Luikse Wafel: Day 1: Assessment

My next project will be the "Luikse Wafel". I have tried many times to make the real "Wafel" from Belgium, but have never succeeded. I think I didn't use the right ingredients. Each time I made them, I couldn't get the stickiness of the wafel right. It just wasn't sticky, meaning, the caramel didn't come out right. And it was much too hard. A good Luikse Wafel should be tender from the inside and sticky on the outside. The temperature is also important, you need to bake it at 180°C for the pearl sugar to melt, the baking time is 3 minutes. Also very important is the waffle iron. It needs to have thick grating, otherwise you won't get the tenderness inside.

Let's go over the ingredients first and make a comparison of different recipes:

All of the recipes contain the following ingredients:

• water
• yeast (amount of fresh yeast, or half the amount dried yeast)
• flour
• sugar
• eggs
• butter
• pearl sugar

Some of the recipes use milk.

Let's make a comparison between the amounts:

What's odd is that patisserie.be uses a lot of liquid, almost twice as much as SOS Piet (after normalization). Another interesting thing is that Alpha Core uses a lot of eggs, probably making a yellow kind of waffle, which is not the one I'm looking for. Kleine Keuken doesn't use sugar in the dough itself and is worth noting. And it's funny that SOS Piet doesn't use milk while all others do. 

With all of these different recipes it's difficult to choose the best one out. 

I'm going for the recipe of Patisserie.be because they look like the real ones.

Now for the real work, how do you make them?

First you make the dough from the flour, yeast, water, milk, eggs and fine sugar. Let it rest for half an hour. Then add the rest of the flour, butter, pearl sugar. Let it rise a bit and then bake.

See this video of SOS Piet.

A more detailed description:

1) Add the 300 g milk + 200 g water + 75 g yeast in a cooking pan and dissolve on low heat

2) Mix together: 800 g flour + 50 g fine sugar + 2 eggs

3) Mix 1 and 2 together

4) Let it rise for 30 minutes
5) Add the 200 g flour + 500 g butter (+ optional salt)
6) Knead until you get a dough
7) Add 600 g pearl sugar, cut it in small pieces and let them rest for 15 minutes
8) Bake on a buttered waffle iron

This recipe is for 10 people, so divide by 10 if you're the only one who's going to eat it.

Stay tuned for the results. Go to day 2.