Mr. Sato heads to the SoraKitchen with a bowl of pancake batter, a tube of mayo, and a desire to know if, and how, this cooking hack works. Pancakes are one of those wonderful foods that are honestly

Mr. Sato heads to the SoraKitchen with a bowl of pancake batter, a tube of mayo, and a desire to know if, and how, this cooking hack works.

Pancakes are one of those wonderful foods that are honestly pretty hard to screw up. Sure, some brands of pancake mix might be marginally tastier than others, but barring some major catastrophe like totally burning them, nine times out of 10 pancakes are going to come out tasting good.

Recently, though, our ace reporter Mr. Sato found himself wondering about a rumored way to make pancakes really good:** adding mayonnaise to the batter, which is supposed to make your pancakes cook up extra-fluffy**.

Mr. Sato wasn’t entirely convinced that this was going to work, though. Not only is mayonnaise pretty far outside the normal realm of pancake ingredients, the suggestion to add it to the batter which he’d heard comes from Kewpie, Japan’s biggest mayo manufacturer, and odds are they’re bigger believers than most people are in the idea that mayonnaise makes everything better.

Still, Mr. Sato was intrigued, and also craving pancakes, so he decided to give this unorthodox idea a try for himself. After procuring a box of pancake mix, milk, and eggs, he headed to the kitchen and began mixing them together to form the batter.

Then he separated the batter into two halves…

…and added mayo to the batch on the right.

Kewpie recommends 1.5 tablespoons of mayo for every 150 grams (5.3 ounces) of pancake mix, and Mr. Sato kept to that ratio for this experiment. Once he’d stirred in that addition, he poured both batches of batter onto a pre-heated hot plate to cook.

▼ No mayo (マリなし) and with-mayo (マロあり)

Mr. Sato wants to let everyone know that while it might look like the non-mayo batter is fluffier at the point in the cooking process when he snapped the above picture, that’s only because he accidentally poured a little more of it onto the plate than he did the with-mayo batter. As he watched them cook, though, he was surprised to see that the regular, no-mayo batter pancake began rising and cooking quickly…

…while the with-mayo batter was taking its sweet time rising.

At first, this seemed like the opposite of what he’d been promised, but after a while the with-mayo batter caught up to the non-mayo batter in terms of thickness, though the with-mayo batter seemed to have a smoother surface.

▼ Without mayo (left) and with mayo (right)

Suddenly, Mr. Sato realized that he’d gotten so enthralled watching the pancake batter rise that he’d forgotten about flipping them over. Hurriedly working the spatula, he turned them both and saw that they were toastier than he’d ideally want them to be, but thankfully not scorched to an inedible degree.

Keeping a closer eye on things for the second half of the cooking process, he managed to prevent too much additional singeing, and soon had his two cooked pancakes to compare.

▼ Without mayo (left) and with mayo (right)

Looking at them side by side, he couldn’t see too much difference. Maybe the with-mayo pancake was a littler thicker, but by a centimeter or two at most, a difference that could just be some random variance. When he sliced off a piece and took a bite of each, though, that’s where the real difference became clear.

Starting with the no-mayo pancake, it was fine, but not perfect. During cooking, air bubbles had formed within the batter, creating little pockets of empty space within the pancake itself, each of which was a patch of dryness and coarse texture.

The with-mayo pancake, on the other hand, had a more uniform, denser consistency.

There’s a scientific explanation for this, which is that the emulsified vegetable oils and vinegar present in the mayonnaise prevent the gluten present in the pancake mix’s flour from binding together as tightly, which in turn makes for a softer texture.** So while adding mayo to the batter won’t necessarily make your pancakes bigger, the softer and more uniform consistency means that you can get the sensation of extra fluffiness even in pancakes of the same size**, and Mr. Sato recommends everyone who likes pancakes give this cooking hack a try at least once.

Related: Kewpie