Pancakes & Poffertjes
A lot of times I get the question what typical Dutch cuisine is. Well the Answer to that is actually really simple. We don’t have that! At least not one that is good enough to put on a menu. There are a few restaurants that do serve typical Dutch food. But to call it cuisine….
Throughout the years the Netherlands and especially Amsterdam has been a country and city made out of a lot of different nationalities. So our cuisine has been infected (but in a good way) with the influences of these nationalities. In the early days it was mostly Asian food that came to Amsterdam but these days we have a big influence of food and spices from the middle east.
If you want to give our cuisine a name, I would call it more of a fusion cuisine. Which makes some of the dishes in Amsterdam (or other places in the Netherlands) really surprising and delicious. We have many Michelin star restaurants.
But there are a few items that are typical Dutch, and really delicious. A few of them you found with me on the boat. Cheese (the famous Gouda and Edam Cheese), Drop (black liquorish), Speculaas (Cinnamon based cookie), Bitter koekjes (Almond based Cookies) and Haagse Hopjes (Caramel and coffee sweet). But beside that there many more amazing treats.
For instance, the famous Dutch Pancakes. Everybody knows pancakes and many countries have their own interpretation. But the Dutch have taken it to the next level. Funny enough we went two ways. We make either very large pancake. And we fill them with cheese, apples, all kinds of stuff. Or we make the pancakes really small and fluffy. We call these pancakes “poffertjes”. There are many places in Amsterdam where you can eat them. And to be honest, it almost impossible to go wrong with these poffertjes and pancakes. But there are a few places where they made it a real craftmanship.
The ones that are my personal favorites;
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