Last week, we set out to make a Graham Cracker Waffle. It was not the glowing success we’d hoped for, but let’s back up a bit. One of my chefs had just found the Serious Eats recipe for The Best Strawberry Ice Cream, and wanted to make it, so he did. And it was delicious. But we needed to complete the dish. So, he suggested a graham cracker waffle underneath it. It sounded like a good idea, but here’s where we went wrong.

First of all, we should have just started from scratch and figured it out. But some Google-Fu led us to an existing recipe. I had never heard of the site, and I should have known better. We proceeded, nonetheless. The recipe did not work out. So we formulated our own recipe. After three attempts, we still weren’t happy. It didn’t have enough graham flavor.

Ultimately, here’s where we went wrong. Instead of using graham crackers and grinding them into a flour, we were using pre-ground Nabisco graham cracker crumbs. After repeated failures, I tried the crumbs by themselves. They tasted like nothing. They certainly didn’t taste like graham crackers. It’s a reminder to slow down and resist the urge to shoot from the hip. I should have ensured that the crumbs, the crucial ingredient, met my standards. I didn’t. Also, I never should have wasted my time with some random recipe from a Google search. We learned from our mistakes. We finally have a waffle recipe we’re happy with.

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