For my second week as Waffle Dad, I had Plans. I was going to do a riff on the Essential Waffles I posted about the previous week, with a very scientific-minded approach. Knowing that the waffles have a bit of a sourdough’y taste, I wanted to see what would happen if I upped the sugar content. A reasonable, limited, highly controlled experiment right? Well, sadly the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
A Somewhat Clarifying Experience
Things started well enough. I started to make the batter as the recipe calls for. No surprises: I warmed the water, I added the yeast, I warmed the milk. All pretty straightforward, right? Easy, peasy, lemon-squeezy (and there’s a phrase I never thought I’d type in a million years).
But as I was melting the butter, a moment of inattention took hold. I looked away or just didn’t pay attention to the microwave, and the result…clarified butter. Sadly, I was too distracted by the fact that what should have been gloriously luscious melted butter had in fact become clarified butter (with the milk fats still floating around).
Now, I had no idea what this would do to the waffles. I mean, the milkfat is now floating in little foamy bits, and the butterfat is a syrupy golden liquid. Will the waffles still cook right? Will the batter (what the hell does batter do anyway? bat?) do whatever batter does, correctly? No idea!
Well, I’m committed to the scientific method, so I said: What the hell? We’ll go with it. And so I used my somewhat-clarified butter in place of regular melted butter. And that became my experiment, rather than my original sugar plan.
Use somewhat clarified butter (including the milkfat, not just the butterfat) instead of melted butter.
And Now the Panic...
The next morning, I woke up and prepared Hercule for the waffling. Tried a new location, in a different spot on the counter to see if it would work better. Thought to myself “This feels pretty good, let’s go with this spot right by the stove”. Not that I’d need the stove, but it was near a plug and seemed to be in a decent place.
I mixed in my eggs, mixed in the baking soda, whisked everything smooth. So far, so good. Poured the first batch of waffles in, and got them merrily cooking away. Innocently, I start looking at my phone while Hercule counts down to a golden brown state of doneness…when
FIRE. SMOKE DETECTED IN THE LIVING ROOM.
Our Google Nest smoke alarm goes off. I drop my phone. E leaps from the couch (in as much as a person 30-weeks pregnant can leap). There is a moment of muppet flailing, until I realize that I can just push the button to silence the alarm. We crack windows, we get a fan, we do all the things.
Mind you – the waffles were not (in fact) “smoking” nor were they on fire. Not at all. And Hercule just sat there looking all innocent.
So windows opened, fan on, I continued to cook more batches of waffles.
A Less than Clear Experimental Result
So panic notwithstanding, how did the waffles turn out? Well, near as I could tell the semi-clarified butter did not have any impact whatsoever on the waffles. They seemed to take a little longer to cook than I remembered the previous batch taking, but I didn’t actually measure so that might be an observer error.
They were tasty – consistent with the results of the batch I cooked last week. So my inadvertent experiment was…kind of a success? However, having had panic and craziness and muppet flailing for the second week in a row, I have decided: next week, I Will Be Serious.
