Basic Buttermilk Waffles & Maple Syrup

After many, many weekends away, Shaun and I woke up on Saturday with nothing to do and nowhere to go. While I do make a mean scrambled egg, I decided to test my skills on a new recipe for this lazy Saturday.

Enter your basic buttermilk waffles. You'd be very surprised to know how challenging it is to find a simple, straightforward recipe for this classic dish. For the classics, there are few that I would consult. Betty Crocker, my mom, my grandmother's scraps-of-paper-recently-turned-recipe-book, The Joy of Cooking...and in this case, Alton Brown. With his signature obsessive recipe making of the mad scientist variety, it seems as though he knows that he's talking about.

Basic Buttermilk Waffles & Maple Syrup
*Adapted from Alton Brown
1 C all-purpose flour
1 C whole-wheat flour
1/2 tsp baking soda
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
1 tsp vanilla extract
3 tbsp sugar
3 eggs, beaten
2 oz butter, melted
2 C buttermilk* (and if you don't have any, find out how to make your own, below)
Vegetable spray, for waffle iron
Maple syrup (the real, Vermont kind)

Preheat your waffle iron. In a mixing bowl, whisk together the flours, baking soda, baking powder, salt, and sugar. In a separate bowl, whisk together eggs and melted butter. Add the buttermilk. Add the wet ingredients to the flour mixture and stir until combined, but do not overmix. You'll have a few lumps in your batter. Allow to rest for 5 minutes.

Spray the hot waffle iron with vegetable spray and add the batter. Do not overload the batter, or you'll end up with a giant mess, like I did.

Since my waffle iron makes one lonely waffle at a time, I kept them warm on a sheet pan in a warm oven set to 200 degrees.

*Make your own buttermilk: If you wake up with the urge to make hearty buttermilk waffles, but don't have that one elusive ingredient, try making it yourself. Mix 1 cup of milk with 1 tablespoon of fresh lemon juice. Let sit for about 10 minutes while it curdles and then use in recipe. I doubled mine and put it together in a large measuring cup for easy access.

And while we were at it, we decided to have breakfast on the terrace, the latest place to get a makeover at the Humiston house.

So there you have it. A basic and easy waffle recipe that can easily be jazzed up with some blueberries, strawberries or even some nutella and powdered sugar thrown on top. Since my strawberries that I'd been saving all week turned out to be covered in mold, we went au naturale. So what do you think? Do you do waffles for breakfast? Have you ever made your own? From a mix? Or are you a fan of the Eggo?