Waffleizer

Waffles and goodbye

2010-08-25T07:45:22-05:00

This post is about the thing I said I'd never do — the one thing I insisted the blog was never about.

If it upsets you that I'm doing it, might I suggest that you take out your anger in a constructive manner? Maybe by making waffles?

Everybody loves waffles.

I've asked chefs, bloggers and friends for their waffle recipes and I'm presenting them here. I'll also share my favorite waffle recipe. (That, by the way, is the answer to the No. 1 question I've received since I started this blog.)

If you somehow still don't have a waffle iron, you can, of course, pick one up here. (Oh, and bookmark this Amazon link and use it whenever you shop on Amazon. Thanks.)

Remember, apart from the following links, you can find an index of all the blog's recipes on the righthand side of the page by scrolling down.

Here are the waffles:

* * *

Thank you to the chefs who let me into their kitchens — and even their homes — for this blog. To Lauren, Kathy, Matt, Gale, Allie, Rob, Kim, Jason, Janine, Dimitri and Sandra, thank you again.

With this blog over, I'm taking some time off to wait for the next idea.

Now, there's a chance that idea will never come. And there's an even better chance that if an idea does come, you won't like it.

But you might.

So if you want to find out about anything that might come after this, you can sign up for email notification of any new projects, keep the blog in your RSS feed, follow Waffleizer on Twitter, or Facebook the blog.

When you start a project like this, you hope it finds the audience it deserves. Waffleizer did and I'm grateful. Thanks very much to everyone who's come along for the ride.

It's been a lot of fun for me.

I hope you enjoyed it, too.

Waffled macaroni and cheese

2010-08-10T09:59:38-05:00

Really, this isn't so much a post about how to make macaroni and cheese as it is a post about what to do with leftover macaroni and cheese. So I will let you find your own path to macaroni and cheese. If you make the macaroni and cheese specifically for this purpose, that's fine too, of course. But you're going to have to let it cool in the refrigerator for a while. It needs to be easy to handle. Because you're going to abuse it.

There were a lot of false starts on waffling macaroni and cheese. At first I tried just waffling the cooked and cooled chunks, but after a few minutes in the waffle iron, the cheese had melted away and the macaroni stubbornly refused to conform to the grid of the waffle iron. It had all of the easily imaginable drawbacks of waffled macaroni and cheese — cheese melts easily, after all — and none of the advantages (i.e., no discernible waffle form).

Then I decided to get clever which, as you may suspect before you even move beyond this clause, didn't lead to anything good. If the noodles were refusing to bend to the will and the weight of the waffle iron, maybe I could cut them down to size.

So I dumped a batch of cold macaroni and cheese into the food processor and gave it a whirl. I envisioned the resulting pellet-sized bits of macaroni and cheese conforming easily to the grids of the waffle iron, fusing together into one magnificent macaroni and cheese waffle.

Not so much.

And I made a loaf of macaroni and cheese, which had a slightly different texture to it — one that didn't charm me but which I thought would at least hold up in the waffle iron. I let it cool, cut off a slice, and waffled it.

No.

This was all months ago. Since then, I avoided the topic by waffling abut 20 other things. And that worked well for a while. Until it didn't.

Macaroni and cheese popped up again.

I appealed to Ask.Metafilter for ideas.

Bread it, they said.

That's what worked.

First, I spread the prepared macaroni and cheese into a thin layer on a sheet pan and put it in the refrigerator. (If I had wanted to be more careful about it, I could have rendered it flat on both sides by pressing it between two sheet pans.)

The next day, I took it out and cut a block about the size of a small waffle.

In three shallow dishes, I set out the following ingredients:

flour
an egg, beaten with a bit of salt and pepper
bread crumbs (I used Japanese-style panko) and grated cheese (I used pecorino romano)

I coated the block of macaroni and cheese first in the flour, then dunked it in the egg, and then coated it with the bread crumbs. It held together, though it certainly benefited from a delicate touch.

