Saturday, May 2nd, 2009
The original stroopwafel, which was invented in Gouda around 1784 was actually made of cookie crumbs that were left over from the daily baking of cookies by a bakery in Gouda. The stroopwafel was supposed to be a poor man’s treat. With the growing popularity of the stroopwafel, the flour dough stroopwafel recipe was later invented.
When baking stroopwafels, they are usually cut with a round cutter, which is exactly 8.5cm in circumference. Currently I am using between 23gr and 25gr per cookie, so the round cutter inherently will create a lot of cookie crumbs.
The image on the right shows the left over cookie crumbs. I collected them over the week, while experimenting with different recipes. In the Netherlands, the stroopwafel vendors are selling these cookie crumbs for €0.50 per bag, including some stroop.
I am not selling my stoopwafels yet, so I have no use for the cookie crumbs at the moment. So I decided to make genuine stroopwafels from the left over crumbs.
First of all, I put the crumbs in a blender and turned them into smooth little crumbs. Then I had to figure out what to add. I considered the crumbs a replacement of the flour and added the same amount of egg per weight and half the amount of butter. I had to add about about 20% of flour to get a smooth dough. I left the dough standing for one hour and kneaded it again, after which I started roling ping pong balls for baking. The dough was too crumby…
So, I put it in the kneader for another 10 minutes and voila… A smooth dough…
Baking the cookies was easy, it cooked at the right temperature of 180 degrees at about 45 seconds. However, the resulting cookie was slightly too crumby, so I will need to find a substance that can bind the dough better… The taste of the cookie was good, but perhaps the dough was a bit too fatty and quite some butter was left on the waffle maker after baking two or three cookies.
Pricewise, the cost per cookie went down by 50%. If I can find a good way to bind the dough