We are really into food, but were ashamed to admit that other than Gouda (which we'd never tried) we couldn't think of any typically Dutch foods.. so we looked up Food you must try when you go to the Netherlands. We then spent nine hours in The Netherlands trying some of them out (among other things).
1. Poffertjes
Poffertjes means pancakes, and these pancakes were some of the yummiest that I've ever had, they were really small, and I think they deep fry them. They were served with sugar (the white stuff in the photo) butter (the yellow blob) and syrup. We really enjoyed them and will definitely have them next time.
2. Patat
Patat is chips. The chips themselves just seemed like normal chips, but to make them more Dutch we tried them with oorlog sauce. Oorlog means war, but here it means peanut sauce, mayo and chopped onions. It was pretty good. We didn't think peanut sauce would work but it did. Yum.
3. Drop
This is liquorice which apparently Dutch people consume more than any other people in the world. I'm not sure how true that is, and as we've had lots of it before we weren't planning on having any. But this great cheese shop that we went into (and bought cheese) had samples of lots of different types of drop including chili and chocolate, which we tried.
4. Stroopwafel
Stroopwafel literally translates to Syrup waffle, which is basically what these were. They were nice, and again we tried them at the cheese shop. I have had similar things to this before though, so as nice as they were I wouldn't say they felt extra Dutch and alien to us.
5. Heineken
I really wanted to try Bitterballen (seems to be deep fried beef rolled in balls) and we were told that Cafe Stevens does really good ones, so we went there, but we didn't see it on their menu.. so instead we had a Heineken:
No biggie though, you get that all the time. We even had Heineken in Australia.
6. Kwarkbollen
This literally translates as 'Quark Dumplings'. We chose them because we went into a cafe looking for Poffertjes, but they had run out so we picked the most Dutch looking word that we could find. They were like donuts with a soft but not liquid vanilla like filling. Yum.
7. Kaas
The cheese was great, first we saw it at the market, some were really big and others were shaped like clogs:
Later we went into a shop and tried loads, our favourite was the asparagus and bacon Gouda which we bought:
We offered it to Tanbay's family in Germany and luckily no one liked the asparagus bit so we got to eat it all :)
All in all we loved the Dutch food, especially the cheese and pancakes, but we feel like there's loads more to try. Next time Netherlands!!
ABOUTME
We overland. We eat plants and fungi. We live outside as much as possible. We are all connected. A female travel blogger overlanding and writing about ecotourism, ethical and sustainable travel, socially conscious travel and housesitting. An online travel magazine since 2015.
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