Into the greased (Belgian) waffle iron it went for about three minutes.

The extraction process was a bit tricky, but with a silicone spatula and some patience it was possible to get the waffled mac-and-cheese out in one piece — OK, two pieces.

The bread-crumb coating and the heat from the waffle iron may tend to make it a bit dry. Melting a little cheese on top of it, drizzling some cheese sauce over it, or sprinkling some olive oil on it can help with this.

Really, if you can nail it, the presentation is pretty much unbeatable, even if it does come out in pieces.

* * *

This is answer No. 29 to the question "Will it waffle?".

I picked macaroni and cheese from a short list of ideas with the help of a poll — a poll that really went off the rails when some people frantically and comically stuffed the ballot box. (Who knew the stakes were so high?)

As in a lot of editing, in the process of winnowing the blog to 30 entries, some good ideas got swept aside, chief among them perhaps bacon (though Alton Brown certainly has that covered), gnocchi (which, fortunately, we do not have to wonder about; it can be done) and pierogi (which have been done at least a couple of times — with enough people it's even a party).

I'm certain there are more that I'm missing, some that were part of the poll but didn't finish first and some that didn't make that short list to begin with. If an idea that you were pulling for didn't make it onto the blog, I'm sorry. I try not to disappoint people but sometimes it happens anyway.

I can only say that there is one more post after this one. Maybe it will be the one you were hoping to see on this blog.

Though I rather doubt it.

* * *

With the blog heading off into the sunset, I answered a few questions for Michael Gebert over on Grub Street.

Recipe: Waffled cornbread

2010-08-02T13:35:26-05:00

Notice anything ... different?

I bit the bullet and bought a Belgian waffle iron.

For my next blog, I'm just going to do this blog all over again, only with a different waffle iron.

No.

I'm just kidding.

Can you imagine?

Anyway.

Waffled cornbread has been easily the second-most-requested item on this blog. I've shied away from it because people who make cornbread have definite opinions about it.

This contrasts sharply with my definite ignorance about it.

In the comments below, you can yell at me about how I'm doing it wrong.

I'm not someone who makes cornbread. I mean, I've made it. But I don't consider it a staple of my diet, it occupies no special place in my culinary world and, while I like it just fine, I can go years without eating it.

You can tell I wasn't raised in the South.

At any rate, a new barbecue joint opened up not too far from my place. And I knew it was time.

Luckily, I had some help.

Not just from the people at Pork Shoppe.

(Old Waffleizer: Explain elaborate conceit of blog. Work for months to arrange collaboration with chef. New Waffleizer: Walk into store. Buy pork. Walk out.)

I also had help from Jennifer, who blogs at Keeping Southern (overline: "barbecue is a noun, not a verb") and who shared her cornbread recipe with me.

(Old Waffleizer: Coordinate with guest blogger months in advance. New Waffleizer: Swap emails. Take recipe. Run with it.)

I was really happy with the pulled pork I got from Pork Shoppe, though this is where I warn you again that I know next to nothing about such things. I even ate something called a Texas Brisket Taco, which sounds like the sort of thing I would ordinarily avoid and which may, for all I know, send some people reading this into apoplexy, but which was, to my mind, extremely delicious — pork, cilantro, onion and lettuce in a corn tortilla — and which got me thinking about pulled pork vs. carnitas and cornbread vs. corn tortilla. (Clearly, Pork Shoppe was way ahead of me in this train of thought.)

Cornbread does not require much time to prepare; and it takes all of two or three minutes to cook in the waffle iron.

Now, I have to tell you that I made this in both my standard waffle iron and my new Belgian model and I was more pleased with the results from the Belgian model.

If you don't have a Belgian-style waffle iron, I'm not suggesting you buy another waffle iron to make this. But, really, I am.

The recipe, which can be easily halved, is after the jump.

Waffled cornbread

Serves about 6

Ingredients:

2 cups of cornmeal (wholegrain)
Scant ½ cup flour
½ tsp baking soda
2 tsp salt
4 tsp baking powder
2 cups buttermilk
4 eggs, beaten

Directions:

1. Combine the dry ingredients.

2. In a separate bowl, combine the buttermilk and eggs.

3. Quickly combine the wet and dry ingredients.

4. Waffle in a lightly greased waffle iron until golden brown, about two minutes.

Recipe: Waffled squid salad

2010-07-20T17:20:58-05:00

Will this leave your waffle iron a mess? Probably. Probably an unholy mess. When I finished, the grids were coated in a thin film of squid — my waffle iron's very own marine layer. I did what I always do: patiently scraped up the biggest offending chunks with a silicone spatula, and then made a batch of waffles (out of waffle batter — and you have to love that I need to specify that) to lift out the rest of the nasty bits. The waffles were nothing you'd want to eat, but by the time they were done cooking they had absorbed every bit of squid that was clinging to my waffle iron.

And that is a hell of an introduction to this recipe.

The recipe comes from David Thompson's tremendous cookbook, Thai Food. The inspiration comes from a reader who wrote in after the waffled quesadillas. (Thanks, Elena.) "Why not try cephalopods — maybe squid?" she asked.

Why not? Because it's utterly impractical even by the standards of a blog dedicated to the ridiculous. Because my idea for the blog — most aspects of which are overthought to an almost paralyzing degree — was to offer people a mix of dishes that would be practical to make in their kitchens and dishes that would be impractical to make in their kitchens but fun to see made, and I wasn't sure if squid was either of those things.

No question it was a good idea. And I would like it, yes. But it didn't seem like the kind of thing that people would go for.

Then I thought about it for a couple of weeks. I realized I really had no grasp of what people go for, despite being 90% of the way through this blog.

And I realized that if I was going to worry about playing to the Internet, I could just post pictures of kittens and call it a day.

Which is how I found myself in Chicago's main library, thumbing through the Thai cookbooks to find a squid recipe suitable for waffling.

When I lived in Argentina, people would sometimes ask me what I missed most about the States. Some of them were probably a little taken aback when I answered Thai food. Thai cuisine does one thing better than any that I've ever come across, and that is striking a balance among sweet, sour, spicy and salty notes. This recipe — with its lime juice, sugar, fish sauce and hot peppers — is an excellent example of that.

Squid don't take long to cook, and the high heat of the waffle iron is pretty much perfect for the task. Squid are ranked as a "good alternative" in the Monterey Bay Aquarium's sustainable seafood listings. They're also relatively inexpensive, especially when sold frozen. (The squid that's not sold frozen is usually previously frozen, so if you're able to plan ahead, you can save money by buying from the freezer case.)

The barest and yet still delicious version of this recipe makes use of ingredients you're likely to have on hand — with the possible exception of fish sauce — or at the very least can find substitutes for.

It comes together quickly, looks impressive on the plate and, in a mark of a great recipe, tastes much better than even the sum of its delicious parts. Thompson's version of the recipe does not make note of optional ingredients or include substitutions, but I've written a few notes below.

Waffled squid salad

Serves 2

Ingredients:

Salad:

6 oz. squid [200 grams]
3 shallots, finely sliced
optional: Thai lime leaves, shredded
optional: lemongrass, finely sliced
optional: handful of mint or cilantro leaves
optional: roasted peanuts, crushed

Dressing:

2 bird's eye chilies, sliced thin (substitution: red pepper flakes to taste)
pinch of salt
2 tablespoons lime juice
2 tablespoons fish sauce
large pinch sugar

Directions:

1. Combine dressing ingredients and set aside.

2. Waffle the squid until opaque. This should only take about two minutes. When finished, cut into strips.

3. Allow squid to cool slightly, dress and serve immediately.