How to Cook Waffles

Waffles

Why should you make your own waffles from scratch when you can just buy a mix?  That’s easy. Mixes are a compromise.  Mixes are generally formulated so that you can make two,three, or more different recipes using the same flour. The only problem with this is that all of those recipes should have different ratios of dry ingredients.  Waffles should have more sugar, pancakes less. Biscuits should not have any.  The same goes for leavening ingredients.  When you make waffles, pancakes, and biscuits from scratch you can use exactly the right ingredients.

The main ingredients in waffles are flour, a leavening agent, sugar, salt, eggs, butter, and milk.  No xanthan gum required!  The flour mixes that I have tested with this recipe are my all-purpose flour mix and all purpose soy free flour mix. Any GF all purpose flour mix should work. Just make sure that you like the taste of the individual flours that are used.

The leavening agent in waffles can be yeast (Belgian waffles), baking powder, or baking soda.  The recipes that we’ll use for this lesson uses baking powder. If you try a recipe that uses baking soda, make sure that it also calls for buttermilk or cider vinegar, as baking soda requires an acidic ingredient to activate it.

The sugar, salt, eggs, butter, and milk are all ingredients that you can substitute (and sometimes reduce) according to your dietary needs.  The sugar in waffles caramelizes during the cooking process to help form a nice brown, crunchy exterior. You can substitute brown sugar, honey, molasses, or pure maple syrup for an equal amount of sugar.  Since waffles don’t really need to taste sweet, you can also experiment with reducing the total amount of sugar.

The eggs in the recipe can either be beaten, or you can beat the whites separately (until stiff peaks form) and fold the egg whites into the batter as the last step before cooking. If you need to avoid eggs, use flax eggs made from freshly ground flax seeds and allow the flax eggs time to sit before adding them into the batter.  You can also reduce the eggs from three to two, if fat or cholesterol is a concern.

Butter is a big variable in waffles. You can use as little as 4 tablespoons in this recipe, or as many as 16.  If this is the first time you’ve made gluten free waffles, then try them with the 16 tablespoons first and eat them as soon as they come off the griddle.  That first taste makes you want to melt into a puddle of happiness.  If butter doesn’t work for your diet, you can also use oil, margarine, or Earth Balance buttery sticks.

I was a little hesitant to list “milk” as one of the ingredients. If you’re making waffles for breakfast, then you’ll probably use milk.  But if you’re making them for supper (chicken and waffles, anyone?) then you could also use beer or stock. Water is probably a viable, though less flavorful alternative, if you’re out of milk.  If you don’t do cow milk, then GF soy milk, coconut milk, rice milk, or almond milk are also perfectly acceptable.

Mixing and Cooking the Waffles

To mix up the waffle batter, first mix the dry and wet ingredients together separately. Then combine and stir a few times.  Overstirring is not as big a deal with GF flour since there is no gluten that you are trying to not activate.  As far as baking the waffles, use the instructions that came with your waffle maker. If you threw those away like I did, then try 1/2 c. batter and let them cook until steam stops coming out of the waffle maker.  Note the amount of time that took, because you can then set a timer for each batch after that.  That’s also the most important tip I can give you. Use a timer! Otherwise you’ll get distracted with something else and not remember the waffles until the smoke alarm goes off.  This is most likely to happen on the very last set of waffles because you are already stuffed and not standing eagerly over the waffle iron anymore.

If you are trying to serve everyone in your family at once, you can put the finished waffles in a warm oven until all of them are done. The best setup would be to place a wire cooling rack on top of a baking sheet and then place the waffles on a rack. Cover all of this with a kitchen towel so that the waffles don’t dry out.  I’ll be honest though, you can get by with just putting the waffles on a oven safe plate.  They will lose some crispness, but they are still good.

Waffles do freeze well, if for some reason you have leftovers.