Skip to main content
Main

Plain Waffles

A simple waffle made with eggs, flour, milk, butter, baking powder, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Plain Waffles

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the batter

  1. Mix the baking powder and salt with the flour.

  2. Beat the egg whites and yolks separately.

  3. Melt the butter and add it to the milk.

  4. Combine the beaten yolks and milk with the flour.

  5. Fold in the beaten egg whites.

Cook and serve

  1. Preheat and grease the waffle iron.

  2. Pour the batter into the hot waffle iron.

  3. Bake until the edges are set, then turn the waffle iron to bake the second side.

  4. Serve the waffles hot, buttering each one generously and sprinkling with cinnamon and 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. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

Eggs
Whites trapped by folding add lift, and yolks add richness and structure to the batter.
All-purpose flour
Provides the starch and gluten that form the waffle's main structure.
Milk or cream
Hydrates the flour and gives the batter its liquid base and tenderness.
Butter
Adds fat for tenderness and flavor, and helps the waffle brown.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter, making the waffles rise and turn light.

The step that matters

Fold in the beaten egg whites. Folding gently keeps the air beaten into the whites. Stirring hard would deflate them, leaving the waffles dense instead of light.

“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.

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes