Frequently asked questions

Four steps, following the tabs:

• Pick - choose your ingredients by category (flour/starch, liquid, dairy, egg, fat, sweetener, and so on). You can pick up to two per category.
• Slide - shape the batter with the sliders (sweetness, richness, liquid, and the rest). Each slider nudges one property; the recipe updates live.
• Make - read your recipe: amounts in grams, the batch size, preparation notes, and the waffle quality indicator telling you how typical and how workable the batter is.
• Share - share your recipe or start with a ready made preset

On mobile these are the four buttons along the bottom; on desktop they're the columns left to right.

Each slider controls one property of the batter. Think of it as balances between groups of ingredients or components. Standard mode uses the first four; expert mode shows all of them.

• Sweetness - how sweet overall.
• Richness - how fatty/rich the batter is.
• Liquid - thick batter vs runny batter.
• Tanginess - how much of your dairy is cultured (buttermilk, sour cream, yoghurt etc.) rather than fresh. Only shown when you've picked both kinds.
• Sugar origin - where the sweetness comes from: the natural milk sugar of dairy vs added sugar (see the sweetness question below).
• Fat origin - which kind of fat dominates: vegetable oil or dairy fat.
• Egg richness and Egg structure - the two egg sliders (see below). Only active when you've picked an egg.
• Fibre - refined flour vs wholegrain/fibre (also used to raise fruit and vegetable content).

Advice for expert mode: Note that the sliders to some extent work in pairs. The sweetness of a waffle is influenced both by Sweetness and Sugar origin sliders, the richness by Richness and Fat origin, and the the amount of eggs by Egg richness and Egg structure. To adjust sweetness, richness and egginess may therefore require adjusting more than one slider.

Reset puts everything back to the built-in starting recipe. Fix my batter (expert mode only) keeps your sliders exactly where they are and searches the ingredients for a set that makes a working, reasonably typical batter. It tells you what it changed and offers an Undo, so it is always safe to try. Standard mode is by default always in a "fix me mode".

Yes, by controlling what ingredients you pick:

• Egg-free: deselect egg entirely
• Lactose/Dairy-free: select only non-dairy ingredients
• Gluten-free: choose gluten-free starches; there are a few gluten-free recipes to start from in expert mode.

Keep an eye on the quality indicator as you swap things - it'll tell you if a substitution has pushed the batter out of workable range so you can compensate.

Raise the Fibre slider and keep an eye on the recipe until you reach the desired amount. Avogadro ensures that the whole batter remains balanced as the fibre share.

If you want a recipe with whole grain flour and carrot you need to deselect starches and sweeteners first, then increase Sweetness and adjust Sugar origin to added. With no sugar left to lean on, the carrot has to carry the sweetness - which is what drives it up. Paste this code into the box in the Share column to see it (expert mode):

AwEOAAAQAQESCDIyWjJQMkYyFAEBFRAAggCDACMAEgAoAAkAYQB3Sug (or click this link)

To make it sweeter, raise the Sweetness slider. Sugar origin (expert mode) is a separate control for where that sweetness comes from: toward one end the sweetness leans on the natural milk sugar (lactose) of dairy; toward the other it leans on added sugar. These two sliders play together and depend on the picked ingredients. If sugar origin is dairy there is a limit to how sweet the batter can get. Adjust Sugar origin towards added sugar if you want a sweeter batter, and remember to pick sugar or another sweetener.

Egg does two jobs, and the two sliders separate them:

• Egg richness controls the fat an egg contributes (the yolk's richness), relative to the other fats in the batter.
• Egg structure controls the protein an egg contributes (mainly the egg white that sets a batter and gives structure) relative to the other proteins.

Think of it as the sliders adjusting the relative contribution of egg yolks and egg whites. As a consequence you will see that these sliders also affect the amount of other ingredients. It sounds complicated, but just try to play around with the sliders. The sliders a

In expert mode, when you click a spot on the ternary triangle, the recipe generator sometimes needs an ingredient you haven't picked in order to actually reach that recipe - for example a liquid to carry the water, or a sugar source to hit a sweetness target. It adds the minimum needed and marks each addition with a different colour so it's obvious what happened. The additions are reversible: remove the chip and you're back to your own picks.

The triangle (a ternary plot) is a map of "waffle space" - its three corners represent the batter's major components, and the shaded background shows where the real recipes behind the model are. Your current recipe is shown as a dot. Click anywhere and the tool re-aims the recipe toward that spot. It's a fast way to adjust multiple properties of the batter at once.

Pre-shared recipes are available as presets in the Share column that load a set of ingredient picks and slider positions. From there you can tweak freely using the pickers and the sliders. Note that the presets do not reproduce the original recipes 1:1, but they have been optimised to get as close as possible.

I do not have access to the recipes of commercial waffle mixes and ready made batters. Manufactureres however are required to list ingredients and nutritional data. Based on this it is straightforward to reverse-engineer a recipe that comes close to the original. When doing this I've intentionally left out industrially used additives such as preservatives, acidifiers, emulsifiers etc.

Because recipes are scaled based on the number of eggs. You only need to decide how many eggs you want to use, and the recipe is generated based on this.

It’s not easy to predict how runny a batter will be. Flours differ in strength, protein content, and dry matter, and how long the batter is left to rest influence hydration. Old waffle recipes sometimes stated “add flour until the batter has the right consistency” to overcome this problem. I understand that is not what you want to hear, but the solution is simply to add a bit more flour/starch if you have a too runny batter, or some more liquid if the batter is too thick.

As a rule of thumb, a short rest (about 15–30 minutes) helps - it lets the flour hydrate for a more even texture, and it's especially worthwhile for wholegrain or high-fibre batters. Batters leaned on whipped egg or whipped cream should be used promptly.

Standard: Fewer ingredients, four sliders (sweetness, richness, tanginess, liquid), and one promise: every recipe that can be generated turns out a workable batter. Expert: Access to all ingredients (including leavners) and all sliders. The expert mode let's you go where no cookbook has gone before. If you get lost there is a a "Fix my batter" button than can bring you back on track.

Switching from standard to expert keeps your recipe exactly as it is: the hidden sliders simply become visible, already set to where standard had them. Going the other way (expert → standard) will normally change the recipe slightly.

Because past that point the batter would stop being a waffle. Standard mode works out, for your particular ingredients, how far each control can travel before the batter fails. A short note under the sliders says which wall you hit and, where an ingredient would help, and which one to add. Add it and the wall moves.

Because standard mode picks it for you. It reads your ingredients and adds baking powder as a default, and switches to baking soda if there's enough cultured dairy to react with it. In expert mode leavening is yours to choose.

You brought it in from expert mode, and it isn't on standard's shorter list. It still counts in your recipe, and you can tap it to remove it - but in standard mode you cannot put it back. Switch to expert if you want to add it again.

The waffle-heart in the Make column answers two questions:

• The body (the 3×3 grid cells): How typical is my waffle? A full waffle means your recipe sits right in the mainstream of real waffles. As you push into more unusual territory, cells drop away - fewer cells means further out on the fringe. An empty body means you've gone past anything in the reference collection.
• The two side lobes: Will the batter work? Filled lobes means you have a workable batter. Missing lobes mean something's off - usually too little or too much of something.

A typical and workable recipe shows a waffle hear with all cells and both lobes filled; an adventurous but sound one shows an eroded body with both lobes still there. An empty waffle means there isn't enough in the picker yet to judge - a batter tpyically needs a starch, a liquid and a source of fat.

In standard mode the lobes and the waffle stay filled full (8-9 cells filled).

The waffle recipe generator is built on a corpus of recipes that is dominated by, but not limited to, scandinavian style waffles.

