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. 

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...