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Center for Applied Nutrition Blog

Delicious Waffles

Wednesday, March 16, 2016

By: Judy Palken

You might not have thought of waffles as being good for your gastrointestinal system - but try this for a wonderful breakfast!

Overnight Oatmeal Waffles

Yield - about two regular waffles of four squares each.

Ingredients:

1 cup uncooked old fashioned oats
1 cup buttermilk or kefir
1 egg, lightly beaten
2 Tbsp canola oil
1 Tbsp raw honey
1/4 cup oat flour *see note below
1 tsp baking soda
pinch of salt

Directions:

Stir oats and buttermilk or kefir together, cover, and refrigerate overnight.
In the morning add the egg, canola oil, and honey; stir well.
In a separate bowl, mix the oat flour, baking soda, and salt. Stir this into the buttermilk mixture just until blended.
Preheat waffle iron, and cook - waffles are done in about five minutes or when the flow of steam from waffle iron has slowed.

*Regarding oat flour - it is available in some stores, but you can also make it in practically no time, by putting old fashioned, uncooked oats into your blender, and pulsing a couple of times. Voilà - oat flour! Of note - almond flour also works well in this recipe.

Judy’s take on this recipe:

These delicious waffles are actually good for your microbiome! Oats are an excellent prebiotic food, meaning they feed the good bacteria in our GI tract. Oats also help with regularity, and can be soothing to the gut, thanks to their soluble fiber. Regarding the buttermilk or kefir - buttermilk today is pasteurized milk with a bacterial culture, and has little lactose (milk sugar). Kefir is also a fermented milk product, containing a beneficial bacteria/yeast culture. The yeast and bacteria provide lactase, an enzyme that breaks down the lactose. Both beverages are excellent sources of probiotics when uncooked, and protein, calcium, and great vitamins whether cooked or not!

What did Judy do?

By the way, this was a recipe makeover - the original, had, as most waffle recipes do, plain flour (read: refined white flour). It also had baking powder, which contains corn starch. The unfriendly bacteria in our guts thrive on these ingredients; not good. It also called for butter - I swapped that out for heart-healthy canola oil.

A couple of changes were in order to make this recipe gut-friendly - omitting the baking powder and using all baking soda did not affect the final product adversely, and swapping out the regular flour to oat flour led to… really delicious waffles! They were also good with almond flour.

The point is, don’t be afraid to experiment with recipes that you may come across, and make them more GI, “good” bacteria-friendly. There are thousands of recipes on the internet, and they are not off-limits for those of us concerned with good gastrointestinal health - often a few swaps will yield a delicious dish. Have fun in the kitchen, and don’t worry if you cook up some results that are less than stellar - when playing in the kitchen, a few misses are to be expected! Learn from these, and try to figure out how you can improve your results next time.