Wednesday 18 February 2015

Dutch foods

My Livejournal friend touchofgr3y posted about local foods from her home area of upstate New York a few days back and invited everyone to post about food local and unique to where we live.

So here for you, a little list of some typical Dutch foods!

Cheese: Probably most famous outside of The Netherlands is Dutch cheese. The Netherlands is the largest cheese exporter in the world! I guess at least all of you in the US will know Gouda cheese. Dutch cheese is usually (semi)-hard and mild. Some variants I really like are the ones with herbs like cloves, cumin or nettles. We eat it with sandwiches ofcourse, but also as a snack in cubes. 




Bitterballen & kroketten: A deep fried crunchy coating with a ragout filling inside. The small round ones are called bitterballen and often served at parties with mustard. The larger oblong shaped kroket is a typical Dutch snack, also sold for example at McDonalds.



Stroopwafels: A delicious waffle cookie, made from two thin layers with syrup in between. You can buy them at every supermarket, but also freshly baked from stands at the market. They are extra nice with a cup of tea. Leave the wafel for a while on the hot tea and the syrup will melt a little bit. Yummy!



Herring: Raw brined herring is eaten cold, with chopped onions, sometimes on rye bread. The traditional Dutch way of preparing these fish is by gutting them aboard the fishing boat, but the pancreas is left inside the fish. The pancreatic enzymes will help preserve the fish, so the brine they are later kept in needs less salt. 



Hagelslag & vlokken: Hagelslag is chocolate sprinkles as a sandwich topping. Vlokken (flakes) are a variant which is thicker and curved, like in the picture. It's best with white bread and a thick layer of butter ;-) 



Stamppot: Mashed potatoes mixed with vegetables and served with gravy, smoked sausage and bacon. Typical winter food, not haute cuisine, but really tasty and nutritious. Vegetables often used for this are kale, raw endive, onions and carrots or sauerkraut. I love it, eat one of the variants at least once a week in the winter season. It's one of those dishes your mum makes best!



Suikerbrood: I grew up in the North of the Netherland (Friesland) where this is a local delicacy. It's a luxury bread with big lumps of nib sugar mixed in the dough and flavoured with cinnamon. I'm not too fond of it, but I thought I should add a local dish as well as general Dutch ones!



12 comments:

  1. As you know, my mom's family is Dutch, some of them from Friesland. Although it was my great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents who came here from Holland, my mom's family is very attached to their Dutch heritage. I can remember eating rusks for a snack at my grandparents' house -- these crispy round pieces of bread, usually topped with butter and a slice of cheese. And my grandma would make "suh-sigh-shee" -- no idea how to really spell that, but they were sausages wrapped up in little pancakes. And lots of baked goods with almond flavoring in them :-9

    Maybe I love cheese so much because I'm half Dutch? :-D

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    1. I didn´t know the word rusks, but checked it and we call it ´beschuit´ in The Netherlands. It´s also really good with strawberries when they´re in season!

      I think you might mean ´saucijzenbroodje´ which is a ´sausage bun´. Ah yes, almond flavoring, we usually eat that around Sinterklaas and a little bit for Christmas!

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    2. Ooooh, I bet they would be good with strawberries!

      And I bet my Grandma just used a nickname for saucijzenbroodje, or shortened it -- she liked to give things cute nicknames.

      I completely forgot to mention krakling, which we also call Dutch Christmas Cookies -- they're basically a pie crust dough, just flour and water and butter, and then we roll it into long pencil-shapes and shape them into figure 8s or letters, roll them out on a sugar-covered board with a rolling pin, and bake them. They're crispy and flaky and marvelous. Though my mom and I seem to be the only ones who really appreciate them.

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    3. Ah, krakelingen! I'm rather fond of them and the funny thing is, I live on a street called Krakelingweg. But I don't think it's named after the cookies!

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    4. I love how simple they are. Sometimes we don't need fancy!

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  2. Stroopwafels are, in my opinion, the best things ever thought of. :-P Thank goodness you can also buy them in Belgium! We once had friends who lived in Holland and moved to England, and when I asked them what they missed most, they said it was the stroopwafels! Haha. :-D

    ~ Naomi

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    1. I don't think I would answer that, I don't eat them that much. I really don't like the bread in England, but maybe you can buy better bread at other stores than supermarkets. But from the really Dutch things I guess I would miss the big choice in cheese most.

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  3. I love stroopwafels with my tea! That and some cheese are the only things I think I've tried on your list, but it all sounds so interesting. The strangest sounding foods to me are hagelslag and vlokken. Not that I'm any stranger to chocolate, but eating it on top of bread and butter...that's definitely unusual here in the U.S., or at least in Missouri.

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    1. Well, you should give it a try once! You do have Nutella or other chocolate spreads in the US right? I'm guessing your son would be a fan of more chocolate on his bread. As kids we always had to eat at least 1 sandwich with healthy stuff (cheese or meat) before we could get hagelslag or vlokken.

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  4. And now I'm hungry for some cheese and stroopwafel (been meaning to search around town for some, the batch you gave me was very yummy!) xD Great & informative post :)

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    1. You would think with Canada being quite popular with Dutch immigrants that they have some Dutch shops around there?

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