We bought some stroopwafels here in the supermarket. The price is ¥567 for 8 stroopwafels. I opened the package and smelled the stroopwafels, but it smells very artificial, compare to our own stoopwafels. One of the reasons for buying the stroopwafels is to look at the ingredients slip. Commercially produced stroopwafels do not include yeast. Apparently there is some soy flour inside.

So I started googling about soy flour in cookies in order to find out how we can make use of soy flour. Soy flour is made from roasted soybeans that have been ground into a fine powder. Rich in high-quality protein and other nutrients, soy flour also adds a pleasant texture and flavor to a variety of products. Baked products containing soy flour tend to brown more quickly, so it may be necessary to shorten baking time or lower the temperature just slightly.

So far, that sounds like a good product to use in my stroopwafels. The baking time problem was exactly what was plaguing me when I used a recipe without yeast. Improving the texture is of course also a welcome improvement.

Although soy flour has not yet found its way into many family kitchens, it is used extensively by the food industry. Soy flour turns up in an amazing array of food products, including fudge and other candies, pies, doughnuts, cakes and rolls, pasta, pancake mixes and frozen desserts. Some meat loaves and other prepared meat products use soy flour. It also keeps baked goods from becoming stale. In fried foods, like doughnuts, soy flour reduces the amount of fat that is absorbed by the dough. It adds a rich color, fine texture, tenderness and moistness to baked goods. Because it adds moisture to baked products, soy flour can also be used as an inexpensive and cholesterol-free egg substitute in these foods. Replace one egg with 1 tablespoon soy flour and 1 tablespoon water.

It all sounds very positive. I read somewhere that you can replace wheat flour with up soy flour up to 30%. So my new batch, I added 30% soyflour. When baking the waffle there was a noticable difference. The waffle baked easy, quick and with low temperature. The result was a dark brown waffle, which was easy to split. Quite a success, I thought. After baking a few waffles, I tasted one of the waffles.

Yuughhh…

It tasted horrible. It had a strong soy flavour, which made the cookie quite unpalatable.  That was quite an unpleasant surprise. So I stopped baking immediately.

The next batch of dough, I thought to use a bit less soy flour and see the result. I didn”t want to waste the first batch, so I took 15% of the soy dough and added it to my next batch, which resulted in about 5% soy flour.

The result was again that the waffles was easy to bake and split. The consistency of the cookie was nice, but you could still detect a slight soy flavour, which gave the cookie a strange aftertaste.\n\nThird trial was by adding again 5% soy flour, but the bitter after taste of soy was still discernable, which gave an unwelcome after taste.

Apparently there are two types of soy flour:

Two kinds of soy flour are available: Natural or full-fat soy flour contains the natural oils that are found in the soybean. Defatted soy flour has the oils removed during processing. Both kinds of soy flour will give a protein boost to recipes; however, defatted soy flour is even more concentrated in protein than full-fat soy flour.

Apparently the defatted soy flour has a milder taste than the full-fat version, so we will need to find the defatted soy flour in order to continue our experiments. Another reason to look into soy flour is that it has a preservative function in the baked product, so it can extend the shelf live of the stroopwafel.