Dutch Food – Pannenkoeken, kroketten, sate and more

Do you know what is considered typical Dutch food?  No?  I didn’t either.  I was really hoping it wasn’t meat with a side of meat.  Haha.  When Brian and I traveled to Germany and Switzerland a few years ago, I felt like every restaurant had really heavy, super filling food.  I started calling it meat with meat because all I really wanted was a salad.  When I finally found a chicken salad on the menu in Switzerland I cheered – only to be very disappointed when instead of lettuce with grilled chicken it turned out to be cold chicken salad, the kind with mayo in it.  Eww.  I ate it anyway because I had paid a million Swiss Francs for it.

So what is considered Dutch food?  These are some of the items we’ve tried so far.  Sadly, I did not take any pictures of my own food, because my food photography skills often end up making even the best meal look pretty gross.

Pannenkoeken

I like these.  I think everyone does.  It’s hard not to like thin pancakes that can be covered in syrup (stroop), filled with fruit, smothered with Nutella, or topped with bacon and cheese among a variety of other topping possibilities.  Last week a woman who is friends with our exchange family volunteered to come over and cook pannenkoeken for our family for dinner.  It was awesome!  She made a huge stack of pancakes and brought a variety of toppings to try on them.  We had sliced apples, raisins, bacon, cheese, Nutella, banana, stroop, powdered sugar, jam and even ice cream.  Some of the toppings were cooked right in to the pannenkoeken, not just put on top at the end.  My favorite combination was bacon and cheese, but I also liked Nutella and bananas.  You can eat the pannenkoeken flat like an American pancake, or roll it up.  The syrup here, called stroop, is different than the maple syrup we have at home.  It’s thicker and has a more desert-like taste to it.

There are also a ton of pannenkoeken restaurants in the Netherlands.  Here, they eat pannenkoeken for dinner, not breakfast.  We haven’t visited a pannekoeken restaurant yet, but plan to in the upcoming weeks.  According to our exchange family, pretty much every pannenkoeken restaurant is great for kids and when I looked at the menus for a couple of them I couldn’t believe how many different combinations of toppings were offered.

Kroketten

A few weeks after we arrived in Amersfoort, we sat down for lunch at Restaurant ‘t Hoogt while on our bike ride to the National Military Museum and I ordered the lunch special.  I had no idea what it was, but it was highlighted on the menu, was an affordable 8 euros and I wanted to try something new.

My plate arrived and it had three slices of white bread laying on it, each with a different topping.  On one slice was 2 pieces of cheese.  On the second slice was a fried egg, and on the third slice was a kroketten (sometimes spelled croquette) with a couple packages of mustard.  Hmm…what am I supposed to do with this food?  Make an egg and cheese sandwich?  Wrap the kroketten up in the bread?  Cut it up with a knife and fork?  Who knows.  So I dug in and hoped no locals were looking.  I took a bite of the kroketten wrapped up in the bread with some mustard on top.  Crunchy and deep fried on the outside.  Squishy, mushy inside.  Hmm…this is a weird texture combination.  And what is on the inside?  Is that meat?  I have no idea what kind of meat this is.  It looks kinda brown…it must be beef.  Why is it so squishy?  I kind of want to spit it out but the waiter just asked if it was good and I smiled and nodded so I better eat all of this….ick.  I’m not a fan.

As far as I can tell, bitterballen (another popular Dutch snack food, especially as an appetizer or at a bar) is basically the same thing as kroketten except for the shape.  Bitterballen is round.  I haven’t actually tried any yet, but given distaste for kroketten, I probably won’t be seeking it out.

You know what else is strange?  You can buy kroketten in machines that look like vending machines.  Isn’t there meat in those things?  How does it not go bad?

Sate

I’m pretty sure this is Brian’s new favorite food.  Sate is an Indonesian food that is common in the Netherlands because Indonesia used to be a Dutch Colony (at that time it was called the Dutch West Indies).  Sate is basically meat on a stick.  It’s small pieces of chicken, beef or pork (although chicken seems to be the most common) skewered on a wooden stick, grilled, and served with a thick peanuty-Asian sauce.  Yum.  Yum.  Yum.  There will be a lot of sate in our future on this trip and I need to find a place back in Madison that serves this.  After a quick Google search it looks like Bandung on Williamson Street may be my best bet!

We also found some Asian sesame sauce covered chicken sate we like a lot too.  Tonight I’m going to try and make some from scratch, which will probably be a complete failure, but I’ve got my fingers crossed!

Poffertjes

After eating out at a few restaurants with the kids, I kept noticing the same thing on several of the kids menus – poffertjes.  I had no idea what these were and when I plugged the word into my translator app, nothing came up.  So we played it safe and avoided them for the first few weeks.

Then I took a chance and ordered them for Ben, figuring if he didn’t like them I could feed him something off my plate.  Instead, he devoured them and Brian and I barely got to take a bite before he ripped them out of our fingers and stuffed them in his mouth.  Poffertjes are like little, fluffy, round pancakes.  They are usually served with powdered sugar on top and a pat of butter.  They actually seemed more like a dessert than a meal to me, but regardless of whether you eat them as a meal or as a dessert, they were super yummy.

Stroopwafel

A few months ago I flew on a United Airlines flight early in the morning and was given a pre-packaged stroopwafel as a snack.  I ate it and wasn’t very impressed.  It was kind of hard and chewy.  So when we arrived in the Netherlands, I wasn’t hurrying to buy stroopwafels.  That was a mistake. I missed out on several weeks of yummy eating.  The stroopwafels here are amazing.

Especially the hot fresh ones you can find at little stands at the markets or even at the Amersfoort zoo.  A stroopwafel consists of two thin waffles with a thin layer of stroop between them.  If you have a stroopwafel that isn’t warm, you’re supposed to take it and set it on top of a hot cup of coffee or tea to let it warm up for a minute.  This makes the stroop kinda gooey and wonderful.

I have a few more food goals for the remainder of our trip.  I still want to try more Indonesian food (like a rijsttafel which is apparently a smorgasbord of Indonesian food), cheese fondue, apple pie (it’s everywhere…it must be good), and more amazing, super cheap cheese.