Brown Butter Waffles

A lazy morning favorite in my home. It always begins with the Joy of Cooking as a reference (even though I've just about memorized the recipe, it's reassuring to confirm my memory).

When in doubt, use an entire stick of butter. Let it melt slowly on low heat.

Let it cook until it begins to brown - a result of the Maillard Reaction! Once it's starts to brown, the Maillard reaction seems to accelerate as the butter darkens surprisingly quick. I usually turn off the heat as soon as I see it starting to brown, because it will continue to brown even as it cools slightly. Here it started to brown even before all the butter was melted, which turned out to be rather convenient because I could use the unmelted butter to help cool the quickly browning butter even faster than if I had just turned off the heat.

Fully melted brown butter:

A Buttery Digression: When you purchase a stick of butter, it's a smooth emulsion of fat, water, protein, and lactose (roughly 80% fat, 15% water). When you apply heat, it's incredibly easy to break this emulsion - meaning the fat and water separate and the protein and lactose clump together and fall out of solution. Clarified butter (a.k.a. ghee) is just butter that has been lightly heated such that the water evaporates and the proteins and lactose clump together so they can be easily strained out. Clarified butter is pure milk fat. Brown butter cooks a little bit longer than clarified butter until the lactose reacts with the proteins to form delicious little nutty brown flecks.

More on the Maillard Reaction: It's a redox reaction! Lactose is oxidized (gives up a proton) while an amino acid is reduced (accepts the proton) to form any of several aromatic, ring-shaped, compounds (i.e. pyrroles, pyridines, pyrazines, thiophenes, thiazoles, and oxazoles). These aromatic compounds stimulate our taste and smell receptors resulting in a delicious response!

And now, back to the waffles...

Combine the wet things:

1 1/2 cups whole milk

3 eggs

drizzle molasses

browned butter

Combine the dry things:

1 1/2 cups flour

1 Tbsp Sugar

1 Tbsp Baking Powder

Cinnamon

pinch salt

I generally use white flour, but you could easily substitute any flour of your wildest dreams! At some point during the preparation of the batter I plug in my trusty vintage 1940's cast iron waffle iron (it takes a while to warm up).

When the iron is hot, I whisk together the wet things and the dry things to make the waffle batter.

Butter the iron and apply the batter!

The set up:

Butter, waffle iron, batter, and of course - a cup of coffee

The perfect waffle.

...I love watching it cook!

Everything stays warm in the oven!

What happens from here is up to you. Waffles make great companions with any of theses toppings:

Maple Syrup

Honey

Molasses

Peanut Butter (or any nut butter)

Butter

Fresh Fruit

Jam

Fresh fruit cooked with butter and sugar (a la Bananas Foster)

Cinnamon & Sugar

...

Waffles also make an excellent substitute for bread - they can be toasted, used to make sandwiches (especially breakfast sandwiches!), or my new favorite - battered and pan-fried to make waffle-french-toast!

Waffle with chicken, fried egg, and cole slaw

Making waffle french toast

Waffle french toast mini sandwich with...

Mt. Townsend Creamery Trufflestack Cheese

Skagit River Valley Ranch Bacon

Heirloom Tomato

Green Onion

Reference: On Food & Cooking by Harold McGee

A Cast Iron Love Affair...

After destroying a high-end non-stick Scanpan, I started researching the original, indestructible, non-stick pan: cast iron. I started, as I often do, chatting with a salesperson at City Kitchens. He informed me that most, if not all of the modern non-stick surfaces are intended to be used with vegetable fats and repeated use with animal fat can actually degrade the non-stick surface. Considering that I cook daily with bacon grease, modern non-stick surfaces are clearly not for me.

So, cast iron. Something about the Lodge brand pans has never impressed me. They're bulky, pre-seasoned with who-knows-what, and their rough texture just doesn't seems very conducive to optimal non-stick. However Lodge is one of the few (American made) cast iron cookware companies that still exists... so I turned to eBay to find some quality old-fashioned cast iron from the early 1900's.

Griswold and Wagner were two American cast iron producers around the turn of the century. They were eventually bought in the 1950's and now you can apparently still find "Wagner" pans that are now made in China.  Both Wagner and Griswold pans gained a reputation of being high quality pans - they're light weight and forged in a way that maximizes non-stickness. Interestingly, Griswold pans are hot collectors items while Wagner pans go relatively unnoticed in the antique market.  This means it was relatively easy for me to find a prime-condition 10inch Wagner pan for about $30 (Whereas the exact same pan with a "Griswold" stamp might have cost at least $100... economics is silly).

As soon as I got my Wagner pan in the mail, I threw it in the oven to cook off the seasoning so that I could re-season it with bacon grease.  What is brilliant about this is that every morning when I cook bacon, I'm doing something good for my pan - whereas before I was just slowly killing my Scanpan with bacon.  It's funny how much better I feel about life knowing I'm being good to my cast iron pan and in return my cast iron pan is good to me.

The first thing I made was poutine. I fried french fries in my cast iron pan. Then poured off the excess grease, spread the french fries on the bottom of the pan, covered them with gravy and Golden Glen Farms cheese curds and then I put the whole thing in the oven until the cheese melted.

This pan made the best french fries I've ever had.  Needless to say, I'm totally head over heals in love with cast iron.

Paella, Brownies, and Duck

I have a bit of catching up to do, so here's one big post about a couple totally unrelated things I've been cooking recently. First is paella. At least, my initial intention was paella, inspired by my Spanish coworkers. But then I realized I don't really keep paella ingredients just lying around, so this is my Cascadian Paella:

Blue Bird Grains wild rice pilaf blend, Skagit Valley Ranch breakfast sausage, chicken stock, onions, garlic, carrots, tomatoes, cilantro, paprika, saffron, and cayenne. Breakfast sausage is officially no longer just for breakfast!

A few days after the paella adventure we hosted an Indian-fusion themed potluck. I made gluten free chai brownies and they were amazing! First I have to show off a new toy that I used for this recipe; it's essentially a sauce pan with a round bottom that becomes the top half of a double boiler. The rounded bottom is really nice to have for making cooked-egg emulsion sauces like hollandaise or sabayon. But I just melted butter and chocolate in it this time:

I followed Julia Child's recipe for fudgy-gooey chocolate brownies, substituting Bob's Red Mill gluten free flour and adding coriander, cinnamon, and cardamom.

That was Friday, then on Sunday we went to the farmers market. Stokesberry farms had duck again and we couldn't resist. I decided this was a special duck that deserved special treatment so I rummaged through my cookbooks for a while and finally settled on a recipe in Thomas Keller's French Laundry cookbook. The recipe was for duck breast wrapped in cabbage leaves and poached for just a couple of minutes. Thomas Keller wrapped them in plastic wrap for poaching, which seemed excessive to me--I just tied the cabbage on with butchers twine and it worked perfectly. Oh and I poached it in duck stock from the last duck that we got. Here's the finished product served with pilaf:

That was just the breasts. For the rest of the duck; I roasted it and then plucked all the cooked meat off and cooked it in butter with onions, garlic, and carrots. Mean while I made a duck demiglace, washed some spinach, and cooked some pasta.

Then I combined the demiglace with the buttery duck and veggies to make a pasta sauce, seasoned with salt and fresh ground pepper, and finished it with the spinach so it just barely wilted. Then I mixed in some cooked pasta and grated a bit of Gouda for garnish. Voila!

A Picture Post!

I have all these pictures of food that I've made in the past year and it's time I organize and catalog their existence here. Without further ado, in chronological order:

Last fall I started seriously experimenting with our local fungi and made these deliciously fluffy Sparassis Souffles ...Sparassis (Sparassis brevapis) is latin for Cauliflower Mushroom - they look like a brain, or coral, and have a very delicate flavor with a surprisingly crisp texture.

Then there were whole wheat mini croissants; entirely made from scratch and by hand - it was quite the process/work out. I still dream of Phil's pastries at Harmony Bakery in the Bay Area, or Santa Cruz, or wherever he has ended up. Anyway, I attempted to make something like the mini whole wheat croissnats Phil made.

As winter creaped up on us, I did a survey of winter squash. The verdict: Delicata is by far the best!(bottom right). Delicata has incredible flavorful, almost reminds me of something between a butternut and a spagetthi squash but with the smoothest texture of any squash I've ever had! All the other squashes in this picture had very mild, simple stereotypical "squash" flavors.

This picture illustrates the colorful bounty of winter - all locally grown Washington vegetables in the dead of winter! yay purple! (left to right: Onions, Garlic, Three types of Carrots, Potatoes, Kale, Chioga Beets, Red Beets, and some thyme)

This is my self-portrait. And one of Alex too. Made out of buckwheat pancake batter - a Fischer Family classic.

As if pancake portraits were not enough, we topped some pancakes with homemade blueberry syrup, my own cardamom-butterscotch ice cream, and bacon (the essential ingredient).

Finally, I would like to introduce one of my best friends, the waffle iron. I got this one at a garage sale for $10, it's from the 1940's and has reversible cast-iron plates - it makes my favorite waffles

The End!