Instant food in cups have become a popular phenomenon and pantry staple in pantries over the past fifty years or so with options ranging from countless (questionable) flavors of noodles to mac ‘n’ cheese. There are even homemade recipes for stuff like brownies and cakes in mugs. And I get it, it’s convenient and fast. Fill with water, microwave for a minute or two and then enjoy. But pancakes? Really?
With STAAR officially starting this week students will be regularly reminded by teachers that breakfast is the most important meal of the day and to be sure to eat something nutritious for the brain the morning of state testing, but many students don’t take this advice weather it be because it isn’t available to them, not having enough time, or any number of reasons. Pancakes in a cup sounds like a good idea and option in theory, but in reality? Yikes.
Pearl Milling’s buttermilk and maple flavored “Pancake on the go” are available at HEB for $1.48 and the quality matches the price. When you first peel off the top there’s only about a half inch of powder which doesn’t leave much to be expected substance wise but we’ll round back to that in a moment. When you take it out of the microwave it looks almost spongey, bland in color without much of a scent.
The actual pancake is somehow disturbingly soggy with a dry texture, it doest cook evenly and leaves you with a gamy, almost putty-like texture once you put it in your mouth. There wasn’t much to note about the taste, bland and a bit like flour maybe. All of the maple syrup stuff sunk to the bottom and solidified into a weird gel texture from being cooked and frankly looked concerningly like some kind of mold or growth at first glance.
Jumping back to the nutritional substance, it’s not great. Filling maybe, but nutritionally there are much better options for a better good to price ratio. The HEB brand chocolate chip chewy bars, which retail at $2.27, come in a box of eight averaging at about 28 cents per bar while each pancake in a cup is sold separately. One single look to compare the two nutrition labels shows a drastic difference in their value and honestly if you’re going to sacrifice taste it had better be healthy.
Taking into consideration the price, taste,and nutritional input this product is not worth it. I’m fairly certain you could manage to get more benefits from chewing on play-doh even, just warm it up a little and the only difference would be that the play-doh has a better flavor. Id just stick to a breakfast bar the morning of STAAR.
