SC - Adventures with wafers - part the first (long)

[Kerri Canepa]

I have taken the collected recipes for wafers and pizzelle and begun testing.
While I was waiting to hear back from the list, I searched SOAR and Epicurious
to see if there were any baking powderless and vanilla-less recipes and located
two. Both recipes produced huge numbers of wafers (something like 15 dozen)
which was rather intimidating but one recipe had a half batch version. Whew.
Crisis averted.

The original recipe is as follows:

Barbara D'Addario's Mother's Pizzelle (Half batch)

3 eggs
1 cup flour
3 1/2 tbsp sugar
1 1/2 tsp anise extract
4 tbsp margarine

(Immediate substitutions: 1 1/2 tsp of Sambucca and 4 tbsp butter)

Cream together margarine and sugar until light and fluffy. Beat in eggs, one at
a time. Beat mixture vigorously. Add flour gradually, continuing to beat
vigorously, until there are no lumps. Beat in the anise. The mixture should
ribbon when dropped from a spoon. Bake until golden.

Problems: The recipe as stated produced a batter so thick I could almost knead
it. It was fluffy but very thick. After looking over the other recipes which
included more liquid in the form of oil or cream, I added 1/2 cup milk (2% since
that's what I had) and 1 tsp of Sambucca. This produced the proper texture and
fluidity.

I began heating the iron on the stove. Since I have an electric stove, I put the
setting on 5 (which is about medium hot) and placed the closed iron on the
burner for a couple minutes per side. I brushed the inner surfaces with melted
butter and placed about a dinner spoon amount of batter on the iron and closed
it. Put it back on the burner. Turned it over. Checked it. Did this several
times when I realized that the batter had cooked itself onto the iron. Oops.
Pried out what I could and soaked the iron in hot water. Thankfully, the cooked
batter came right off when soaked.

Figured the cause of that problem was the iron wasn't hot enough. Turned burner
up to 7 (8 is the highest setting) and let iron sit on it for longer. When
sprinkled water sizzled on the top of the iron, I figured I'd try again, this
time with a little more batter. Put about 2 dinner spoons worth of batter on
iron and closed it. Much whooshing of steam and some squirting of rapidly
expanding cooked batter. Scraped that off and put back on burner. Turned a few
times and kept checking. When wafer began to brown, turned it out on parchment
paper to cool. 

Note: I have no idea how anyone would roll one of these into a cone or cylinder.
As soon as it left contact with the iron, it instantly hardened. I guess you'd
have to roll it while still on the iron and that sounds like a strong
possibility of getting some nasty burns on your fingers.

The recipe with the addition of milk produced about 3 dozen wafers. They were
light and crispy and surprisingly sturdy for their thinness. They were lightly
sweetened and the addition of Sambucca only perfumed them slightly. I took all
the nice looking ones to work (there were only eight that couldn't pass my rigid
culinary expectations - dang, my husband and I just had to eat them ourselves)
and kept four to test for storability. I made a number of people very happy and
was told that if I wanted to bring them again, that would be just fine with
everyone.

Total time to produce some 3 dozen wafers, over two hours. Mind you, part of
that was cleaning off the baked on batter from the iron, having to stop to go
over and get a kitten or two off the screen (twice), and having the smoke
detector go off (which wouldn't have been a problem except for the fact that I'm
recovering from knee surgery and I can't climb on anything easily. So while I'm
trying to find something to help me step onto a taller bench, the smoke detector
keeps going off and frightening the kittens who rush around willy-nilly, until I
can finally get up high enough to disconnect the darned thing. This sort of
thing only happens when you're home by yourself - I think it took about 15
minutes to deal with what with opening windows and turning on fans).

For this recipe to work, the iron has to be kept hot. Towards the end I would
put the empty iron back on the burner after taking a cooked wafer out. I'd let
both sides reheat before putting in the next bit of batter. Keeping the iron hot
reduced the need for melted butter on the iron since nothing stuck. The cooking
time would probably decrease if a gas stove or open flame source was used. Also,
the iron was made from cast aluminum which does not hold heat the same way iron
would.

Next recipe will be a redacted recipe from Menagier.

Kerri
Cedrin Etainnighean, OL
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