Gouda, stroopwafels, drop… a dozen Dutch food delights

My first introduction to Dutch food came from Judy Flooryp, my childhood friend whose mother sent her to school with sugar sandwiches and drop – aka salted black licorice. Oh, how I envied her! My mother never let me eat such culinary delicacies as white bread slathered with butter and sprinkled with white sugar.

Apart from Judy’s lunchbox and Gouda cheese, I didn’t know much about Dutch food for the next 55 years…until we spent 3.5 weeks in the Netherlands and added stroopwafels, pannenkoeken, appelbollen and other tasty highlights to our repertoire. 

We were happily scarfing back Gouda cheese of various ages when my Canadian friend Andrea, of Dutch heritage, messaged me.

Market days in the city of Den Bosch, where we pet-sat for a family for 3.5 weeks, offered a wide array of beautiful fruits and vegetables, as well as savoury and sweet baked goods, including stroopwafels and speculaas.

“I’m sure you’ve learned by now Dutch food sucks,” Andrea wrote after we’d been in the Netherlands a week. “All deep-fried and flavourless. The only spice they have is mustard. Go try and find spices in a grocery store. See how many they have compared to here [Canada].”

She’s not wrong.

We saw a lot of deep-fried fare on offer, including kroketten and bitterballen with various types of fillings, battered-and-fried fish, and the aptly named oliebollen, which translates as “oil ball.” It’s a small doughnut (like a Canadian Timbit) traditionally served on New Year’s Eve. And then there are the friet (fries) – arguably the favourite Dutch snack food as well as the preferred side dish for lunch or dinner, but served with mayo instead of ketchup. Be still, my clogging heart.  

Another Canadian friend, Hans, who grew up in the Netherlands, had fond memories of childhood comfort foods.

“My mother used to prepare an oven dish with a layer of wine sauerkraut, a layer of ground meat and a layer of mashed potatoes,” recalled Hans. “I still ask her to make it for us when we visit.”

Still, he and Andrea and other friends who made food recommendations for the Netherlands invariably focused not on Dutch food, but on international fare: Chinese, Ethiopian, and especially Indonesian.  Since Indonesia used to be a Dutch colony, you can sorta maybe call nasi goreng and rendang Dutch food, right?! It’s also the best way to get your fix for spices, since Dutch food is…well, plain.

Indeed, it was challenging to find a restaurant that served typical Dutch food. We found Japanese sushi, Italian, Indonesian, Argentinian, Mexican, and Thai. And plenty of fusion food that blended popular tastes from several countries. Our theory was that Dutch people eat their plain Dutch food at home but want to experiment when they go out for dinner.

The exception was cheese and sweets – Gouda, Edam and cheese shops were everywhere, and cafés and bakeries served a wide array of tempting treats. Even Andrea admitted she loves the sweet stuff: Dutch pancakes of any size, appeltart and oliebollen.

We didn’t sample every type of Dutch food, but still found many to enjoy. Here are the top 12 Dutch foods that we tried (in no particular order).

1 Hagel

Grocery stores have huge sections devoted to hagel (aka hagelslag). These sweet sprinkle-like bits are a topping for white bread and butter. And that’s when the proverbial penny dropped. Sugar sandwiches – they’re really a thing! Judy’s mom probably couldn’t find hagelslag in small-town Canada in the 1960s, so she improvised with white sugar.

Hagel (which means ‘hail’) comes in chocolate, milk chocolate, dark chocolate curls and an orangey-pinky-yellow version that Hans said isn’t considered real hagel.

“We loved chocolate sprinkles on open-face sandwiches,” said Hans, adding that true hagel must contain 32 percent cocoa, so it’s less sweet than the sugar-infused sprinkles added to cakes and cookies. 

Bill agreed that the chocolate hagel was less sweet than our cake sprinkles. But I tried the orangey flavour and it was pretty sweet. I can’t imagine a dentist would see much difference.

2 Gouda cheese

On a Thursday morning, we drove to the town of Gouda to see the weekly cheese market that has taken place there since 1198. From April to September, crowds gather in the market square surrounding a vast array of Gouda cheese wheels laid out on the ground. The cheese traders and farmers negotiate and go through an elaborate hand-slapping, hand-shaking routine that finally results in an agreed-upon deal. Horse-drawn wagons come and go while young men load and unload the cheeses. Cheeses are taken to the Weigh House (De Goudse Waag), at one end of the square, where they are weighed on the original scales.

