Possibilities and the Art of Exploring Them

It is somewhat likely that Waffle Guy is losing his mind. 

Here's the rundown.

Sometime Last Week:

We decide that we've both gained a bit of waffle weight, and join a health club. Waffle Guy is suddenly a fitness fanatic and The Provider of Delicious Breakfasts. 

Saturday Morning:

Waffle Guy wakes up hellbent on a delicious waffle breakfast. Together with his eldest daughter and her friend, he uses our the Caveman Recipe to create a flat, dense, flavorless waffle that offends the senses of all who taste it. Thankfully, I am picking up my children at this time and remain blissfully ignorant of Bad Wafflery. 

Waffle Guy does not give up. On a whim, he adds 3 tablespoons of brownulated light brown sugar, a teaspoon of vanilla, and 1 3/4 cups of milk. He puts it on the waffle iron. Magic! Together with the Junior Waffle Chefs, he has created the best waffles we've consumed since Belgium. 

He calls me to relay the good news, and to encourage me to 

show up quickly for breakfast. I eat several delicious waffles with strawberries and whipped cream, but it's okay because we've been working out. 

Saturday Afternoon:

We are invited to a send-off party for a friend who is being deployed to Iraq, and we realize it is necessary to bring a snack to share. 

Rummaging through the snack-foods section of Cub Foods, we stumble upon Little Pepi's Pizzelle Waffle Cookies. He picks them up. "But we're here for hummus and pita chips," I remind him. 

"And waffle cookies," he counters.  

We go to the party and play with some tiny dogs, but I can see on his face that he's dreaming about waffles. 

Sunday Morning: 

We attend my daughter's baseball championship tournament. My Guy fetches doughnuts for the lot of us. They are a terribly disappointing breakfast item, now that we know what's possible. 

Monday Morning:

The phone rings. "You'll never guess what I found out!" trumpets Waffle Guy. 

From the tone of his voice, I surmise that he's cured cancer, won the lottery, and inherited an island since I've last spoken with him. "Whadduya know?" I say.

"So...we were using the wrong kind of pearl sugar before. We want Belgian pearl sugar, not Swedish pearl sugar. And you can get it online. Five bucks for eight ounces," he says. "And that's not all! There's a place in Florida and a place in North Carolina where you can get sugar waffles. And they're cheap!"

It is clear why I love him.

Tonight: 

I arrive at my Guy's house after a long, irritating day and make myself some pasta for dinner. He's got plans for dessert. 

Pulling a tube of sugar cookie dough from the refrigerator, he preheats the waffle maker. "Should we try it?" he says, nibbling on some dough. 

We've discussed it before, the idea that Liege waffle batter resembles cookie dough. We've even agreed that we must one day try baking cookie dough in the waffle maker. On one hand, my belly is full of pasta, and it's getting late. But on the other hand...

I resolve to work out harder tomorrow.

The cookie dough experiment, as it turns out, is a horrible failure. Ah, well.  At least we've got Little Pepi's.

Remembering Belgeezia

I'm not sure why we call it Belgeezia. It's certainly more fun to say than "Belgium". Maybe that's why I like my Guy: even geography is fun when he's around.

Places you can't find waffles (but should)...

Number 1: The Aster Cafe

Minneapolis, MN

I don't want to sound creepy, but I'm excellent at being obsessive. You might claim to have obsessions, but I bet I'm better at it than you, at least where sweet treats are concerned. For example, you might decide to become obsessed with chocolate chip cookies. You might bake them daily. You might order them every time you see them at a cafe or coffee shop, and you might eat them daily. But that wouldn't make you obsessed. You'd be a poser.

Unless you got pro-active. Start lecturing your dry-cleaner about the merits of complimentary cookies in the waiting area, or start writing to your congressperson urging legislation that mandates cookie breaks in public schools, and you can claim to be obsessive.

The mark of the truly obsessed is the willingness to go to any length to obtain one's snack of choice at any moment. In my own waffle obsession, that has manifested as a massive scouting mission to determine which restaurants in the greater Minneapolis-St. Paul area ought to sell waffles. And, using my scarcely-read blog as a forum, I will publicly urge those establishments to heed my advice, because I like to play hardball like that.

