Sweet Crunch
- 4 days ago
- 3 min read
Updated: 2 hours ago
My name is Melissa Lynn, and I co‑own Sweet Crunch Waffles in Charlotte, North Carolina. At the Market at 7th Street, we specialize in liege waffles.
They are a little different than waffles you make at home. It’s not made from a batter—it’s made from a dough that we make in‑house with all fresh ingredients. It rises and rests for about 24 hours, and once it’s ready, we mix in pearl sugar. That’s what makes a liege waffle: the dough and the sugar together.
A sweet treat that brings me back to childhood—my family and I would go to Chili’s and get the chocolate molten lava cake with the vanilla ice cream on top. We would all dig in, have the chocolate spill out. Delicious. That brings me back.
The special that we are putting out for Flowering is a mini original liege waffle with a scoop of coffee ice cream and a fun little pipette filled with cold brew. The reason why we chose this was because when we were in Belgium, all we tried were the plain liege waffles. They were so delicious. That’s what started our desire for Sweet Crunch. So to give an ode to Sweet Crunch, we wanted to push everyone—if you haven’t tried an original liege waffle, you absolutely should.
That’s also something I recommend to everybody who comes to the shop. Fifty percent take it, fifty percent don’t, because I think they feel like they need to top it with everything—which does taste very delicious topped with everything. But an original waffle with coffee ice cream… that’s something special.
We started Sweet Crunch by popping up in a local coffee shop. We reached out to them, and they were like, “Sure, let’s take a chance on these people who have no restaurant background, no culinary experience.” We put out our foldable tables, carrying our 80‑pound cast‑iron waffle iron. That’s how we started—popping up at coffee shops and wanting to bring the two together.
We have a huge Hobart mixer where we make all of our dough. We make it twice a week. So two days a week, you can come in and see us making dough—cracking 120 eggs, putting them into the mixer bowl. The sounds you’ll hear in our kitchen are a small mixer mixing fresh dough with the pearl sugar, timers going off telling us when to take the waffles off, and the majority of the time, scraping. That is us cleaning the iron because the sugar crystals caramelize on the iron. If you leave it there just a little too long, they get a little burnt. So we’re constantly scraping sugar or caramel off the iron.
Tyler and I made the first batch of the waffles in our house, not really knowing exactly what to do. These waffles are made from a dough, so they’re yeast‑based. But the first time, we killed the yeast. Nothing rose, and we were like, “What is going on with these waffles?” We tried three more times. We finally got our dough to rise, and then it still didn’t taste quite like how we had it in Belgium.
We had continued trial and error, which is normal. We actually wanted to franchise one of the Belgian waffle shops there, and they were like, “No, we’re not ready to go to the States yet.” After we killed the yeast, I was like, “This would have been so much easier if they would have said yes,” but no. The trial and error continued, and we finally got it down.
Something I would definitely want to pass down to the next liege‑waffle Sweet Cruncher is: take the time to create it as it should be. If we didn’t let the dough rise and rest, it just wouldn’t come out the same. There would be a little bit of a difference. Or if you don’t have all of your ingredients— “Oh, I’m short 10 eggs”—it might not sound like a lot, but make sure you have everything you need.
Just because the timer goes off doesn’t mean the waffle is done. Use your eyes. Take that visual. Does it look golden brown, or does it still need time on the iron? Making sure it’s perfect matters, and it definitely matters to the customer. I think in this day and age, we’re spending money on things that we actually want—on quality—and that’s something I would like them to do.
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