Pancake pros cook up stacks for July 4

Fred Couzens/VIEWFrom left, Rotary Club of Boulder City members John Kubiak and Ray Rainey beat up the batter with the help of a power drill at the July 4 Pancake Breakfast. Advertisement

There's no doubt about it, Rotary Club of Boulder City members Ray Rainey and John Kubiak have seen "batter" days during the past 13 years.

Boulder City's dynamic duo of dry ingredients has been responsible for making the mixture that turns out fluffy pancakes for the famished palate at the July 4 Pancake Breakfast since 1995, and in Rainey's case, a lot longer than that.

"I've been doing it for 25 years, and they were making pancakes long before I joined the club," said the man whose job it is to carefully flutter the complete pancake mix.

The actual process involves scooping out the mix, pouring it into a five-gallon bucket, adding water ever-so-slowly and then having Kubiak and his mixer -- a long whisk attachment spun by a power drill -- blend away until they produce a not-so-soupy consistency that gets poured into a supply bucket from which the batter is plopped onto a hot, gas-fired griddle nearby.

"We went through 50 pounds of mix and two more 25-pound boxes already," Rainey said as he broke open another box of Krusteaz pancake mix barely an hour after the breakfast had started. "This'll make our third box."

Years ago, the Rainey-Kubiak concoction involved a more complex, and somewhat secret, process that utilized an ingredient that had more of a dual purpose than merely turning dry powder into a wet, pourable mixture.

"Our secret ingredient used to be beer," Kubiak said as he quieted his drill. "We used to mix it out behind a trailer, not out in the open because that wouldn't have been the best thing to do."

Some people, they said, liked the taste produced by the use of "faux water," but for Rainey, "I didn't notice any different taste in the pancakes though."

Nevertheless, hundreds upon hundreds of breakfast-goers keep coming back year after year for the product Rainey and Kubiak have learned to make under the trees in Bicentennial Park.