Liège Waffles (Philippe Conticini)

After the Brussels waffles recipe, I wanted to offer you a recipe for Liège waffles, those round waffles, crispy on the outside and soft on the inside, the best waffles in my opinion. So, I turned to a recipe by Philippe Conticini, published in his book La Pâtisserie des Rêves. These waffles are quick to prepare, but you need to plan several rising times to get these soft waffles. The book states that these quantities correspond to 8 waffles, I personally doubled the quantities and obtained about forty waffles, in my opinion with this recipe you will rather have about twenty waffles. Finally, these waffles keep quite well for a few days, by putting them in the toaster or oven for a few minutes before eating.

Ingredients

:

310g of flour
60g of brown sugar
1 pinch of fleur de sel
25g of fresh yeast
60g of egg
200g of butter at room temperature
130g of sugar crystals (pearl sugar)
12.5cl of semi-skimmed milk

Recipe

:

Put the flour, brown sugar, and fleur de sel in the bowl of the mixer equipped with the hook and mix.

Dissolve the fresh yeast in the milk, then add this mixture to the powders.

Then incorporate the eggs and butter and mix at medium speed until the dough is smooth and elastic (about ten minutes).

Cover the dough with a cloth, and let it rise for 30 minutes.

Then add the sugar crystals (still using the hook), then place in the refrigerator for 2 hours.

From this moment on, I no longer very closely followed Philippe Conticini's instructions, because given the current heat I thought I wouldn't achieve a correct result. I’ll first give you the basic recipe, then I’ll share my way of doing it.

Roll out the waffle dough between two sheets of parchment paper, using a rolling pin, to a thickness of 1cm, and place back in the refrigerator for 30 minutes. Then cut out using a cookie cutter oval shapes of dough and let it rise again for 40 minutes.

And here’s what I did: I didn't want to have to cut out the circles of dough because being quite buttery and given the current temperature I don't think I would have been able to get a "hard" enough dough after refrigeration to cut out these circles. After 2 hours in the fridge, I degassed the dough (press down firmly to let the gas escape), and put it back in the fridge for 30 minutes. I then took pieces of dough to form small logs which I placed on parchment paper, and let them rise again for 40 minutes.

And there you go, all that's left is to cook your waffles in a waffle maker for 3-4 minutes (depending on your device, they should be golden and soft inside).

Enjoy your breakfast! ;-)