The first pancake never works. This true of small, fluffy, American pancakes. It is true of big, thin French crepes. And it is true of big, slightly thicker, Dutch pannenkoeken. (When I was a kid, they were "pannekoeken," but a spelling reform intervened.) And you can find many explanations of why this is so on the world wide interwebs! Too hot. Too cold. Too much grease. Not enough grease. Enough grease, but not coating the pan in the right way. Whatever. It never works. Which is no big deal if you are making a stack of kaaspannenkoeken (Dutch-style thick crepes with Gouda cheese filling, glad you asked) half a foot tall. But if you make just a single pancake, you're down to a pancake efficiency of 50%.
Nonetheless, pannenkoeken are great. The way to cook them has been engraved in my memory since the time I sat on top of the counter watching my dad make them, but I choose my words with care: "way to cook" does not a recipe make. Pannenkoek cooking is not like making a cake, 2.5 cups of this, three tablespoons of that, bake at 330 degrees for 27 minutes unless you have a gas oven, in which case it's 28. It's more of an intuitive thing, involving you-know-it-when-you-see-it every step of the way.
For authentic Dutch pancakes, beat 1 cup flour per person with 1 egg (always one egg), a little salt, and enough milk to make it runny. You may want to add more eggs, actually, but the way I have the recipe stuck in my head, there's one egg regardless of the amount of flour. No eggs at all and your pancakes just don't work, although the dirty little secret is that if you substitute soy for cow's milk, the egg is somehow superfluous. Heat and lightly grease a skillet (Blue Band margarine was the traditional thing in my birth household, but cooking spray will do), pour a ladle full of batter, and swivel the pan around. If the batter does not coat the entire skillet, your batter wasn't runny enough. That's what I mean by you-know-it-when-you-see-it. Making sure the batter the batter is just runny enough to coat the entire pan when you swivel it, but no runnier, is the only indication I have of how much milk to use.
Also, we tend to use "pannenkoekenmix," or "pannenkoekenmeel," or some such, rather than flour. It's a contraption of which the commercial availability probably does not extend more than a few hundred kilometers from the Koopmans Corporation of Amersfoort's headquarters, but rest assured: as far as I recall, it's just a mixture of wheat and buckwheat flours, with maybe a little baking powder added, depending on which type you get.
But for added authenticity, be sloppy about the whole recipe. Dutch cuisine is not supposed to be pretentious. Just don't be so sloppy that it doesn't work. I'll now the nature of your sloppiness when I see it. Or rather, when I taste your pancakes.
And yes, you are supposed to flip the pancake when the portion of the top that's uncooked is small enough that the batter will not run all over your stove as you flip it. And no later than that. As with the consistency, that's an ex post measure of when to take an ex ante action, so the real solution is, again, practice.
Next step: kaaspannenkoeken. This is tricky. You put the batter in the pan like before, and after the bottom gets cooked but before the top gets cooked (and you have no way of knowing when the bottom cooks!), you add some slices of Gouda cheese, cut with that most unpronounceable of kitchen implements: the kaasschaaf. Now, you move the slices of cheese around a little, the point being that they need to be covered in batter. You may find it necessary to use some extra batter; the amount stuck to the bottom of the ladle tends to be just right. But don't use too much, because you will still not be able to flip the thing before the top is mostly cooked, and the top will now cook slower, which means the bottom might burn before the top cooks. Oh, oh, and you thought that Dutch cooking couldn't be all that hard, given how prosaic it tastes, well, we've got you fooled. Pancakes aren't exactly an art, but they are a habit, which takes time to acquire.
Actually, I think many dishes are much more like pannenkoeken than cookbooks let on. Cookbooks like to take, well, a "cookbook approach." They make it all seem as though cooking is about following a series of steps. All ratio, no muscle memory. Bullshit, of course. But marketable bullshit. That's why I like YouTube recipes. You see people do their cooking the way they actually do it, before it gets reduced to the near-mathematical abstraction of a formulaic recipe-book ingredient listing, "add one medium julienned, caramelized, pureed red onion and heat au-bain-Marie until bubbly near the edges."
Just remember: the first pancake never works.
