After a good night’s rest, you wake up and decide you want a nice filling breakfast. After washing up, you get into your car and start the engine. But then the big question hits you like a brick in the face: which place do you go to? Waffle House or IHOP? You wait in the car, engine idle, battling over the greatest decision a man has to make every morning.
For the uninitiated, pancakes are “a thin, flat cake of batter fried on both sides on a griddle or in a frying pan” (“Pancake”, Dictionary.com). Waffles, on the other hand, are “a batter cake with a pattern of deep indentations on each side, formed by the gridlike design on each of the two hinged parts of the metal appliance (waffle iron) in which the cake is baked” (“Waffle”, Dictionary.com).

So which is better of the two? Waffles or Pancakes? I believe pancakes are far superior to waffles in every way. Every day when I wake up and look for a good, filling, tasty breakfast, the first thing I think of is to grab four pancakes from the dining hall and stack them one on top of the other. Then I pour syrup on top of all of them and take my fork and knife and cut the pancakes into four evens triangles. Then I lift each pancake triangle and place them into my mouth. After entering my mouth, I let the pieces sit in there, savoring the greatest taste ever to man (short of a women’s mouth). The buttery, syrupy, soft pancakes find its ways to my taste buds and entertain them with pleasure. After about a minute, my mouth begs me to chew and swallow and I give in. After, I attack the rest of the pancakes with the enthusiasm of a young child who has just gotten his first toy to play with.

So what exactly makes pancakes better? Both waffles and pancakes seem the same, right? Wrong. Pancakes are much simpler in design. Instead of requiring an intricate grid locked design, all that is required for a pancake is a flat surface. In order to make waffles, one must possess a waffle iron. There is simply no other way to make a waffle. Pancakes, on the other hand, can use a variety of cooking tools available in the everyday household. You can use a skillet, a frying pan, or even a pancake iron. Every family that cooks will most likely own a frying pan. This makes making pancakes universally possible in every household because every kitchen has a frying pan. No need to buy an extra iron just to make one breakfast item. And since pancakes can also be cooked using frying pans and skillets, this means that the tools used to cook pancake can be used for cook other food. Waffle irons can only cook waffles. Nothing else can be used for it. Not to mention that when one uses a waffle iron, the person using the iron is must be skilled in the art of making waffles; otherwise the batter will seep through the side cracks and get all the countertop.

Drawing upon personal experiences, I remember that when I was a Boy Scout, we would always make pancakes for breakfast whenever we went camping or backpacking. Why? Because it was much easier to make pancakes and it required fewer tools. And when the cook has to cook for 10 people, we could cook the pancakes in different sizes to help divvy up the available food better. In the summer of 2004 we went to Wyoming for 10 days on a backpacking trip, and I remember that during the trip, equipment weight was an issue. Yet we still managed to cook pancakes with the limited tool available to us. How was this possible? We were able to use our backpacking stoves. When we cooked the pancakes, all that was needed was a heat source, a frying pan, and a spatula. We already had that included in our gear, so it was feasible to cook pancakes. Had we wanted to cook waffles, we would have to needed to purchase and lug around a heavy waffle iron. To make matters worse, if you wanted to cook a waffle, you cannot cook waffles in a waffle iron over a camping stove. You need to have a coal bed, as you cannot cook with cast iron over an open flame; the open flame will crack the cast iron mold. From this, it is clear that pancakes are a far more versatile because they are able to be created with what is around.

Another issue both pancakes and waffles bring up is the cleanup process. Pancakes are relatively easier to clean up since they are cooked on a flat surface. Flat surfaces are easier to clean because the substances that become stuck to the surface have a place to go when they are scrubbed off. Waffle irons on the other hand have crevices where food particles can get stuck. One can spend hours trying to scrub out all the food particles, only to realize that a finger does not fit in there or that the finger does not possess the strength to clean it.

Pancakes are also healthier than waffles. According to nvdaily.com, “A 6-inch homemade pancake has about 175 calories, whereas a waffle can have 220.” (Platkin, par 8). Number’s wise, this means that 4 pancakes will be 700 calories while 4 waffles will be 880 calories. These extra 180 calories can over time add up, as each time you are gaining 180 more calories per meal. Over a one week period, that means an extra 1,260 calories! And over a one month period, that would be a 5,040 extra calories! To put this into perspective, a pound of body weight is equivalent to 3,500 calories. That means that if you ate waffles instead of pancakes everyday for breakfast, you would gain 1.44 more pounds in a month.

Out of 10 random people I asked while writing this essay, I asked them to decide whether pancakes or waffles are better. 7 out of 10 agreed that pancakes are better. As one person described it: Pancakes are “Thinner, broader, soft, foamy. They just beat waffles. Waffles are like sugar tacos.” Other people just said it was better and they could not answer really why. They just preferred pancakes. Looking online, one can also tell which of the two foods more people prefer by looking at two restaurants specializing in both: IHOP and Waffle House. IHOP currently is all over the US, showing up in 49 states (“IHOP (Restaurant)”; Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia). Waffle House on the other hand is only in 25 states. (“Waffle House”; Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia). IHOP is currently expanding is businesses all over the US, and more people have heard of it than Waffle House. In New Jersey, before moving to Georgia I had never even heard of Waffle House.

Pancakes are superior to waffles. They are easier to make, clean up, are more versatile, and are healthier. I tend to think of a waffle as a glorified pancake; essentially it is just some pancake that has some grid pattern on it. The simplicity of the design in a pancake makes it far better. There goes a saying that my dad says: simple is better, as it means fewer things can go wrong.