Okay, I have been busy and not really updating our stroopwafel blog. I have tried to invent my own stroopwafel recipe, but it was not really a stroopwafel according to the experts. The result was a nice caramel cookie. Recently someone was generous enough to share their information about a commercial recipe that was bought in the Netherlands and used by one of the bakeries. I can not reveal the details of the recipe, but the commercial recipe indeed ends up more like a real stroopwafel. It was also easier to bake and has a nice brown finish when it comes out of the waffle maker. I also had a problem with my previous recipe that the waffle bulges up after a few days or weeks when it is put in the package. I have seen this happen also with commercial stroopwafels, but with our new recipe, we do not have that problem.
After
That said, trying to make a recipe in a different country with different ingredients and different customers, meant that I had to make some adjustments to the recipe.
When I do some test batches of the recipe, I usually use our little home bakery machine to mix the dough, so I make batches of a few hundred grams at the time. When adjusting the recipe, there are many factors involved in deciding the right formula. A few of these are:
- How easy is it to bake
Too crumby and it falls apart when you try to split it
Too much egg and it may bake solid on the edges, so it is impossiible to split
Too dry and the waffle does not spread easily on the waffle iron
Too wet or fatty and soft, then the waffle becomes too thin and is impossible to split
Too fatty and the waffle becomes brittle at the edges and is difficult to split
More moist means more elastic dough - While baking
Often during the baking process, the heat of the iron gradually changes, or we take the waffle out of the iron too late or too early, so of course I need to know how an under cooked waffle or over cooked waffle tastes. - How is the taste
In Japan, people are not used to sweet cookies like we eat in Europe. A stroopwafel is filled with stroop which is 100% sugar and butter, which is bound to be sweet. Anyway, we decided to reduce the amount of sugar in the waffle, so we get a nice balance between the sweet stroop and the crunchy waffle.
Well, I can tell you there are a lot of variations to be made. But the final verdict is always the taste. So I keep on munching stroopwafels day after day. I sometimes eat more than 5 stroopwafels per day. The average Dutchman only eats 20 stroopwafels per year. I eat more than that in a week.
Compare with competition
Besides eating to refine our recipe, I also have to eat stroopwafels to compare with other stroopwafels. Fortunately, there are not many stroopwafels in the market here in Japan. Some of the imported stroopwafels can be very bad indeed, so no comparisson.
Compare freshness
The sensation of a freshly baked stroopwafel is completely different from a packed stroopwafel. Whenever we make a batch of stroopwafels, we usually keep a few behind, put a date and store them. We need to find out how the stroopwafel tastes after a day, after a week, a month, two months, 3 months etc. Currently we put an expiry date of 2 months on our stroopwafel, but eating tests show that even longer is possible.
How does it taste?
Well, after tasting so many stroopwafels every week, I can tell you, I sometimes lose my sense of taste myself. I don’t know whether this one is better than that one. I don’t know which consistency is better, whether the sweetness and saltiness are okay, whether the stroop is too hard or too soft, whether the cookie is over or under baked. I sometimes wish someone could take over my job of tasting stroopwafels and give me some good advice.