I like stroopwafels, but they’re too expensive in Denmark. I bet you can make them at home for a tenth of the price.
But whats the best recipe?
You need some sort of press buy I doubt a normal tosti grill can do the job. I don’t see it really
I have what’s called a krumkagejern in danish, it makes thin cookie like waffles. I figured I would use two of them in a stroopwafel, but in most recipes I see the wafels are cut in half.
In the end, it comes down to a split, thin waffle (that comes apart surprisingly easily!), glued back together with a paste of caramelly goodness. There’s no one recipe, but most recipes end up being quite similar.
I think this recipe matches up with all the Dutch-language recipes quite well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7oB50N96Ce4
Finding the right treacle/syrup to make the “stroop” out of may be difficult in some countries. In Dutch, the stuff is commonly referred to as “stroop”, but machine translations to many other languages will bring up “syrup”. Thick syrups are also referred to as stroop, but that’s not the stroop you’d normally find in the ingredient list for a stroopwafel; the “stroop” often used here is specifically a quite dense sugar beet syrup (>70% sugar). I don’t believe “lighter” syrups like maple syrup (typically >60% sugar) will taste the same without adjusting the proportions, but you’re free to try, of course!
Further details that may affect the taste of the result:
- Typical Dutch butter (“roomboter”) contains about 82% fat
- Typical Dutch “full” milk (“volle melk”) has a fat percentage of about 3.5%
- Most Dutch recipes use yeast rather than baking powder
- Many recipes assume easy access to a special stroopwafel waffle iron with tiny ridges. I think a (near) flat waffle iron/grill will work just fine, you just won’t get the iconic lines.
I think Dutch and Danish food norms are pretty close, but people from other countries may need to add cream or water to get the fat contents right.
To find the right dough and filling for your tastes, you may want to experiment. Some people like to add a bit of vanilla flavouring to their dough, others use a different treacle-to-sugar composition for the stroop part. Some people have preferences for the types of sugar used and their ratios.
The stuff you buy in tourist shops and supermarkets is highly commercialised and processed, with large parts of the stroop being replaced by cheap glucose syrup which, in my opinion, makes for a quite bland mixture. This picture of a can of the stuff shows the ingredients if you want to try to replicate the commercial taste. The advantage of this mixture is that it’s dairy-free, I suppose.
Safety warning in case you haven't cooked with mostly-sugar mixes before.
Be very careful while, and after, heating the sugar mixture. I don’t think you need to heat it to more than 60℃ for the components to mix, but sugar will easily heat to a temperature way beyond the boiling point of water, and spilling hot caramel can cause very nasty burns.
Thank you for the very thorough answer :) I will give that recipe a try - with some amendments due to availability etc.
I think I will be ok ingredients-wise; Danish butter is also at least 80% fat, we have the same full milk (sødmælk), and we have the same kind of dark sirup (mørk sirup) which has around 75-78% sugar content and is also made from sugar beet.
The main issue will be the wafels themselves - my ‘krumkagejern’ does not leave room for the waffle to rise enough to cut it in half. But I think if I use the right dough I can bake them like I bake ‘gode råd’ (good advice) cookies.
@EvilCartyen try your iron first, you might be surprised. The waffle is VERY thin! It’s easier to slice than you may think as long as you do it while it’s hot
Mørk sirup looks exactly right, that’s nice.
You’ll be surprised how easy it is to cut the waffle! The center is very soft for while the part contacting the heater becomes quite solid. If you time it right, your knife will find the center for you and slide right in.
I think your krumkagejern should do quite nicely based on the pictures I can find online. Stroopwafels are supposed to be extremely thin compared to breakfast waffles, I think your gode råd cookies look about the right size.
They’re pretty big compared to industrially produced stroopwafels, I’d say. 15 cms in diameter. But there’s an inner ring which is roughly 10 cms and that seems more like it. I’ll give it a go at least 😁
The extra large stroopwafels are very popular at stroopwafel stands, so I think they’d be perfect! I wish they’d sell the bigger versions in stores, but I guess they’re too brittle for mass production.
As a reference, have this random image I downloaded from the internet:
