(Oops! Blog title is a misnomer. The wafflemaker is indeed ‘new to me’ but is in fact older than I am!)
So there’s a lady in the neighborhood whose been making crackers for 25 years or so and along the way has acquired a bunch of otherwise-crap. She filled the warehouse adjacent to her cracker factory with everything from Madonna posters and cookbooks to Pee-Wee Herman playing cards and, yes, antique wafflemakers. She’s recently opened shop, basically just bootlegging her warez to anyone who walks in off the street – old school style!
I acquired this vintage wafflemaker for a song:
The side handles are plastic and the lid handle feels/looks like some sort of wood-plastic composite, likely to dissipate heat. There’s an orange LED indicator on the lid above the lid handle, and the dial can be seen on the side – it goes from ‘lighter’ to ‘darker’ and it does get a bit warm during operation – ouch!
The whole thing is slightly raised on little rubber feet and the ring around the bottom of the base of the unit nicely catches any batter that spills out and wipes down amazingly easy making the thing a cinch to clean.
The seller also supplied two power cords with it: one the original which was a little old and decrepit, and the other a newer, fabric-wrapped and spring-hinged one that was clearly the nicer of the two. In other words she didn’t ‘guarantee’ either even worked, but said if they didn’t no problem just bring it back. I took her on her word, even though there were plenty of places to plug in and verify.
The unit was a little dirty and after getting it as clean as I could with a toothbrush and other cleaning utensils I opted for the old trick of actually using the device to clean itself. I made some waffle batter and the first one cleaned off a bunch of the gunk from the maker onto the waffle, like so:
This also showed me the sort of weak-heat spot in the middle – just need to apply a bit of extra oil (and time, perhaps) right there. I went for a second waffle, to give it another ‘food scrub’ of sorts:
We’re getting close!
One more light cleaning and no further residue came off, so I proceeded with the edible batch.
You can’t see it but there’s peanut butter and parmesan cheese in this batter, and the waffles are perfect, I mean divine:
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