Norwegian waffles - With a hint of Heston

This recipe is essentially taking into account the average "best waffles" from Norwegian recipe sites, including the outliers of ingredients and amounts. Then taking inspiration from Heston Blumenthal's principles and general ideas on what gives flavour and texture, and why.

Servings: 8-12 (depending on the size of your waffle iron).

Ingredients

• 300 g plain white flour
• 50-80 g sugar, depending on if you like it on the sweeter side or not.
• 1.5 tsp baking powder
• 0.5 tsp fine salt
• 1 tsp vanilla sugar powder
• 165 g butter
• 6 green cardamom pods
• 300 ml cultured milk (250 + 50 reserved)
• 150 ml whole milk
• 100 ml water
• 3 large eggs
• 0.5 tsp bicarbonate

Steps

1. Prepping the cardamom infused beurre noisette

Crush 6 green cardamom pods lightly with the back of a knife or wooden spatula. Melt 165 g butter in a small pan over medium heat with the crushed pods. Keep it moving, and stir consistently. The target is when the milk solids at the bottom turn a nutty brown and it starts to smell like toasted hazelnuts, albeit with a warm cardamom aroma, then pull it off the heat. Strain the husks and pods, set aside to cool until luke warm.

Expect this step to take anywhere from 5 to 10 minutes depending on your stovetop. Some evaporation and loss of solids sticking to the pods will occur, so we end up with about 150 g of browned butter, which the recipe targets.

2. The dry and the wet

Whisk the plain flour, caster sugar, baking powder, vanilla sugar powder and fine salt in a large bowl.

Then whisk 3 large eggs with 250 ml of the cultured milk in a jug, along with 150 ml ofwhole milk and 100 ml of water.

3. Making the batter

Pour the wet mixture into the try, one third at a time, while whisking smooth with a hand mixer between each addition. This is to help avoid lumps. Once all the wet mixture has been incorporated, it's time to finally whisk in the browned butter. The batter should be like poaring cream.

Cover with plastic wrap and leave at room temp for about 2 hours.

4. Final prep and making the waffles

Once the batter has rested for 2 hours, prepare 50 ml of cultured milk in a cup. Stir in 0.5 tsp of bicarbonate of soda and let it fizz for about a minute. The batter itself has thickened a bit at this stage, which is expected. Since adding our bicarb fizz mix will thin it out a bit again.

Fold the bicarb and cultured milk mix gently into the rested batter, a few strokes only, as overworking the batter at this stage could make the waffles tougher. If the batter seems a bit too thich, you have a choice of a few splashes of water or with milk. If you're going for crisper exterior, water. If you're going for soft style waffles, add more while milk.

Heat the iron thoroughly and brush with some butter for the first waffle only. Cook until deep golden and the steam has largely stopped. Cool on a rack for crisp waffles, or stack under a towel for soft ones, depending on your preference. This should follow your potential choice of water vs milk for dilution if the batter was too thick.

The why. And some other enhancements

The first part is that all the ingredients are by weight, not volume. Heston is a detail freak, and things like flour vary by volume just by how you scoop.

Moving on from just melted butter to a ~beurre noisette~, browned butter, with infused cardamom pods provides much better depth of flavour. The slightly caramelized, nutty flavour of the butter, and the fresh aromatics of cardamom pods, which are fat-soluble makes for a more savory flavour.

Next up is the resting period. Typically, a Heston recipe would rest it overnight. Full hydration, relaxed gluten and some enzymatic breakdown of starches into sugars, which also helps with browning. But at 2 hours, most of that has already happened, so that's why this recipe calls for 2 hours instead of 24. At these lengths, the bicarb would already have been fully reacted with the acids, so that's why we leave it to the end to ensure a fluffier consistency.

Also adding salt is something that few of the original recipes do, but it is a flavour enhancer and alongside the butter gives a better end result. Around 1:100 ratio between salt and flour is where he'd probably land.

Some other enhancements - More work, more special

Cut down some of the gluten

Swap 20-25% of the wheat flour for some cornflour or rice flour. Splashing with some vodka instead of water, yes you read that right. It thins out the batter without hydrating gluten the same way, and evaporates faster. This is his tempura logic.

Additional browning

Skimmed milk powder and a little dextrose could be added to the dry mix. More lactose and reducing sugars means more Maillard reaction at a lower waffle iron temperature. This can help give that good browning without drying up the interior of the waffle, leading to a better textural consistency and contrast.

Dextrose is just powdered glucose. Glucose is a reducing sugar, while sucrose (regular table sugar) is non-reducing. That means means regular sugar provides sweetness, but doesn't provide browning until it breaks down (~160°C degrees). Glucose is also less sweet in taste, so we can add more browning without making the waffle too sweet, and also at a lower waffle iron temperature.

Double cooking

Straight out of the french fry handbook, double cooking can help get that crispier, almost glassy exterior that holds up better over time before going soft. This is of course only relevant if you're doing the crispy style waffles.

The water

When water evaporates it leaves behind nothing. When milk evaporates it leaves behind solids in the crust that stay slightly soft and hygroscopic. That means they pull moisture back in as the waffle cools. It also adds more fat, which coats starch and protein, giving a more tender and less brittle structure. The latter here would be the enemy of a crisp exterior.

There is already a lof of milk and fat in the batter, so this is more about controlling in which direction we take it when adjusting the batter thickness.

The bicarb vs the resting and fluffiness

So since bicarb reacts with the acid and procudes sodium salt, water and CO2. The CO2 gas bubbles is what gives the fluffy consistency. But resting overnight or for a long time allows all those bubbles to reach the surface of the batter and escape into the air. That's why reserving the bicarb mixture to the very end helps contain the bubbles in the batter until it's time to cook.

Another fluffiness enhancement would be to separate out the egg whites from the eggs, and whip them into a foam. Then after stirring in the bicarb mixture, gently also fold in the foam with only a few turns to even it out without working the batter too much.

Toppings

Brown cheese, frozen or aerated sour cream, and blueberry jam (even better as a fluid gel using Agar).