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LIÈGE WAFFLE RECIPES and SOME TIPS

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There are quite a good few decent recipes online and below are some that we like.   We prefer the brioche style recipes that call for unmelted butter vs. melted and the reason is if you melt the butter, the butter leaches out when cooking and you get an oily waffle. Making brioche dough using unmelted butter is however more time consuming as it just takes time to incorporate the butter a bit at a time.  It's worth the effort we think.  Lots of recipes just tell you to dump in the butter which we don't like.  If you don't develop the gluten before adding the butter, you'll end up with more a cake like structure which is not as good.  Btw, if you ever see a recipe calling for oil, just skip it entirely.  Butter tastes better!  

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Our own recipe is trade secret, but even if we did publish it, it would only work for large scale production as we make 180lb batches. When it's scaled down to make for example 10pcs, the ratios are a bit off anyhow.   Plus we use fresh yeast which isn't readily available.  The below recipes are mostly 2 day recipes because dry yeast needs time to ferment to develop more flavor.  If you can get fresh yeast, then you can often skip the overnight process which certainly will save some time.   For businesses trying to make it in house, here a few tips:

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  • Try bread or pizza flour.  The high gluten helps with give the dough more elasticity than AP flour.  You'll likely need a bit more liquids (milk, water, butter and eggs) though to keep the dough moister and not as tight.   Sure, we know historically these waffles were made with lower gluten flour closer to pastry flour, but that's because high-gluten flour didn't exist.  Mills were not that sophisticated.  

  • Try fresh yeast.  This has a stronger fermented yeast flavor and that's what is being developed when recipes call for overnight proofing.  You can pretty much skip the overnight fermentation and still get great flavor.  Huge time saver.  

  • Invest in a dough divider.  Weighing out small dough balls is incredibly time consuming and labor intensive.  

  • Try Couplet pearl sugar instead of  Tirlemont.  You'll see cleaning the iron is much less painful especially if you have a HVD waffle iron.  Also, if you freeze or refrigerate the dough for long periods, larger size pearls will offset the inevitable melting that will occur.  See more about sugar on our sugar comparison page.  

  • Use or develop with a metric weight based recipe.  It's much more precise and easier to scale as well as repeat.  

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ADAM WAYDA'S BLOG
https://liegewaffle.wordpress.com/

Adam has probably done the most research into what recipe is the most authentic.  He's quite the fanatic about them.  In 2016, he actually contacted us one day because he was curious about our product.   We ended up sending him some samples to test because we were also curious what he thought (good or bad).  Turned out that he liked our product quite a lot and decided to mention our dough on his site.  We also like that he has a metric recipe which is much more precise.  

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ASHLEE MARIE'S BLOG
http://ashleemarie.com/traditional-liege-waffle-recipe/

Her recipe is similar to Adam's, but we like how there is some extra info dealing with household waffle irons.  It's true that because they don't have the mass of a commercial cast iron machine you have to cook at a slightly hotter temperature to get good results. Cooking for more than 3 minutes will be a very dry waffle though.  She has a video too, but she really needs to learn how to pronounce "Liege" properly!

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GENIUS KITCHEN

http://www.geniuskitchen.com/recipe/liege-waffles-belgian-pearl-sugar-waffles-158977

We like how straight forward the recipe is, but not a whole lot of detail on instructions.  We would say adjust the recipe to add the butter chunks slowly and just ignore the main photo because they used Swedish pearl sugar.   Not the prettiest Liege waffle pictures since it was cooked on a round quartered waffle iron.  

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BRIOCHE RECIPES (FOR MORE ADVANCED OPERATORS)

Now if you really want to get into the challenge of developing your own proprietary recipe, start with a brioche recipe.  If you compare them to Liege waffle recipes, you'll see they have more eggs relative to the flour.  That's probably the biggest difference, but besides that they are pretty similar.  We would recommend shooting for a 40-50% butter baker's ratio to the flour as well.  Any higher and the cost of your Liege waffle dough starts to skyrocket.  

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