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.