Waffle Try #2

Last week I was feeling pretty good about the first batch of Belgian brussels waffles I made, but this week I was reminded that baking is most definitely a scientific process, and this time the scientific experiment went a bit awry.

I figured I would try a different recipe just to compare with the previous one. This recipe which I found online had similar ingredients but it included only 2 eggs, fresh yeast, and an actual vanilla bean..i figured that maybe the yeast would help the waffle dough rise a bit to get that fluffiness....it was worth a shot.

250 ml of milk
100 gr of butter
250 gr flour
1 vanilla bean

15 gr fresh yeast
2 eggs, split into yolk & egg white
1 tbsp of table sugar

50 grams of gelei sugar
powdered sugar.

This recipe was a disaster for me. I started off by warming 250 ml of milk in a pan with the vanilla bean and butter...let that simmer and then took out the vanilla before beating about 250 grams of flour into the milk slowly and intermittently.....this is where it all went wrong. I don't know if i had too much flour, too little milk....if the heat was too high, but the whole thing turned into one gloppy mess...a bit of clumpy batter that was unsalvagable...and it was tough to mix the flour in quick enough while the milk was on the stove...

Running short on time and ingredients i decided to go ahead and try the first recipe again for now. Oddly enough it didn't turn out as good as last time. The waffles had less flavor and they weren't as fluffy . They weren't necessarily bad (michael did eat an entire batch) but not what i was hoping for...

One of the things i did differently this time was to use vanilla sugar packets instead of mixing some vanilla extract with sugar...so for next time we decided to try a few things differently together: stick with the vanilla extract sugar combo, use real butter instead of the land o lakes stuff i had in the house, and whole milk...no 2%.....i still want to try a recipe with yeast because i've read that really helps with the fluffiness of the batter.

Michael has promised his niece and nephew waffles next week...so the pressure's on...they've officially dubbed it "waffle night" and here's the recipe i'm going with for now..

1 cup of flour
5 egg yolks
smidge of salt
3 ounces powdered sugar
5 tbsp of real butter

250 ml of warmed milk
1 tbsp vanilla extract/sugar combo

4 egg whites

Waffle Try #1

Okay, so waffle experiment #1 went pretty well. I found an old cook book in my mom's house called "De Vlaamse Keuken", which translates to "The Flemish Kitchen." It was published in 1980 by a woman who traveled around Flanders and collected hundreds of local recipes from mothers and grandmothers.

It had been so long that I worked with the metric system. One of the biggest challenges was converting all of the grams and liters into ounces and cups. Is a "coffee spoon" a "tablespoon" or a "teaspoon"? Thank god for google. Michael went to work and we crossed our fingers that the measurements were right....

This recipe calls for:

1 cup of flour
5 egg yellows
tbsp of powdered sugar
a cup of milk
a smidge of salt

a packet of vanilla sugar
2 1/2 ounces of butter.......

the final touch is 4 beaten eggwhites.......

so i started with the flour, dropped in the eggs, and then added the powdered sugar and salt...i didn't have vanilla sugar packets so i took a little bit of vanilla extract and mixed it with regular sugar separately before adding it to the mix....mixed those ingredients up and then added in some lightly heated milk with butter. The final touch was the whipped egg whites.....

I'm hoping Michael will give his commentary on the overall taste, but i thought the first batch of waffles came out great. Right now I have a standard waffle maker with 4 grids that doesn't flip so it was a little challenging to get the waffles evenly cooked. But, the 1st batch was fluffy, tasted very nice and was a great start. Batch #2 was not as good...not cooked enough i think..and batch #3 was better again but missing that fluffiness from batch #1? We guessed maybe that the egg whites were not mixed in enough so they were more incorporated with first batch than the latter ones? My thought: add one more egg white to the recipe next time and see how that goes? Maybe it would create that extra fluffiness. I also saw some recipes with yeast. Maybe this would make the batter rise more for that light crisp feel?

All in all, it was not a bad first attempt but it still didn't have that fluffy and crispy crust of the Belgian waffles that inspired me to take on this experiment.

p.s. don't let Michael near the powdered sugar next time. It looked like a sugar bomb went off in the kitchen.

The Great Waffle Experiment

I grew up in Belgium and have always been proud of our delicious food; the mussels with fries, the delicious bread and pastries, the many flavors of beer...fair enough, beer has not been recognized as a food group yet but we're working on that. But it wasn't until recently while having dinner at Den Domus in Leuven, that i tried a brussels waffle. I had no idea what i was missing. It was the most delicious, fluffy, light, flavorful waffle I have ever eaten.

So here I am back in the States and it has become my mission to share the secret of Belgium waffles with my fellow American friends. Together with my trusted test kitchen waffle taster, Dr. Michael John Kelley, I plan to try, tweak and taste as many iterations of Belgium waffle recipes as it takes until I can produce a waffle worthy of my Belgian heritage.

Here we go folks. Stay tuned for the 1st round. Please share tips and tricks as we navigate the world of waffle making.