My wonderful, flexible frozen chaffle cubes recipe

dkistner2222

I've come up with the perfect MFP-friendly way to do chaffles! I have chickens and sometimes just a few too many eggs, so I mix up a large (6x) batch of the basic chaffles recipe (1 egg plus half a cup of part-skim mozarella cheese for two mini-Dash chaffles). That's it. This mixture almost perfectly fills one of my 21-cube silicone ice cube trays (https://amzn.to/3ebnTRl). When frozen, my little cubes are totally ready to pop out and make however many chaffles I want to: one, two, four, eight, whatever. I usually do mine in multiples of four because I have Dash's multi mini (https://amzn.to/2RJMSUn).

The first time I did this, I didn't spray the trays, so it was a bit hard to "pop" them out to put into a ziplock freezer bag so I could do another batch, so I had to let them defrost slightly in the refrigerator before I could pop them out. Running some hot water over the bottom of the trays works well enough, though, as long as I don't overfill them and am careful not to let the edges of the cubes run together.

I set up a MFP recipe I call "Frozen Chaffle Cubes Mozarella" (6 eggs, 3 cups of mozarella cheese) so I can copy it and do one for cheddar or any other type cheese. As all chaffle lovers know, if you make the basic chaffle recipe and add 2 tablespoons of coconut or almond flour to it, you get two perfect bread-like 4" chaffles. Without the addition of the flour, the basic chaffles may have raggedy edges and be a little smaller than 4" (which I happen to think looks very artisanal).

Normally, using the basic recipe, each chaffle has half of an egg, a quarter cup of cheese, and 1 tablespoon of almond or coconut flour. My bulk-recipe frozen chaffle cubes are a tad more than HALF the size of the basic chaffle recipe. This is great because I have a partner who doesn't want to eat a lot of eggs, and I can tell him that four chaffles only have about one egg between them. And I find it far more satisfying to eat four crispy chaffles made with my chaffle cubes than two done by making them up on the spot.

The beauty of this recipe is I can pull out a cube or four or eight, whatever, and defrost it in my chaffle mixing bowl for a few seconds in the microwave to slightly soften so I can mash up the cubes (this doesn't melt the cheese). Then I can add whatever extra ingredient(s) I would have added before for each cube, based on the formula of 6X/21. So, for example, if I'm adding almond flour, for EACH cube I use I need 6X the 2 tablespoons of almond flour from the basic recipe (12 tablespoons) divided by 21 = .057 tablespoons or roughly half a tablespoon per chaffle-cube chaffle. Half a tablespoon is really easy to remember and log and doesn't appreciably change the way the chaffles taste. Also, there is room in the waffle maker to add in about a full tablespoon more of another ingredient, give or take (depending on whether or not you added the flour).

For lunch I just had four chaffle cubes with a quarter cup of fresh chopped asparagus out of my garden. I could have added in some almond flour or more asparagus but didn't this time. Total calories: 270 for a filling lunch that was to die for. (Next time I have a bit of some fresh vegetable or meat I'm trying to use up, or I have something in my Misfits Market box that I don't know what to do with, I know what to do!)

When I went to log the meal, I put four servings of Frozen Chaffle Cubes Mozarella and a quarter cup of asparagus. I could have gone with ounces or grams had I weighed it. Really, you can pretty much wing the amounts, whatever you have on hand. Yesterday, I did two servings plus an eighth of a cup of homemade tart-sour kimchi just because I felt like a mad scientist and wanted to see what happened. They were beyond divine....

dkistner2222

I made this from scratch today to see if I could get a better way to not overfill my freezer tray. I filled the tray, then scraped off the top down to the tray grid level. I was left with exactly enough for four more to be made right then and there. So I adjusted my recipe to show 25 servings, not 21. I dumped in some kimchi into the part I didn't freeze, chopped it all together in my Oxo Good Grips salad chopper and bowl, and got four round Dash chaffles at 59 calories each; 55 is the calories in just one basic recipe chaffle. I'm finishing up my fourth one now, and I would really have been just as happy with only two of them.

So that's a quick way to kill two birds with one stone: the frozen chaffle cubes plus one meal or sandwich rounds for two, or (as I plan to do soon), chaffle dog chews.