It’s been quiet here for a while. But luckily there’s a project that has been simmering for a very long time. I got the idea back in 2014, sketched up some dummy screenshots (see below) and made a crude Excel model. But it never moved on from there. Until now. Today – 9 August 2026 – is the 250th anniversary of the birth of Amedeo Avogadro, and I’m very happy to announce the launch of Avogadro – a parametric waffle recipe generator.
There is no recipe database. Nothing is stored and retrieved. You pick the ingredients you want – liquid, dairy, fat, egg, starch, sweetener – and move a handful of sliders for properties like sweetness, richness, tanginess and more. The tool computes a batter on the spot, in grams, scaled to the number of eggs you’re using. A waffle heart quality indicator tells you two things at a glance: whether your batter will actually work, and how typical its composition is compared to real waffles. Fringe doesn’t mean bad – several well-loved commercial mixes sit surprisingly far out.
There’s a standard mode and an expert mode. Many may want to begin with fewer sliders, a shorter ingredient list, and a guarantee that anything you can build there is workable. But as a reader of Khymos I recon you may want to jump directly into expert mode which provides access to the full list of ingredients, all eight sliders, and more presets. It will happily take you where no cookbook has ever gone before.
Older waffle recipes sometimes simply stated “add flour until the batter has the right consistency”. This was tacit knowledge. If you know, you know. Such recipes did not make it into the corpus of a about 1,000 waffle recipes that I have collected, mostly Norwegian and Scandinavian. Those recipes nevertheless raise the important question: What makes a batter a waffle batter, and when does it stop being one? This is the question I’ve been trying to answer with Avogadro.
Summing together all the possible combinations of ingredient picks and slider positions, Avogadro spans about 10²⁷ distinct control settings. That’s 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 theoretical recipes! Compare this with Avogadro’s number: 6.02214076 × 10²³ – the count of atoms or molecules in a mole, a term chemists use just like others buy eggs by the dozen. It means that the tool covers something on the order of 1,660 moles’ worth of waffle batters. Hence the name and the launch date: Amedeo Avogadro was born in Turin on 9 August 1776, and his hypothesis that equal volumes of gas contain equal numbers of molecules laid essential groundwork for modern chemistry.
An honest caveat: 10²⁷ control settings, does not translate to meaningfully distinct recipes. Rounding and the pruning of trace ingredients mean many settings resolve to the same batter, and quite a few land outside anything workable, indicated by the absent “lobes” of the waffle heart quality indicator. Nevertheless, there are enough recipes for all, and there is a high chance that once you have played around with the settings for a while you see a recipe no one has ever seen before.
Some practical notes:
- Choose between standard and expert mode
- Pay attention to the waffle heart indicator: filled lobes = batter works; the number of filled cells indicates closeness to an “average batter”
- There’s an FAQ behind the waffle heart/menu (top left on desktop, bottom left on mobile)
- Every recipe has a unique share code and URL
- There’s a clean print mode which includes a QR code back to that exact recipe (click printer icon above ingredients, or hit “Print” in your browser)
- Ready-made presets in the Share column serve as starting points to tweak from. Besides some archetypes there are clones of commercial mixes and clones of waffle recipes from the Norwegian Church Abroad who are well known for their waffles (and they have published all their recipes).
- It’s free, needs no login, and works on your phone.
I have obviously not tested 10²⁷ batters. Consider Avogadro a very well-read guess at what “right consitency” means. Which is where you come in. If you find a setting that produces something absurd, or a combination the model clearly mishandles, I genuinely want to hear about it – that feedback is worth more to me than praise. Equally, if you discover a batter worth sharing, tell me that too. If you want to point my attention to a specific recipe in the comments below, please remember to include the direct URL to that recipe.
And hey, if you don’t yet have plans for how to celebrate Avogadro’s 250th: Design the batter of your dreams and bake a waffle!
Here’s the mockup from 2014 – a little ugly, but fun to see that many core concepts made it into Avogadro:
