The Ultimate Waffle Recipe

Name: The Ultimate Waffle Recipe
Prep time: 30 min
Cook time: 3 min
Total time: 33 min
Ingredients: 1 3/4 Cup All Purpose Flour; 2 1/4 Teaspoons Baking Powder; 1/4 Teaspoon Baking Soda; 2 Tablespoons Cornstarch; 3 Tablespoons Sugar (plus 1 Teaspoon ); 1/2 Teaspoon Fine Sea Salt; 3 Large Eggs; 3/4 Cup Buttermilk; 3/4 Cup Heavy Cream; 1/2 Cup Unsalted Butter (melted and cooled slightly)

4.32 from 74 votes

We tested over 100 waffles and this is the best buttermilk recipe out there! The ultimate waffle recipe and it’s all thanks to a few simple secrets.

What Makes Waffles Soggy?

Don’t overstir the batter. It’s okay if there are a few lumps -– they will dissipate during cooking.

No peeking! Lifting the lid of the waffle iron will cause it to lose heat, leading to a collapsed waffle.

A good hint as to whether your waffle is done is to watch the steam coming out of the waffle iron.

If there’s still a good amount of steam billowing out of it, your waffle isn’t ready yet.

Once you remove the golden, crisp waffle from the iron, toss it back and forth between your hands to allow some of the steam to dissipate.

Then, rest it on a wire rack so steam can continue to escape on all sides without making the bottom soggy.

Serve as soon as possible

Everyone claims to have the ultimate waffle recipe, but we are going to be so bold as to challenge all of those recipes to a throw down. We spent way too much time pulling up every recipe we could find for buttermilk waffles and even more time testing all of the recipes. We even pulled out the Bobby Flay waffle recipe from his chicken and waffles throw down, it was good, but it was not the ultimate.

This recipe has been EXCLUSIVE to our cookbook, Our Sweet Basil Kitchen but today you get it on the blog!! Make sure you pick up your copy, which is on sale again this week, before you read the rest of the post and thank you so, so much for your continued love and support of our site!

Let’s get on with the recipe!

First, there’s the fats. Oil, butter, margarine, shortening, coconut oil and even yogurt were all tested but we definitely loved butter the most. No surprise there, except one little thing, when to add the butter. That ended up being the absolute most important thing. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

So buttermilk clearly deserves to be in waffles but in experimenting we were all over the board with how much. Almost all recipes were around the same measurements, but at one point we found ourselves just shy of the needed amount so on a whim I threw in heavy cream. Oh. Sweet. Mercy. Eureka!! The waffles turned out with a better texture and flavor than anything we had previously tried. Suddenly the batch of straight buttermilk waffles were totally out of the running. We did a side to side comparison and sure enough, the sweet cream addition led to a less eggy and better flavored waffle.

Then there’s a few small notes, sugar or no sugar, and if sugar how much? Baking powder versus baking soda and of course, the secret ingredient, corn starch. We ended up feeling that the no sugar waffles were just too plain and while the sugar didn’t necessarily make them sweet it did sweeten things up just enough to round out the flavor.

We also decided that both baking powder to give a fluffy rise and soda which is activated by the buttermilk, to give a nice texture were needed. And the cornstarch, well we learned that one from Completely Delicious and we love that it helps to create a crisp outside.

We can’t chat about waffles without mentioning that over-mixing is the devil and you should avoid it as such. Truly, stirring these babies will destroy them no matter what ingredients are added. There should still be plenty of streaks of flour after you stir in the wet ingredients.

And that butter thing is the winner for a soft inside and crisp outside. You MUST gently stir in the butter at the very end which may leave you with a lumpy batter but the flour will be gone.

Finally, the secret was leaving the batter to rest. In our final stages of testing we got distracted with kids and the batter sat for 30 minutes and holy moly it was the best batch yet! I don’t know the science but I know it works!

Can Waffle Mixture be Frozen?

You can store batter in the freezer for up to a month. When you’re ready to do some pancake making, just thaw in warm water or overnight in the refrigerator.

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