Maybe someday, I'll sit out in front of those establishments, contentedly munching my perfect homemade waffles and rhapsodizing to anyone who will listen about how they shouldn't patronize those uncooperative, non-waffle-carrying restaurants, and encouraging a citywide boycott of all un-waffley restaurants. And then maybe I'll get arrested for vagrancy. 

At last weekend's Stone Arch Festival of the Arts in Minneapolis, I strolled through the Aster Cafe and got goosebumps. This place would be the perfect place to enjoy a morning waffle on the shores of the Mighty Mississippi. It's a charming little joint that's been serving coffee and snacks at the adorable St. Anthony Main for decades. I snapped a few photos, so that you can imagine yourself sitting there and sharing a waffle with me. 

C'mon, Aster Cafe. Don't make me bring my own waffles.

Simplifying the Process

Having been appropriately humbled by the apparent complexity of many sugar waffle recipes, my Guy and I decided to take a new approach: Find the most idiot-proof waffle recipe on the planet, and see if we could make it work. From there, we reasoned, we could tweak and refine our recipe into The One that would bring the joy of True Waffledom to the U.S.A.

A recipe on Cooks.com for "Easy Good Waffles" looked promising. It contained a very short list of simple components, required almost no kitchen skills, and sounded as if it had been named by a troglodyte. Optimism reigned as we gathered our ingredients.

With flour, baking powder, salt and sugar lined up on the counter, I began rummaging through the Guy's kitchen drawers for measuring cups and spoons. The cups were easy enough to find, but my Guy, being a guy, apparently had not used a measuring spoon in eons, and therefore couldn't tell me where I'd find a teaspoon. We combed every last cupboard and drawer, until finally he joyfully handed me a tablespoon. Fair enough, I thought. I could eyeball that amount. I grabbed a coffee spoon from the silverware drawer.

While my eight-year-old daughter dutifully stirred, I added our dry ingredients to a large mixing bowl, reciting the name of each aloud as I did. "...One tablespoon sugar...one-half teaspoon salt...a cup and three-quarters flour...three teaspoons baking powder..."

Eerie silence descended on the kitchen. My Guy had stopped moving, frozen into the smirky posture he only assumes when he knows he's right. "You do know, don't you, that there are three teaspoons in a tablespoon?" he said. 

Sheepishly, I checked the recipe, which indeed had called for three teaspoons of baking powder and one tablespoon of sugar. I became concerned that the directions truly had been written by a cave dweller, and that my interpretation of the recipe was not much more evolved. No matter, I decided. This couldn't be worse than our last attempt.

My daughter added milk, egg yolks and melted butter, and I finished our batter by folding in two stiffly beaten egg whites. It was a batter, to be sure, and not the elegant log of dough we'd seen months before in Bruges. But it was a good  batter. We were making progress.

The Guy assumed the role of lead baker once again, only this time, upon opening the waffle iron, we were greeted with a glorious surprise--palatable waffles. My heart pounded in my chest. It may not be a Liege waffle, but it was a waffle, and that was something. My faith was born anew. 

We served the kids first, and when they didn't die, we decided we'd taste the fruits of our second-ever waffle project, too. To our complete surprise, they were pretty tasty! A far cry from the delicious, dessert-like sugar waffle that fostered our waffle obsession, to be sure, but a heck-of-a-lot better than your average Perkins fare. 

Besides, perfection wasn't the goal on this go-round. I'd set out to make a waffle without destroying it, and I'd succeeded. I doused my waffle in Smucker's Strawberry Syrup and Ready Whip, and reveled in my perceived glory. 

Not the Guy. Ever the critical thinker, he dove into a highly intellectual treatise on the merits and shortcomings of The Waffle 2.0. "I give props to the maker," he said, meaning the waffle maker and not the beautiful woman who'd made the batter. "The texture is lovely. They're gorgeous. They lack just slightly in sweetness." 

He named the waffle iron Esther, and embarked on a side-by-side comparison of shot glasses filled with baking powder to reveal

that my three "teaspoons" of baking powder were, in fact, more generous than the tablespoon for which the recipe should have called. I hated to admit he was right, but I had to be honest--the waffles were a B+, if you were looking for a breakfast waffle. A little more sugar, a little less baking powder, and we'd have created a solid A.

The Verdict: Moderately delicious breakfast waffle. Not much of a sugar waffle. Best served with cheap breakfast-food toppings. 

Next time: More sugar, less baking powder. Possibly more butter. 

Waffle Lover Report

Apparently, there are at least a few other Liege waffle fanatics in the United States. I just discovered a Denver-based company called the Liege Waffle Factory, which claims to make authentic sugar waffles that are shipped frozen and can be heated in the microwave in just 60 seconds. I'm skeptical, but curious.

They appear to be an adorable company (they even have a blog!), and I'm hatching a plan to befriend them on the grounds that they clearly know something I don't. Besides, Denver is much closer to my stomping grounds than Belgium, making it conceivable that I could convince them to teach me at least some of their secrets.

I'd order some today, but the it looks like their minimum order is 60 waffles, and they require next-day shipping because they're frozen. The total for sweet waffley bliss? A whopping $217.99, with shipping. Yeowch.

Even the waffle-obsessed have limits. At least for the time being.

The Dao of Waffles

I met my Guy for lunch yesterday having no idea I was to spend the evening engrossed in wafflery, but a post-lunch jaunt to Williams-Sonoma made up my mind for me. There, on a shelf, was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen: an All-Clad Two-Square Begian Waffle Maker. 

"It's on sale. Should we buy it?" my Guy asked, eager to officially begin the waffle experiment. 

"Babe. It's $140. Let's just get the $20 cheap one from Target," I said. "We don't even know if this is going to work."

"But we'll get sick of the $20 waffle maker after we use it once, and then we'll buy another one anyway. Let's just get it," he said decisively. 

And that is how we came to own the best home waffle maker outside of Belgium.

I spent the afternoon carefully scrutinizing recipes on the internet. He shopped for ingredients. Just after dinner time, we were ready to roll. We used a recipe found on Chowhound, which I selected based on its delicious-looking ingredients and ridiculously complex process. The ingredients were as follows:

Batter 1:

1 1/4 ounces fresh cake yeast or 2 1/2 packages active dry yeast

1/4 cup warm water (about 100 degrees F)

1 cup all-purpose flour

1 tablespoon granulated sugar

1 large egg, beaten

1/3 cup milk, warmed to 100 degrees F

Batter 2:

9 tablespoons unsalted butter, at room temperature

6tablespoons all-purpose flour

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1/4 teaspoon baking powder

1 teaspoon ground cinnamon (optional)

pinch of salt

1 tablespoon granulated sugar

1/2 cup pearl sugar or 3/4 cup crushed sugar cubes

That's right: the recipe required two separate batters, which could theoretically be mixed to create the incredible dough required to achieve Waffle Nirvana. Such complexity, such intricacy must surely mean the author knew what they were doing, right?

Just for good measure, we thought we'd add a few equally challenging ingredients of our own:

2 overtired children who wanted to make a caterpillar cake

1 caterpillar cake pan

1 boxed cake mix

ingredients for homemade buttercream frosting, including food coloring gel (primary colors)

candy for decorating the damned thing

Good thinking.

We mixed up our cake and stuck it in the oven, and reverently began the sacred work of Finding the Waffle. Diligently, we dissolved the yeast into warm water and combined it with the sugar and a small amount of flour. It foamed and gurgled like into a thick, angry brew. My Guy triumphantly declared, "We've just made Belgian beer!" I should have known then that something was wrong, but I was determined that this could be The Waffle. I pressed on.

I added the remaining flour to batter one, set it aside to rise, and moved on to batter two--a scrumptiously aromatic paste of butter, flour, vanilla and sugar. The recipe directed me to mix the two batters with my hands and shape it into ten small balls of dough. The children argued fervently in the background about who whether the cake was cool enough to frost, but I didn't care. I was ecstatic. This was our moment!  

Plunging my hands into the batter, I proceeded to try to knead it into dough. It stuck to my hands like rubber cement. I tried harder. It stuck harder. Within moments, the majority of the bowl's contents were firmly adhered to my palms. I was really trying hard now. My Guy offered to scrape off my hands with a spatula. By now I certainly should have known something was wrong.

We gave up on balling the dough, and more or less flung it at the waffle maker. For the sake of experimentation, Waffle Guy added more flour to part of the sludge in a vain effort to make it less glue-like. The kids fought about markers.

He took on the role of Waffle Cook, tenderly glopping our hideous batter-stuff into the waffle iron. It smelled like skunky beer. But they came out of the waffle maker shaped like waffles, and so we maintained our optimism. We tasted them.

Failure.

He added more sugar to the second batch and baked them while I made homemade buttercream frosting for the caterpillar cake. The kids argued about who got to add the food coloring. This time, the waffles were a little bit better.

"We need more sugar, I think," my Guy said. "The ones in Bruges were way sweeter than this. Plus, they're not getting all caramelized like the ones in Belgium." He dumped in more sugar.

This time, they weren't so bad. We were getting somewhere. He added much more sugar. The kids bickered about who got to frost which segments of the caterpillar. The high-octane extra-sugared dough began to smell a little like fire. "Waffle emergency!" yelped the Guy, who was trying to scrape crumbly goo from the grid of the waffle iron. 

I was devastated.The tastiest waffle yet was being removed from the iron in a hundred tiny pieces. Just when we began to find the flavor, we lost the structure.

I frosted cake with my girls. He cleaned up his kitchen, which contained two batters' worth of messy dishes. As I remember it, we were mostly silent. 

Later on that night, as we sipped a beer on his deck and watched a storm roll by, I found myself contemplating my enjoyment at such a simple pleasure. It occurred to me that when it came to our waffles, we'd buried them beneath layers of kneading and leavening and sugaring and flouring and glopping. Perhaps The Waffle can't be forced--perhaps it must just happen. I made a note to myself to pick a much simpler recipe next time, and sat back to watch the lightning. 

At least the cake turned out...

The Call of the Waffle

I met my Waffle Guy  last winter, completely unaware that he would introduce me to the snack that would forever alter the way I look at food. I didn't know then that he was my Waffle Guy. I knew only that he was the sweet man who was a friend of friends, that his eyes sparkled, that I liked the places he suggested when he asked me to dinner. 

Flash forward three whirlwind months, and I found myself on a plane bound for Munich, where I was to meet up with him for a few days of European magic. Our itinerary was packed--we'd hang out with friends and family in Germany before exploring the Rhine and Mosul river valleys. Since my Guy had a friend living near Brussels, we figured we'd seize the opportunity to explore a new and unfamiliar country for a couple of days, too. I planned to write about it all. He planned to take lots of photos. And we planned to eat. A lot.

German food was as I expected it to be--hearty, simple and accessible; comfortable without being cumbersome; easy to love. I was thrilled to be surrounded by an abundance of flavors not readily available stateside, accentuated by perfect scenery and friendly people. 

When we visited Belgium, I was full of anticipation for chocolate, and I wasn't disappointed. We braved the world's most terrifying traffic in Brussels to find a Neuhaus Chocolate outlet, from which we proudly departed with three large tote bags filled to the brim with some of the tastiest treats on the planet. We transported our cache to our hotel in Bruges with the utmost care, shielding our insulated bags from the sun and refusing unnecessary stops along the way. It was heaven, and I was convinced I'd never have such a profound love for a snack for the rest of my days. 

I was wrong.

I'd always had a penchant for street vendor foods--there are few joys greater than a bagel in Manhattan or a hot dog in Chicago. My career has afforded me a lovely and broad array of culinary experiences: I've enjoyed the finest dining that my home-base metropolis has to offer, eaten chocolate-covered crickets and literally nibbled almost everything at the Minnesota State Fair, and so I was perhaps a bit cocky when I approached the waffle stand in Bruges. Sure, I expected a yummy treat. But how could I have known that my world was about to change?

The sugar waffles, or Liege waffles, sold in northern Belgium are unlike anything else on the planet. Filled with tiny pearls of sugar that carmelize on the outside and turn to sweet goo on the inside, these incredible confections literally left me speechless.

Not my Guy, though. "Did you see that?" he asked, his mouth full of heaven. "That wasn't batter! They cut big pieces of dough to make those! Like little waffley hockey pucks!" Two-thousand waffle calories later, he was finally able to stop rhapsodizing, rendered silent by the sugar coma that only such a waffle could produce.

Thus began our obsession with The Perfect Waffle. We've discovered that Liege waffle makers are not readily available for sale in the United States, that sugar waffle recipes are widely available and even more widely variable in their ingredients and technique. We've found there are no experts here, no one to simply tell us how to replicate those moments of bliss. And so we're on a quest to find the answers ourselves. Through trial and error, through good recipes and bad, we're committed to discovering how to bring the sugar waffle to the streets of America, or at least to our own kitchens. 

Join us on our journey...