Gluten-Free Tuesday: Crisp and Easy Waffles

"[Photograph: Elizabeth Barbone] A great pancake-waffle divide exists in my home. I'm a pancake person. My husband? He loves waffles. For years I made waffles that I adored. They were delicate, with a slightly crisp exterior and a soufflé-like interior, and, thanks to a bit of buttermilk, they had a mild tang. One morning my husband looked down at his plate and said, "You know, I don't love these. They're too soft, too pancake-like. I like waffles to be more, I don't know, waffley." You know you're in trouble when someone needs to make up a word like "waffley" to describe what they don't like about your cooking. Looking at the recipe, I noticed that it contained a high percentage of wet ingredients. I decided to tighten the batter by increasing the amount of dry ingredients. This worked: the resulting waffles were crisp and no longer pancake-like. I made one more change. I swapped the buttermilk for milk in order to lose the buttermilk pancake-flavor. Now the waffles tasted, well, waffley! These waffles are fantastically easy to prepare. Unlike some recipes, you don't need to whip the egg whites to lighten the batter. A generous amount of baking powder provides the lift, giving you a light, crispy waffle. To make preparing the waffles even easier, measure the dry ingredients the night before you plan on making waffles. In the morning, you'll only need to add the milk, eggs, oil and vanilla. About the author: Elizabeth Barbone of GlutenFreeBaking.com joins us every Tuesday with a new gluten-free recipe. Elizabeth is an alumna of the Culinary Institute of America and Mount Mary College. With her solid professional baking background, Elizabeth is known for creating gluten-free recipes that taste just like their wheat counterparts. She is the author of Easy Gluten-Free Baking...."