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

Braised Fennel, Poached Egg, and Cornmeal Pancake

Cornmeal Pancakes (modified from Dad's recipe)
1 cup AP Flour
1 cup Cornmeal
2 tsp Baking Powder
4 Eggs
2 cups Milk
drizzle molasses

Combine the dry things.

Combine the wet things.

Whip the egg whites.

Add the wet things to the dry things.

Then fold in the egg whites.

Make pancakes in a hot buttered pan!

Braised Fennel
Fennel bulb(s)
Stock (or wine)
Salt

Let simmer for 15-30min until tender

Basil!

Poached Egg
SmittenKitchen has a great description of how to poach an egg.

I use a splash of vinegar in a a couple inches of water heated to just below simmering.

Then I make a whirlpool, drop the egg in the center of the whirlpool and let it cook for a few minutes. I test the doneness by jiggling and gentle poking. Poached eggs are easiest to make one at a time, but if you're making more than one, the first one will get cold while the second one cooks.  I pull my poached eggs out a tiny bit early, then when all my eggs are poached, I put them back in the warm water to warm them all up together.

Gluten-Free Broccoli-Mushroom-Cheddar Pie

Woohoo!! I figured out how to make gluten-free pie dough! (for my GF buddies, cause I love them, and I love a culinary challenge) ...though admittedly, it's somewhere between pie and biscuit dough.  I did a bunch of research, and while everyone seemed to suggest that it's best to make your own flour blend, I decided I was semi-lazy and bought Pamela's Gluten Free flour blend.

I started with my sister-in-law's recipe, then compared it with the recipe on the back of my bag of Pamela's flour, made a few tester pies, and ultimately settled on this recipe:

Gluten-Free Pie Dough

6 Tbsp Butter

1 1/4 Cups Pamela's GF Artisan Flour Blend

1 tsp Baking Powder

1 Large Egg

1/4 Cup Cold Water

Pinch Sugar

Two Pinches Salt

I like to use frozen butter, cut into small cubes. Then squish the butter into the dry ingredients (flour, baking powder, sugar, salt) with your fingers. The key with pie dough is that you want to keep it cool so that the butter doesn't melt. Crack the egg into a bowl with the water and beat them together with a fork or whisk. Combine the wet stuff with the dry stuff and knead it all together - if it's not easily forming a cohesive dough, add more water, a Tablespoon at a time.

Once the dough is made it could be used for anything. I made 6 personal-sized hand-held pies, and the second time I used this recipe for two 9-inch pies.

First, to roll out the dough is a little bit different than rolling out a gluteny dough. FLOUR FLOUR FLOUR. Flour everything incredibly well with GF flour.

Then, very gently, roll out the dough. The weight of the rolling-pin alone was enough pressure to achieve this. And "keep the dough moving", meaning between every roll; rotate it, lift it up, make sure it's not sticking to the table.

I placed some chopped broccoli, cremini mushrooms, and white cheddar cheese in the center of my dough, then gently folded the dough over the filling and crimped it shut.

To get nifty ruffled edges, simply poke them with your finger.

I thoroughly egg-washed the outside of each pie and topped it with more grated white cheddar.

These pies need to bake for at least 30min at 350F.

In the end it kind of looks like a blobby mess, but it sure is tasty!

Homemade Brown Sugar and Coffeecake

Coffeecake is really just an excuse to eat that magical topping of butter, sugar, and flour (a.k.a. streusel). When I was a kid, my mom would take me to Hobee's for brunch after church every Sunday and I would always order the same thing - blueberry coffeecake. I would scrape off the topping and eat it by itself, then argue with my mom about whether or not I was going to eat anything else. It became a sacred Sunday ritual for me - carefully scraping streusal off the top of my coffeecake to ensure that I got every molecule of butter and sugar without contaminating it with any of that blueberry-cakey-stuff. Then eating those crunchy sugary little morsels of divine deliciousness - ahh, those were the days!

Luckily, coffeecake is pretty easy and fun to make. I start by making my own brown sugar from evaporated cane juice and molasses:

An interlude about sugar production: Sugar is made by juicing sugar cane, then evaporating the water out. This results in "evaporate cane juice" which is mostly just sugar crystals, but also contains some other stuff. Usually, evaporated cane juice gets purified into white sugar by removing all the "other stuff". The "other stuff" is what makes up molasses (tons of essential minerals!). To make brown sugar, they just mix a bunch of molasses back into the purified white sugar. So you can't have molasses or brown sugar without highly processed white sugar. Also, by making your own brown sugar, you can make it as dark or light as you want!

But I digress, back to the coffeecake!

I've come to appreciate some nuts in my coffeecake topping, especially my favorite nut: almonds.

Streusel Topping

1 cup All-Purpose Flour

1 cup Brown Sugar

1/3 cup Chopped nuts

8 Tbsp Unsalted Butter (1 stick)

2 tsp Ground Cinnamon

pinch salt

Melt the butter, combine all other ingredients in a bowl, then pour the butter on top and mix together.

Fresh streusel that's still slightly warm from the addition of hot butter is decadently delicious, I highly recommend frequent taste-tests of streusel, ya know, just to make sure it tastes okay.

Coffeecake topping can be made anytime and refrigerated or frozen until needed.

Coffee Cake

4 Tbsp Unsalted Butter

1 cup Sugar

2 large Eggs

2 cups All-Purpose Flour

1 tsp Baking Powder

1 tsp Baking Soda

pinch salt

1 1/4 cups Strawberry Yogurt (or sour cream, or any other yogurt)

1 tsp Vanilla

• Beat the butter and sugar in a mixer until white and fluffy.
• Add the eggs and again mix until it has a smooth, white, fluffy texture.
• In a separate bowl; combine flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt.
• In yet another bowl; combine yogurt and vanilla.
• Add the dry stuff to the egg-butter-sugar stuff in three parts, alternating with two parts of the yogurt-vanilla stuff.
• Transfer to a greased baking dish and bake at 350F for roughly 30min.

I used two containers of Brown Cow Cream-Top Strawberry Yogurt, which imparted a deliciously subtle fruitiness to the coffeecake, but you can use any yogurt or sour cream.

Back to my streusal obsession. There used to be an incredible bakery called Harmony Bakery that would mix a bit of streusal into their coffee cake batter, and then they would put a thin layer of streusal in the middle of the coffeecake as well. They understood: coffeecake is just a streusal vehicle. I recommend this method. Though it takes a bit of care to spread the thick sticky coffeecake batter on top of a layer of crumbly streusel.

Mmmmmm coffeecake topping!

Yeast-Raised Waffles

Yeast-raised waffles take a little bit more time to make than regular baking-powder-raised waffles, but it's totally worth it! Simply make the dough the night before, then wake up and make your waffles!

2 1/4 tsp Dry Yeast

Dissolve yeast in 1/2 cup warm water until foamy

2 cups Flour

1 tsp Sugar

1 tsp Salt

2 Eggs

2 cups Milk

1/2 cup Unsalted Butter, melted

Combine all these ingredients together in a bowl with the yeast solution. Whisk until everything is evenly mixed together, then cover the top of the bowl in plastic wrap and put it in the fridge overnight!

1/4 tsp Baking Soda

Add baking soda to the batter immediately prior to cooking. Make sure it's thoroughly mixed in!

Pull out your favorite waffle iron, and make some waffles!

These waffles were so tender and fluffy!