President John F. Kennedy's Favorite Waffle Recipe Requires An Unique Ingredient

Some of us start our mornings with coffee or tea and leave it at that, but when you're running an entire country, you're going to need a little more fuel in your tank. Favorite breakfasts of America's presidents have ranged from Richard Nixon's protein-packed cottage cheese with ketchup to Harry S. Truman's eggs, bacon, and bourbon, but John F. Kennedy preferred something sweeter. He was a waffle man, and posterity has preserved for us his go-to waffle recipe that he'd send out whenever he was asked to contribute to a cookbook or recipe roundup. It was a fairly standard one in most respects; made with butter, eggs, milk, sugar, salt, baking powder, and flour. One way in which it differs from many other recipes, though, is that it specifies the use of cake flour.

The cake flour helps to make the finished waffles a bit less dense than waffles made with all-purpose flour. Further aeration is also provided by the fact that the eggs are separated, with the whites being whipped into stiff peaks. Taken in combination, those two factors make the waffles extra light and crispy.

Cake flour is made from the same ingredient as all-purpose flour, which is to say, finely-ground wheat. The difference lies in the grinding, since cake flour is milled extra fine. It also contains less protein — anywhere from 5 to 9%, compared to the 10 to 12% found in all-purpose flour. The more protein, the more gluten can form, and the denser the dough will be, which is why bread flour has an even higher protein content (12 to 16%).

If you're not an avid baker, you may not have or want multiple types of flour on hand. Luckily, cake flour is fairly easy to substitute, so you can whip up a batch of JFK's waffles without cluttering up the pantry with another product that you might not use on a regular basis. For homemade cake flour, put two tablespoons of cornstarch in the bottom of a one-cup measure, then fill the rest of the cup with all-purpose flour. Dump the whole thing into a sieve or sifter, then stir the sifted ingredients so they're well combined. After that, sift the mix a few more times to ensure it's nice and airy. Then, proceed to make your waffle batter, bake a cake, or use your DIY cake flour in any other recipe that calls for the ingredient.