Only…what you see is now like a theatre-piece, a re-enactment of the cheese trading that used to go on, a show for tourists who jostle to get the best camera angles. Bill held back but I, of course, dove into the crowd and wormed my way to the front so I could get a cheesy photo taken holding a plastic wheel with the “Gouda girls” – young women dressed in traditional Dutch white-pointed headgear, skirts, aprons and wooden shoes.

Later, we toured the Cheese and Crafts Museum, housed in the old Weigh House that dates to 1668. We learned about the building’s history, the marble bas relief illustrating the scale, how cheese is made and traded, and the other products that have supported Gouda’s economy over the centuries: beer, clay pipes, cigars, pottery, bakeries, and candles.

On another day, we took our bikes on the train to Gouda and cycled southwest through farmland known as the Krimpenerwaard. We followed the Cow-Cheese route that takes you along canals through villages and past dairy farms. What a superb ride that is! The Holstein-Friesian cows munched grass in long skinny “ribbon fields,” surrounded not by fences but by canals and irrigation ditches. Every garden-bedecked home had a moat. The map is incredible to examine. Go ahead: Google ‘Gouda,’ scroll southwest, and then zoom in to see all the ribbon fields. 

The so-called polder land is below sea level, of course, but was pumped dry using windmills. The high acidity in the peaty soil makes the grass rich and sweetens the cows’ milk, giving the resulting cheese a unique taste. We cycled past cheese shops and dairy farms that sell their own cheese, stopping many places to sample and buy the buttery, creamy Gouda. It ranges from “young” at just four weeks of age up to “very old” at one year or older, when it’s light brown, dry, crumbly and stronger in taste. We loved the old, but also the medium-aged, which retained its creaminess but had a stronger taste than the young. We bought a lot of cheese!     

3 Bitterballen

We found a few restaurants that offered traditional Dutch food as appetizers – that’s how we tried bitterballen. To make it, you cook a meat stew, let it simmer until it’s really thick, scoop balls of it, coat it in breadcrumbs and then deep-fry the balls.

Bitterballen are close cousins to the oblong-shaped kroket (from the French word croquette). Kroketten were a rare treat when Hans was growing up. He described them as “a thick flour, water, egg and meat or veggie mixture, rolled in breadcrumbs and deep fried. I still enjoy them, although the meat content appears to be down to near zero nowadays.”

Hans’ wife, Karen, has learned to enjoy many Dutch foods “but is particularly fond of bitterballen with mustard, which, enjoyed with a wheat beer on a patio on a Dutch car-free medieval square, is the ultimate holiday experience.” I’d agree with that!

We tried two types of bitterballen – a meat version with mustard (rather bland) and another one with rice and truffles inside (delicious).

4 Stamppot and hutspot

On a day that we didn’t feel like cooking or going out, we perused the ready-to-microwave section at the grocery store and chose one tray of stamppot and another of hutspot.

Our stamppot was potatoes mashed together with cauliflower, broccoli and onions, although other vegetables such as kale and cabbage can be used. Hutspot was potatoes mixed with carrots (although Hans said meat is traditionally mixed in too).

Ours came with two large beef meatballs slathered in gravy (smoked sausage is a more typical accompaniment). Neither was a feast for the eyes, but they were pretty darn tasty. Dutch savoury food tends towards the meat-and-potatoes variety – comfort food, I imagine.

5 Friet

What better place to sample Dutch fries than at De Aardappeleters – The Potato Eaters! We found this little restaurant in the town of Nuenen right across from the Van Gogh Village Museum. Vincent Van Gogh painted The Potato Eaters, his first famous painting, while living in Nuenen.

We ordered the “special friet”: fries topped with mayo, raw onion and curry sauce. Anyone who likes Canadian poutine would enjoy this, as we did. Delicious. (Cutlery came in a mini paint can.)

We also sampled a bockwurst and a knakworst – two styles of sausage. They tasted pretty much the same – like a regular old hot dog wiener. Dried sausages that we tried on another day had more complex flavours.

6 Soused herring and kibbeling

We tried two famous Dutch fish dishes at a food truck in Den Bosch’s market square (but they seem to be available everywhere). Soused herring – it’s brined but was pinkish and raw – was served with diced raw onion. I thought of it as sushi and enjoyed it immensely. Bill ordered kibbeling, which is chunks of a white fish, battered and deep fried. Also delicious when dunked in… wait for it… mayo.