Just adventurous. "Unusual" (fewer cells) only means your recipe sits far from the typical cluster of real waffles - not that it's bad. Plenty of real, delicious waffles live out on the fringe (sweet commercial mixes, gluten-free, very eggy, and so on). Notice how some of the presets do not fill the entire waffle grid. As long as the side lobes are present, the tool considers it a workable batter.

A missing lobe means one of the four essentials - liquid, flour, fat or protein - has dropped too low or is too high. Pressing Fix my batter will look for an ingredient set that works while leaving your sliders alone; otherwise play around some more with the pickers and the sliders. If you are stuck, press Reset or load one of the ready-made recipes as a starting point.

Click one of the share buttons in the Share column to generate and share a link that gets you back to the exact recipe you see.

Copy the share code from the Share column and keep it. Paste the code back at any time to restore the recipe exactly. The code does not contain the recipe, only the picked ingredients and the slider positions.

It's a tool that builds a waffle batter recipe from your choices rather than looking one up. You pick the ingredients you want, nudge a handful of sliders for things like sweetness, richness and liquid, and it computes a complete, balanced batter. Under the hood it's grounded on a large collection of real Norwegian and Scandinavian waffle recipes, so what it produces stays close to how waffles are actually made - while still letting you strike out into combinations no cookbook lists.

Because of how many different waffles it can make. Add up every combination of ingredient picks and slider positions and you get more than 10²⁷ possible control settings. That's 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 recipes! This number is larger than Avogadro's number which plays a fundamental role in chemistry. Just like we talk about a pair (2) or a dozen (12) in everyday life, chemists talk about a mole, and when you ask "How many are there in a mole?" the answer is: Avogadro's number - or to be exact 6.02214076 × 10²³. The concept was invented by the Italian scientist Amedeo Avogadro, and the waffle recipe generator was launched on 9 August 2026 to celebrate the 250th anniversary of his birth.

It generates them. There's no database of finished recipes to scroll. In fact, if you where to store every single recipe code the calculator can generate in a database, its uncompressed size would be 34 RB (ronnabytes) which is about 180,000 times more than the estimated total size of the internet. Every recipe you see is computed on the spot from your picks and slider positions, which is why two people with different settings get genuinely different batters.

More than you could ever try. A rough count of the control settings you can dial:

• 8 sliders, each with ~101 positions → 101⁸ ≈ 1.1 × 10¹⁶ slider combinations.
• ~10 ingredient categories, each letting you pick up to 2 items from a varying list (e.g. ~7 liquids, ~10 cultured dairies, ~7 fibre ingredients) → roughly 10¹¹ pick combinations.
• Together: on the order of 10²⁷ distinct control settings - about 1,800× Avogadro's number.

Not every setting yields a valid or meaningfully different batter - many are near-duplicates or drift outside what makes a workable waffle (the quality indicator flags those). But even after discounting heavily, the number of good recipes stays astronomically large.

Given the large number of recipes that can be generated it goes without saying that I have not tested them all. Use the tool at your own risk.

It's very likely unique! With about 10²⁷ possible settings, once you've played with the pickers and sliders for a while there's a strong chance you're seeing a batter recipe no one has ever seen or tested before.

The "essence" of about 1000 real life waffle recipes has been lifted into a model that automagically turns the picked ingredients and the slider positions into workable recipes.

Khymos (khymos.org) is a long-running blog and website exploring the intersection of food, chemistry, and popular food science. The site is run by Martin Lersch, an organic chemist who obtained his PhD from the University of Oslo, Norway in 2006. Martin lives in Norway and works at a biorefinery. The Khymos blog and the Avogadro recipe generator are not related to his day-time job. Read the Avogadro announcement post on Khymos for more background and context.

Feel free to reach out at hello@khymos.org with feedback, questions and ideas you may have. If linked to a specific recipe, please remember to include the recipe code or the URL to the recipe in your email.

Yes - You are free to use and share all the recipes you generate.

If you find this tool useful feel free to buy Avogadro a coffee (Stripe website opens in new window)!

Thanks - I really appreciate that! You can do this via Stripe (link opens in new window)