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Dessert

French Waffles

A batter of butter, sugar, eggs, milk, yeast, flour, and salt baked in a waffle iron.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk 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 ↓

French Waffles

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Cream the butter and sugar together.

  2. Add the egg yolks.

  3. Beat the mixture well.

  4. Dissolve the yeast in the sweet milk.

  5. Add the dissolved yeast to the creamed mixture alternately with the flour.

  6. Add the salt.

  7. Ensure the milk and flour are lukewarm.

  8. Beat the egg whites until light.

  9. Fold the beaten egg whites into the batter last.

Rise and bake

  1. Set the batter aside for three hours until it becomes light.

  2. Bake on a greased waffle iron.

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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  2. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour 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
Yolks enrich the batter and whites, beaten and folded in, add lightness and airiness.
Butter
Creamed with sugar, it adds richness and a tender texture to the batter.
Yeast
Ferments the batter during rising, producing gas that makes the waffles light.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the waffles together once baked.
Sugar
Sweetens the batter and helps brown the waffles in the iron.

The step that matters

Fold the beaten egg whites into the batter last. Folding gently keeps the air in the whipped whites. Stirring them in hard would deflate the batter, reducing the lightness the rise and whites are meant to give.

“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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