Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Oatmeal Wafers
Oatmeal Wafers
Mix a small quantity of salt into eight ounces of oatmeal flour, and make it into a dough by adding one teacupful of boiling water, Turn it onto a board well sprinkled with meal, knead it slightly, roll it out as thin as possible, cut it into shapes, brown first one side and then the other, and when they are crisp they are ready for use.
This is a Scottish-style oatcake under a hotel name: four ingredients, no fat, no leavening. Everything depends on rolling it thin and cooking it dry.
- Oatmeal flourUse finely ground oat flour, or grind rolled oats in a blender until powdery. Steel-cut or coarse pinhead oatmeal will not hold together into a dough that rolls thin.
- A teacupfulNineteenth-century American books are inconsistent about this measure; a teacup is usually reckoned at somewhere between four and six fluid ounces. Add it gradually — oat flours vary in absorbency and you want a stiff, just-cohesive dough, not a paste.
- Boiling water mattersUse water straight off the boil, as the recipe specifies. Oats have no gluten; the heat gelatinises the starch, and that gelatinised starch does most of the work of binding the wafer.
- Work it warmKnead and roll while the dough is still hot enough to be barely handleable. Once it cools it crumbles at the edges as you roll. Patch cracks by pressing them closed with a floured thumb.
- As thin as possibleAim for about 1/8 inch or less. Thickness is the difference between a crisp wafer and a chewy, pasty biscuit.
- Browning first one side and then the otherThis implies a dry griddle or heavy pan over medium heat, two to three minutes a side until speckled and dry to the touch. A 350F oven for 15-20 minutes, turning once, is a modern alternative that gives a more even result with a full batch.
- CrispingThey firm as they cool. If any are still bendy, return them to a low oven, 300F, for five to ten minutes rather than browning them further.
- Yield and keepingYield depends on how thin you roll and how large you cut the shapes. Store airtight; they go soft in humid air and can be revived in a low oven.
Oatcakes of exactly this construction — oatmeal, salt, boiling water, a hot griddle — are the everyday bread of the Scottish and northern English uplands, where oats grew when wheat would not, and versions of them are recorded for centuries before any hotel kitchen took them up. The absence of fat and leavening is the point: this is a keeping bread, meant to be baked hard and stored in a tin, and the recipe's closing phrase — "ready for use" rather than ready to eat — treats it as a pantry staple rather than a dish.