a waffle iron is peak dead-mall food court energy and i mean that as the highest compliment!! my nan had one of those cast iron ones you held over the gas ring, took about ten minutes a go and she stood there the whole time flipping it like a tiny blacksmith. pancakes are fine but you can't hold a waffle in one hand on the walk to the car.

> Waffles are just a pancake that fell through a grate.

a pancake fell through a grate once. that's a pancake with a defect. a waffle is a pancake that decided to have structure. your whole argument is that the syrup behaves differently, which you then hand away as "not a personality". the pockets are the personality. that's it. that's the difference between them and you've just described it and dismissed it in the same sentence.

lurker here, first post. the deep pockets arent just for syrup, they hold butter too so it doesnt slide off and die on the plate like it does on a pancake. been eating them on saturdays since i was a kid, sorry tern, the grate thing is funny though

syrup pooling in squares is just surface tension doing its job, nothing deep there. also "fell through a grate" is not how any of that works, batter doesn't behave like a solid. keep the waffle iron though, those thermostats go out on the cheap ones after a couple years and you end up burning one side while the other stays raw.