7 Dutch pancake

Hans and all his fellow Dutchmen enjoy two types of pancakes. The tiny ones, called poffertjes, are the closest to what North Americans know as a pancake, although they’re made with yeast. About three inches across, poffertjes are puffy, sprinkled with icing sugar and served in a paper cone with a toothpick to easily pop them in your mouth while strolling along a canal.

The large Dutch pancakes, called pannenkoeken, are usually savoury rather than sweet, and are typically eaten for dinner, not breakfast, explained Hans.

Pannenkoeken are more like a crepe: quite thin but big enough to cover your plate. We tried them on our Gouda biking day, stopping at a pannenkoeken house right under a windmill. How much more Dutch can you get?! Mine was topped with brie, figs, walnuts and honey: oh, my, was that a delicious combo! Bill enjoyed his with bacon (called spek) and apple.

8 Stroopwafels

Hans and Karen brought us stroopwafels when they visited us in Portugal and we became instant fans of this thin waffle cookie filled with buttery syrup. We bought it wherever we went in the Netherlands. When we visited Gouda, I was surprised to learn that that’s where it originated.

We wandered in to Berg’s Bakery and a clerk asked if we’d like a fresh stroopwafel made right before our eyes. Of course! She took a beige puck of dough and warmed it in her hands before putting it into a waffle press. When it was golden and thin, she removed it, sliced it horizontally (quite a skill!), and drizzled the warm butter syrup onto one side. She capped it with the other side and pressed down firmly with her hand until the syrup oozed to the edge.

I practically drooled as she handed us the warm stroopwafel. Mmmm! Stroopwafels became my absolute favourite Dutch food.

9 Appeltaart

How different could Dutch apple pie be from any old North American apple pie? When we shared a slice at a café in Etten-Leur (where Van Gogh first registered himself as an artist), we found the difference enormous. This deep-dish pie had a crumbly buttery crust like shortbread, and a custardy filling with cinnamon and apples. With apologies to my mom and aunts, I have to say it’s the best apple pie I’ve ever had.  

10 Bossche bol and appelbol

The city of Den Bosch boasts its own special pastry – the Bossche bol. It’s a giant profiterole the size of a grapefruit, filled with whipped cream and coated in dark chocolate. Since I can’t eat chocolate, Bill oversaw the taste test: good chocolate, but the whipped cream was too sweet.

I had an appelbol instead – about the same size as the Bossche bol, but filled with apples and cinnamon, deep-fried, and coated in sugar crystals. I liked it better than Bill liked his Bossche bol.

11 Drop (aka salted black licorice)

Drop is not everyone’s cup of ginseng, but I’ve loved salted black licorice ever since Judy shared hers with me in Grade 4. I discovered a wide array of choices in the grocery store – they vary in sweetness, saltiness, and hardness. I chose a mixed bag and was not disappointed. The taste lasts a long time since it gets stuck in your teeth.

Bill much preferred Dutch chocolate because it’s well-balanced between creamy and hard and not too sweet.

12 Dutch beer

The Dutch are not known for winemaking. Beer is the alcoholic beverage of choice in the Netherlands, where the beer-making tradition goes back to medieval times and sustained the economies of many cities. I’m not a huge beer drinker but when in Rome, er Haarlem…

The Jopenkerk is a former Haarlem church turned brewery with huge copper tanks behind the long bar. We watched the brewmaster as he checked the tanks, testing and observing the beer as it brewed over seven to eight hours.

From the wide selection of local beers, I chose a Meesterstuk Imperial Double Pastry Stout (I do like dark beers). At 11 percent alcohol, it kicked my butt. Bill’s SuperDUPA – a Dutch pale ale – was a much more modest 5.5 percent. But he had to drive.

Later, after our cycle tour around the Krimpenerwaard, we found a sunny patio overlooking Gouda’s town hall. My Koffie Stout was brewed just north of town, while Bill chose a German Weihenstephan. Our well-deserved refreshments went down smoothly.

By the time our 3.5 weeks was up, my Dutch food repertoire had expanded dramatically beyond the sugar sandwiches and salted licorice I’d shared with Judy. We were well pleased with what we had sampled. I wore stretchy yoga pants on the plane back to Portugal.     

We visited the Netherlands in August 2023. Find out where we are right now by visiting our ‘Where’s Kathryn?’ page.