Witte bolletjes

Our love for all things bread started early, around 4500BC, when a tribe of growers settled in the valley of southern Limburg and started growing grain. Slowly the grain selection expanded as wheat came in from France and rye from the German neighbors, causing a variety of breads, porridges and puddings to make their way onto the Dutch table.

The best soil for growing grains was (and still is) in the province of Zeeland, already famous for its quality flour in the twelfth and thirteenth century. Other provinces such as Friesland, Groningen and even Northern Holland tended to have a wetter soil and proved more beneficial for pasture land than cropland. Those provinces were often dependent on the import of grains from neighboring countries.

Besides wheat and rye, the Dutch also grew combinations of grain. Masteluin, a mixture of rye and wheat, provided the basis for a bread of the same name. Rye mixed with oats was called mancksaet and rye with barley spilkoren. All these grain mixes provided heavy, chewy, dark bread, that fed the masses of hard workers. White bread was limited to the wealthy and was nick-named "professor's bread" in the city of Leiden, birthplace of the first university in Holland in 1575, indicating that only the educated and affluent people were able to afford it.

Bread is a common theme in Dutch etymology. "Wittebroodsweken", or "white bread weeks", refers to the honeymoon period, those first six weeks after the wedding when a couple is still enjoying the festive and unique character of the celebration.

White rolls are used for broodje frikandel or broodje kroket, for lunch boxes and to grace the table on a sunny Sunday morning for breakfast. Elongated breads, called puntjes, are the hotdog bun by choice or serve as the foundation for a puddingbroodje. Round ones, bolletjes, hold savory slices of cheese and tomato, juicy sheets of roast beef with slices of red onion, or peanut butter and hagelslag...... Such a simple bread, and yet so versatile. Makes 12 rolls.

Witte bolletjes
4 cups (600 grams) all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons (15 grams) salt
1 teaspoon (5 grams) sugar
1.5 cups (350 ml) milk
2 teaspoons (8 grams) active dry yeast
4 tablespoons (55 grams) butter, room temperature

For the wash
1 small egg
4 tablespoons milk

Mix the flour, salt and sugar in a mixing bowl. Warm the milk to about 120F/40C, add the butter and set aside to melt. Sprinkle the yeast over the dry ingredients in the bowl, and mix in the warm milk and butter. Knead the dough for a good ten minutes, until the dough is well mixed and pliable but holding together and smooth. Place in an oiled bowl, cover and let rise until almost doubled in size.

Brush the risen rolls before
they go into the oven

Punch down and divide into 3oz (85 grams) rolls. Grease a 9 1/2″ x 13″ (24 x 33cm) baking pan or add a silicone baking mat or parchment paper, and place the rolls in the pan, leaving about an inch of distance in between in the rolls. If you want high rolls, keep the inch, if you want flatter rolls, increase the distance. Cover and let rise until doubled in size.

Brush the rolls with the egg/milk wash, bake at 375F/190C for about twenty minutes, or until done (internal temperature is 190F/85C and rising. Remove pan from oven, set aside and place the rolls on a rack to cool. When cooled, wrap to avoid drying out.

Now slice open a roll, smear with butter  and add some good cheese or sandwich meat and enjoy this little luxury!

Gehaktballen met jus

Woensdag Gehaktdag! "Wednesday is ground meat day". It used to be the marketing slogan for the butchering trade during the fifties and sixties, and even now, on many a Wednesday you can find children standing on a little stool at the kitchen counter, helping make dinner by learning how to roll meatballs in their little grubby hands, and sneaking small bites of the seasoned raw meat when the adult is not looking.

Why Wednesday? Presumably because the butcher would butcher harvest on Monday, cut on Tuesday and process all the leftovers into ground meat on Wednesday. Whether that's entirely true or not, I don't know, but it sounds plausible.

Broodje Bal

Dutch meatballs are a couple of sizes up from the average American spaghetti meatballs. Slowly simmered in their own jus, these carneous clods are versatile, easy to make and affordable, and one of those typical dishes that are somehow associated with "gezelligheid", grandmas and wintery dishes. Gehaktballen can be served in many ways: as your main protein with one of the various stamppots, by itself on a piece of bread, broodje bal, with a good lick of mustard or ketchup, or sliced and deep-fried with onion and served with peanut sauce, the famous bereklauw... The gehaktbal will endure practically any kind of culinary treatment: it's all good.

Preferably made with half-om-half gehakt, fifty percent beef and fifty percent pork, these meatballs will also do fine with an 85/15 (eightyfive percent meat, fifteen percent fat) ground beef. Too lean a meat will not do much for their flavor, you need some fat for the simmering and the jus. Since quite a bit of water is added at the simmering stage, the meat itself will have lost some of its calories, in case you were minding your diet.

Gehaktballen met jus
1 lb of ground beef, preferably 85/15 or half beef, half pork
2 slices of white bread
1/2 cup of milk

2 shallots or one small onion
1 egg, beaten
1/2 teaspoon of nutmeg, ground
1/2 teaspoon of salt
1/2 teaspoon of black pepper, ground
2 tablespoons of prepared mustard

2 tablespoons of flour
4 tablespoons of butter

Mince the shallots or small onion. Add the meat to a bowl, mix in the shallots, the egg, the mustard, nutmeg, the salt and pepper and knead a couple of times. Cut the crust off the bread, soak it in the milk and add it to the meat. Dispose of the rest of the milk.

When the mixture has come together, divide it in four equal pieces. Roll each piece into a ball, roll the meatballs throught the flour and set aside.

Heat the butter in a Dutch oven and sear the meatballs on all sides until brown. Lower the heat, place the cover on the pan and let them simmer for a good twenty minutes, then turn them over in the grease and simmer for another ten. Add 1/2 cup of water to the pan, cover and simmer for another twenty minutes. Remove the meatballs from the pan, add 1/2 cup of beef stock to the pan and stir to loosen up all the meaty bits from the bottom of the pan. Taste and see if you need to adjust salt/pepper or bind the jus a little bit with cornstarch or flour, you decide.

Meatballs made one day ahead somehow always taste better the next day. Serve one meatball per person, and add a generous spoonful of jus on their potatoes for some good old-fashioned prakking.

Zakdoekjes

It's not that I don't have enough recipes to write about Dutch baked goods (I have at least another two years worth's of weekly posts!), it's that sometimes I can't pick. So many recipes are wonderful and exciting, but the limitation of time, product availability and sometimes a last minute change of plans dictates what gets published.

This weekend I had planned on making a slagroomtaart, a light cake with whipped cream and fruit. It's a delightful cake, traditionally served at birthday parties or other festive occassions. But I received a booklet in the mail this week, Drentse Pot, about typical foods from the province of Drente, and while browsing through it, I came across a recipe for zakdoeken. Zakdoeken (handkerchiefs) or buusdoukies in the Drents dialect are, in this case, not of the cloth kind, mind you, but a lovely, crunchy yet light waffle. The slagroomtaart went out the window ofcourse, because how can you resist a cookie with such an interesting name? I have never spent much time in Drente, so I was eager to try it out. And I am sure glad I did!

This cookie is sweet, crunchy, crisp and light, and shows beautifully. You will need a waffle cone maker style of waffle iron, like you use for stroopwafels. Watch out when folding the warm waffle, it will be hot!

Zakdoekjes

1 stick of butter
1 1/2 cup of sugar
2/3 cup of water
2 cups of flour
Pinch of salt
2 tablespoons of vanilla essence

Melt the butter and set aside. Warm the water and add the sugar, stir until the sugar is dissolved. Cool the water and add the egg, beat it well, then stir in the flour and the salt. Mix everything to a nice, smooth batter (no lumpies!). Now pour and stir in the melted butter until it is fully incorporated into the batter. Finally add the vanilla and stir.

Turn on the waffle iron, and bake one waffle at a time with approximately 1/4 cup of batter. This depends on how liquid your   batter is, how large the baking surface is etc. so just measure out an amount and see what the result is. If there is too much batter and it runs off the sides, take less. If your zakdoekjes are more like miniature cookies, pour a little bit more.

Pour the measured amount of batter on the hot waffle iron, close and bake. When the waffle is done, open the lid and quickly fold the cookie in half, and then again in half, as if you were folding a handkerchief. Place it on a cooling rack, where it will crisp up into a nice, sweet, crunchy cookie.

Makes approximately twenty cookies.

On the practice of prakken....



Table manners are an important reflection of upbringing and common courtesy. Both hands above the table, no leaning on your elbows, no talking and chewing at the same time, no stuffing your mouth full or taking a sip while you still have food in your mouth....for those of us that were raised in Holland, these rules for board behavior sound probably very familiar.

Not all eating etiquette, however, transposes well into other cultures. Whereas in America most foods are served to be consumed with only a fork, the Dutch use both a fork and a knife to eat: the fork firmly lodged in the left hand, the knife in the right. The fork (vork) is used to spear the food and bring it to the mouth, the knife (mes) cuts a piece of meat, vegetable or potato as needed. Open-faced sandwiches are cut into neat little squares, fruit is skillfully severed into edible pieces. It's all very polite and educated and, the Dutch, we innerly scoff a little bit at those people that still eat sandwiches with their hands, peel oranges with their fingers and scoop up rice with a fork.

Mash those potatoes well

But do not be deceived by such haute haughtiness. Because behind closed doors, when we are alone, we subject the food on our plate to a practice so abhorrent, so abominable that even the most barbarous barbaric would drop its jaw in disgust. This is the practice of prakken. If you are familiar with Dutch cuisine, or have read the articles on this blog, you know that it suggested to always have "jus", pan gravy, with the meat when you serve potatoes. Why? Because this fatty fluid is the key to prakken.

Now what the heck is prakken? Prakken is having a beautiful plate of steaming, perfect globes of crumbly boiled potatoes, over which you drizzle hot, greasy pan juice and then brutally attack with a fork, mashing the potatoes, sometimes even mixing in the vegetables, and reducing it to a soft pulpy state. Why do we do this? I have no clue. But it tastes good.



Add enough pan gravy



As young children, when we just start to eat solids, our food is often prakked for us, sometimes with sweet applesauce mixed in to mask the taste of liver, Brussels sprouts or whatever else we tend to dislike at that age, and to make it more palatable. Perhaps that's why we still prak, I don't know. But mashing your boiled potatoes, mixing it with the gravy of the meat and having the slightly sweet, savory flavor of those mashed potatoes is a whole new experience. A more grown-up, and socially acceptable prakked food would be a stamppot, of which we have many varieties. But the home-made, plate-local prak is praktically, no pun intended, illegal, forbidden and most certainly "not done". And that is what makes it so sweet........

So prak away. At home, that is. Just not when you've been invited to dinner at some new friend's home. Or if a potential new employer invites you to a lunch interview. I know you'll be tempted when you see the gravy from the meat dripping onto the plate and slowly making its way towards the potatoes, but prakken is just not done. At least not in public!





Roze koeken

Recently, I had the opportunity to spend some time with friends from Holland. It doesn't happen very often since most of us live in other states or countries, and it's not too frequent that we all are in the same place, at the same time. After the typical kissie-kissie greeting (three kisses on the cheek, left-right-left), we sat down, poured coffee, brought out the cookies and shared the latest news. And it's never too long before we start talking about food. "Hey, I found this great Gouda cheese online, I'll send you the link", "We have someone selling stroopwafels at the farmer's market. It's not exactly the same but it's good enough". "I'm really going to miss the Dutch store in town when we move, they even sell hagelslag.". Anyway, you get the drift.

The Dutch tend to be adventurous travelers, and you'll find us pretty much scattered across the globe and far away from home. We love to be out and about, but sometimes we do miss our food! So we sat, sipped coffee, and reminisced about culinaria neerlandica. After I brought out a big platter with suikerwafels and gevulde koeken, we started talking about cakes and cookies. I mentioned the ones that I had baked and listed, out loud, the many that I had yet to try. Everybody joined in calling out the ones they liked, we all went "ooh" and "aah", because they're all so good. But when I mentioned "roze koeken", pink cakes, I noticed that the exclamations were a little longer and the eyes sparkled a little more.

I'm, quite honestly, not sure why. Of all the cakes and cookies we have, the roze koek is possibly the least enticing one, skill-wise or ingredient-wise. No elaborate kneading, twisting and rolling needed as with the bolussen. No intricate web of nutmeg, white pepper, cinnamon, cloves and ginger to make a flavorful speculaas. The roze koek has content-wise very little to offer in complexity: butter, eggs, flour and sugar. I mean, don't get me wrong, you can't hardly mess up butter and sugar, but it's nothing unique or special. They do have something going for them, though, something very un-Dutch: a bright pink, almost neon, frosting! Hot Barbie pink, neon Peptobismol tones....just check the pictures and you know what I mean. The fact that you can adjust the coloring also makes them perfect for other occasions, like King's Day! Who can resist a bright orange cake? 

My own theory is that, from all the Dutch cookies, this is the most extravagant one, and with our Calvinistic upbringing, the excitement of biting into a roze koek is like rebelling, it's almost akin to sin. There, that rhymes. The cake itself is buttery, sweet and tender: the pink icing mixed with berry juice adds a slight tang and creaminess to the whole. Definitely worth a try!

Roze koeken

1 cup (225 grams) butter, room temperature

1/2 cup (150 grams) sugar

3 eggs

3/4 cup (125 grams) all-purpose flour

1 teaspoon (5 grams) baking powder

1/2 teaspoon (3 grams) salt

1 teaspoon lemon zest

For the icing

1 cup (125 grams) powdered sugar

1/2 tablespoons red raspberry juice (for orange, try carrot juice)

Optional: food coloring* (red for pink, red and yellow for orange) 

Cream the butter with the sugar. Add one egg at a time and beat until it's been fully absorbed by the mixture before adding the next one. Mix the remaining ingredients together and fold it through the mix until you have a thick batter.

Spray or grease a muffin pan (I used jumbo muffin pans) and distribute the batter evenly over 8 holes, or 6 if you want taller cakes). Fill each cup about half full, but not more. Place a baking sheet on top and bake the cakes in a 350F/175C oven until they are golden, about twenty minutes. Remove the baking sheet from the top for the last five minutes. Pierce a cake with a toothpick, if it comes out clean, they're done. 

Take them out of the pan, and lay them, top down on a flat surface to cool. 

Mix the powdered sugar with the berry juice and stir well. You may want to add a drop of red food coloring if you are looking for that hot pink. or red and yellow for orange. Stir it well, add some milk if it gets too thick, and then ice the cakes. You can either dip the cake upside down in the icing, and let it dry iced side up, or spread the icing with a knife or spatula on top. 

Let the icing dry, then serve with coffee or tea. Feel terribly sinful for a couple of bites and then have another cake!

If you're wondering where we got the pans and the little crown party sticks, check out the pans here and the crowns here. We also use this food coloring. We get a few pennies from your purchase at Amazon at no extra cost to you which helps with maintaining the website. Thank you!