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Dessert

Flemish Wafers

A light, airy wafer made with flour, milk, yeast, eggs, butter, and sugar, baked in a waffle iron.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Flemish Wafers

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. In a deep pan, mix flour with warmed milk and fresh yeast until smooth.

  2. Let the mixture rise in a warm place.

  3. Add beaten egg yolks, cream butter, and pounded sugar to the mixture.

  4. Gently fold in the well-whisked egg whites and let it rise again until nearly double.

Cook and serve

  1. Heat and grease the waffle irons with butter.

  2. Fill one side of the iron with the mixture, close it, and cook until golden.

  3. Turn the iron to cook the other side, then remove the wafers.

  4. While hot, dust the wafers with grated sugar.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  4. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Flour
Forms the main structure of the batter once the wafers set.
Fresh yeast
Produces gas that makes the batter rise and lightens the wafers.
Egg yolks
Add richness and help bind the batter while adding color and tenderness.
Egg whites
Whisked whites trap air that gives the wafers lightness and lift.
Butter
Adds fat for tenderness, flavor, and golden browning on the iron.

The step that matters

Gently fold in the egg whites. Whisked whites hold the air that lightens the batter. Vigorous stirring knocks that air out, so the wafers come out dense instead of light and airy.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, milk, egg, butter, cream, sugar):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Coconutfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, milk, egg, butter, cream, sugar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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