through them really fast you really don't need that but man the possibilities are endless all right so as you can see I did not make these as four inch pancakes um so they're not going to be the three cents a piece but a way that I learned that you can tell if they're done is you just take your uh your spatula and you poke a little hole and you do a little looking and if it's not battery on the inside then it's done that's the really nice thing about cooking on a lower heat you can see these are a lot prettier than these are they did take longer but they're going to be thicker and fluffier and that lower heat allows you to do that all right so mom said that we needed to do a pancake taste test so a pancake taste test we will do so the first stack this is the homemade pancake mix um what I've done I've just taken your run-of-the-mill you know imitation maple syrup um so and they're very good and just from my experience these do taste a lot fresher and a lot more natural than the bag mix will um but you do miss out on a little bit of the fluff factor so anyway moving on to my personal expertise the uh the bag mix and so these are noticeably fluffier but they almost seem rubbery I think that has to do with the fact that well they came from a bag mix but they are a lot fluffier um I don't even know what else to say it's a huge part of my uh my growing up so what is your favorite if you if you could choose either one what would you choose all right so if I could pick one of these I know this is gonna shock my mom I know this is gonna shock myself but I think I'm gonna take the uh the fresh mix because I have more control over what I can put into the mix you know if I wanted to do whole wheat flour if I wanted to like if I had somebody that needed um to go gluten-free let's say we could put oat flour in it um and not only that it does taste a lot fresher but that doesn't mean me personally I'm gonna abandon these because so much nostalgia okay you want to hear something really funny um Sam was finishing his pancakes and he said mom you freaking ruined pancakes for me forever like huh he goes because I always like the mix but the new ones that you made are so good the fresh ones so just know that there is it the fresh is better right when you put the fresh eggs in there and you use just the basic ingredients with all out all the preservatives it does taste better it's not cheaper um but oh it's just so much better and I think it's it's better for you but so now we're going to talk about sourdough pancakes which is my favorite because that's something that I can eat so this is a sourdough start and it's nice and bubbly when I refreshed it it was right here with it where this rubber band is and what I do is I take about a cup of start and it doesn't have to be perfect and to refresh the start I will just put more flour and water in it and then I will let it set and then it just perpetuates right one of the reasons why I can have this is because the sourdough is really good at digesting the gluten and for me not for everyone but for me it makes it so that my body can handle um the the flour so um this is really good with I use in my recipe a half a cup of milk this happens to be almond milk but you could use any type of liquid that you want and I have one egg and three tablespoons of oil and I always mix my wet ingredients first and I want to incorporate that sourdough start in here really well and the honey would go with the wet ingredients you can totally use sugar or you could skip this altogether you don't have to use a sweetener in it but I'm kind of fond of it so I like just that little bit of honey that's in here and part of it is because I don't drench mine in syrup and then a half a teaspoon of baking soda now the baking soda what it does is it just helps give the the natural yeast that little bit of extra oomph you could just use natural yeast and let this set um and let it um get bubbly again but I prefer to do this and then this is just oats right I just put them in my little vine to mix and took a cup of oats and made some oat flour and you know how Sam's pancakes were some of them were super thick I never make mine that thick but everybody has their personal preference how thin they like their their batter for the pancake so you just add more liquid if you like it thinner than what I do and this will set up over a few minutes it's going to get a little bit thicker because those oats are going to absorb the moisture and it'll be a little bit thicker but this looks really good now you could stop here and totally make pancakes but I want to help you get creative so if you have an apple that's going soft in the fridge or any type of fruit or applesauce or something you could add some to that I think it's great especially with the sourdough to add a little bit of spice because the cinnamon will make it so that the sourdough taste isn't quite as prominent you I mean seriously you could put just about anything in these pancakes and remember it's still inexpensive I don't know exactly how much the natural yeast pancakes are because it's hard to calculate that because I bought the wheat years ago when wheat was you know super super cheap if you're buying wheat today that price is going to be a lot more expensive and so it's it's different so we'll let this sit for just a couple minutes and we'll be right back and put them on this hot griddle these look so pretty and it's absolutely delicious I love that little bit of apple in there and when I had all my kids at home when I'm making pancakes and waffles and things for breakfast because that was such a cheap way to feed our family that's one of the things that I take advantage of if I had leftovers of say applesauce or fruit that was going bad or a banana anything where it just wasn't enough or it was starting to turn I would just blend it up and put it in there and that way I'm using that nutrition for my family I'm saving money and nothing is going to waste so I hope you like this about the pancakes they seriously are an incredibly economical food to to make sure that you're fed when there isn't a lot of resources around and when you're using your food storage they can completely be made out of shelf-stable ingredients so for the question of the day what is your favorite way to make pancakes comment below and thanks for being part of the solution