Norwegian Waffles

If you read Saveur Magazine with any regularity you are familiar with their annual Saveur 100. 100 best places, dishes, items, bits and pieces, miscellany. Some are useful, some delicious, some over the top, some entirely too esoteric. This year leading the pack in the entirely too esoteric (but all too captivating) category is Griswold Cast Iron, an Erie Pennsylvania company that has been out of business for more than half a century. For almost 100 years, Griswold produced cast iron cookware. The good stuff. The products that last for lifetimes. The kind of thing that is now coveted, search for, collected and sold for hundreds of dollars per piece on Ebay. I know, I looked.

What’s the point of this brief history? Well, I, like most of you, had never heard of Griswold Cast Iron before it showed up on the Saveur 100 and I, like many of you after reading the article, decided to seek it out. Due to my Norwegian husband’s love for waffles, I had my eye out for a heart and star waffle iron, but after a perfunctory search I threw in the towel. Too expensive for such a limited use.

Luckily, like any self respecting modern woman I found a cheaper, newer, and not nearly as durable version on the internets.  The Chef’s Choice 830 WafflePro Heart Waffle Iron. A literal and figurative mouthful. You too can have one from Amazon and churn out charming heart shaped waffles, much like they do in Norway.

Our shiny new waffle iron arrived recently and, after whetting our appetites on waffles at the Norwegian Seaman’s Church this week, we decided to make our own version at home.

This version, an amalgam of the Norwegian recipes that we found, is as simple as it gets. No eggs, no vanilla, barely any sugar. They are very buttery, and I say that in the best possible sense of the word. We like this thin, doughy version, but any rendition would work nicely with the iron. Once you have your dough, the waffle iron does all of the work. Serve your homemade waffles with blueberry butter, apple sauce, jam, maple syrup or any other topping of your choosing.

Norwegian Waffles (makes 8 waffles)

7 tbsp butter, melted and cooled
2 cups whole milk
1.5 cups flour
1 tsp baking soda
1 tbs sugar

In a large bowl mix 1 cup milk, flour and baking soda until batter is smooth. Add the remaining milk and then slowly drizzle the melted butter into the mixture, whisking as you go. Heat and cook the waffles according to your waffle maker’s instructions.