AI photoSpinach Waffles with Chicken
Savoury spinach waffles topped with crispy chicken, bacon, avocado and a curry dressing.
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Ingredients
- 150 g Plain flour
- 75 g Wholemeal flour
- ½ tsp Baking powder
- 125 g Spinach fresh or frozen
- 4 pcs Eggs
- 250 ml Milk
- Salt
- Black pepper freshly ground
- 100 ml Crème fraîche 18%
- 2 tbsp Mayonnaise
- 2 tsp Curry powder medium strength
- 1 tsp Dijon mustard
- 1 tsp Caster sugar
- ½ pcs Lemon finely grated zest and a little juice
- 75 g Bacon sliced
- 400 g Chicken breast diced
- 70 g Rocket
- 2 pcs Avocado sliced
- 1 pcs Red onion thinly sliced into wedges
- ½ pcs Cucumber sliced
- 1 pcs Apple diced
- 30 g Pesto
- 1 bunch Basil fresh
- 1 tsp Olive oil
Steps
Mix the plain flour, wholemeal flour and baking powder in a bowl.
2 minRinse the spinach thoroughly, then put it in a blender with the rest of the waffle ingredients. Blend to a smooth, runny batter.
3 minLet the batter rest for 15 minutes so the flour can absorb some moisture and thicken.
15 minSpread a little oil or butter in the waffle iron and bake the waffles until golden and fully cooked.
20 minMix all the ingredients for the curry dressing and season well to taste.
Fry the bacon in a pan with a little oil until crisp.
8 minRemove the bacon from the pan and set aside on a plate lined with kitchen paper.
Season the chicken breast with salt and pepper and fry in the pan in the bacon fat, stirring, over medium heat for 4-5 minutes, until fully cooked.
5 minServe the spinach waffles with rocket, juicy chicken breast, crispy bacon, avocado, red onion, cucumber, apple, curry dressing, pesto and fresh basil.
3 min
A waffle that's gone savoury and green — spinach blitzed straight into the batter, no squeezing, no chopping, just colour and a faint mineral edge folded through flour and egg. It looks like a party trick but it's really a batter problem solved by a blender: raw leaf goes in, smooth green batter comes out, and nobody's picking fibrous bits off their tongue. Then it's built up like an open sandwich — chicken, bacon, avocado, apple — so really you're eating a salad that happens to sit on a crisp lattice instead of a plate.
What decides whether this works isn't the chicken or the dressing, it's the rest. Fifteen minutes doing nothing while the batter sits is not optional dead time — it's the flour actually drinking the liquid in, swelling, so the waffle holds together instead of weeping water into the iron and steaming instead of crisping. Skip that and you get a pale, soft waffle that tastes of raw flour at the edges. Some say you can go straight from blender to iron if you're in a rush — no, because the iron will just boil the excess liquid off instead of setting a crust, and you lose the contrast that makes a waffle a waffle rather than a thick pancake.
The second thing that decides it: contrast. Crisp bacon, cool crème fraîche dressing, soft avocado, sharp apple, bitter rocket — if everything on the plate is one texture or one temperature, it collapses into mush, however good each part is alone. A waffle feeding four people isn't a big meal of one thing, it's four small decisions about contrast repeated four times.
Flour: two kinds here, plain and wholemeal, not because tradition demands it but because plain alone gives you a batter with no backbone — too soft, too eager to go gummy — while wholemeal alone is heavy enough to sink the whole structure and taste of bran before it tastes of anything else. Mixed, you get the lift from one and the nuttiness from the other. If you've only got plain in the cupboard, use it all — the waffle will be lighter and slightly less interesting, not ruined.
Spinach, fresh or frozen, doesn't matter which — the blender doesn't care that frozen spinach has already been through a freeze-thaw cycle that breaks its cell walls for you. What matters is rinsing it properly first if it's fresh, because grit in a smooth batter is the one thing you can't blend away, and you'll know about it at the table, not before.
The crème fraîche and mayonnaise dressing is built the way most good dressings are: a fat base (crème fraîche, soft and slightly sour) loosened and enriched by mayonnaise, then given a job to do — curry powder for warmth, mustard for sharpness, sugar to stop the acid from being the only thing you taste, lemon to lift the whole thing back up at the end. Taste it before you commit, because curry powders vary wildly in strength and a "medium" from one tin is a "hot" from another.
Bacon is fried first and the chicken goes into the same fat — this isn't laziness, it's flavour economics: rendered bacon fat has had salt and smoke cooked into it already, so the chicken picks up seasoning it would otherwise need added separately. Fry the chicken until it's gone fully opaque right through and the juices run clear, not by a clock — 4-5 minutes is a starting guess that depends entirely on how small you've diced it and how hot your pan actually is. On a domestic hob, "medium heat" really means: hot enough that a piece sizzles the second it touches the pan, not so hot the outside's brown before the inside's caught up.
Avocado, apple, cucumber, red onion — none of these need a recipe, only a principle: slice them so they can be picked up in one go on a hunk of waffle. Thin wedges for the onion take the raw bite off without needing to cook them. The apple diced small enough that it doesn't dominate a bite but stays noticeable against the softer avocado.
Any mild neutral oil works for frying or greasing the waffle iron — "no smell of its own" is the test, so sunflower or a flavourless vegetable oil, not your good peppery extra virgin which has better things to do finishing a plate than disappearing into a hot iron. And patience, again, is the real ingredient most people skip: rushed batter and a rushed chicken pan are where this dish actually goes wrong, not in anything exotic on the ingredient list.