It feels a bit odd to put together a list of the strangest Dutch culinary habits. It is silly, after all — and why should you even care? People hardly travel to the Netherlands for the food, and it is not something we are particularly famous for. Well, there is the cheese1, of course. The ‘Gooda’ cheese (we know the ou of Gouda is hard to pronounce). I hate myself a little when I say it that way too — it is the same as saying ‘Jootrecht’ for Utrecht, or soccer instead of football.
But maybe we need silly lists. And after reading this one, you will probably get the impression that the Dutch are rather childish in their food preferences. There is nothing wrong with embracing your inner child, but doing it with hagelslag or pancakes is a different level entirely.
My relationship with Dutch food is complicated. I think I have given that away in previous Direct Dutch posts — I am not a huge fan of the motherland’s cuisine. To be honest, the food we know as the standard Dutch dinner is quite boring. With exceptions, of course. But still. It is not all that bad.
Without further ado, here is a random list of food habits. Enjoy. Sincere concerns and questions welcome in the comments.
Supermarkets play such an important — even dominant — role in the food culture of the Netherlands that you should definitely pay a visit to one2. Just to get to know us a little better. Dutch supermarkets are unmistakably Dutch. Almost all the food habits listed in this post have a link to the supermarket.
The supermarkets are well aware of their position, and they have a big influence on what we eat. Around the holidays, for example, they offer special products: butter in festive shapes, fancy vegetable dishes, higher-quality cheeses and over-the-top desserts. After the holidays, it is back to normal. All in all, it is also a matter of consumer demand.
Pre-cut vegetables for everything
Everything regarding Dutch supermarkets3 is focused on convenience. The Dutch consumer is a very practical kind. People would rather not spend time cooking. And why would they? Dinner needs to be on the table quickly, preferably within 30 minutes. And not too late in the evening either. The Dutch have other important things to do.
When you look at the supermarket offering, this becomes clear immediately: an enormous variety of pre-cut vegetables for pasta, soup and stir-fry dishes.
As we are Dutch, it cannot be too expensive either. Supermarkets have been locked in a constant battle over the best discounts for years. And consumers love to play on the same battlefield, trying to outsmart the supermarkets by being the savvy, price-aware shopper.
It is a strange tension between convenience and price, by the way. Pre-cut vegetables cost more than a leek and a head of cabbage, yet we happily pay for the speed.
Meal kits and world cuisine
Convenience goes further still. Meal kits and packets with spice mixes and ready-made sauces are enormously popular. Easy and quick — thanks to brands like Maggi and Knorr, we can put exotic dishes on the table without too much effort. So we can vary between pasta, stamppot and South African bobotie. Why not? (I recently discovered there is now a mix for poke bowl. Why, God, why 😱)
The next level is getting groceries delivered to your doorstep. Even when the supermarket is only a three-minute walk away4.
Zoute drop (salty liquorice), dubbelzoute drop (extra salty liquorice), kokindjes, boerderijdrop (farmhouse liquorice), dropmix, griotten, honingdrop (honey liquorice), muntdrop (coins), autodrop (a mix of liquorice shapes in a box designed to keep in the car), jubes, zwartwitjes (blacks and whites), school chalks, harlekijntjes, katjesdrop (liquorice cats), bielzen and many more.. 😋
Skip the fancy sweet shops — you know the ones, dressed up as tourist traps — and get your drop in a supermarket. Brands like Venco, Klene, Oldtimers and Katja are widely available.
3: More than a stroopwafel
Just like drop, we have a lot of different biscuits. We are not generous with serving them — just a few on a small dish with tea or coffee, and that’s it.
Source: nationaalarchief.nl / Walter Blum - Spaarnestad Photo
You can find a lot of biscuits in the supermarket (Verkade, for example). There is also a wide variety of regional pastries and biscuits across the Netherlands. This is something fun to discover for yourself. Hint: go to local bakeries.
The stroopwafel is an attraction in itself. But it is heavily misunderstood, and the main reason is social media — visitors are lured into buying fancy packaged versions when they should be looking for the simple ones. The fresh ones you can buy at almost every food market in the Netherlands.
But there are so many other biscuits to discover. I would like to make a case for the gevulde koek. It is a large, almond-filled biscuit. For these, you absolutely have to go to a bakery. The outside edges are slightly crisp and the filling is sweet and soft.
4: Hagelslag at breakfast: Vlokken, muisjes and more
On weekdays breakfast can be very practical (just a slice of bread with a basic topping or yoghurt with cereal – all quick quick), but at weekends, Dutch people make breakfast a feast. The table fills up, and so does the time spent around it. Everything that can go on a slice of bread (in Dutch: boterham) will be put out. And mind you, that’s a lot.
Boterham!
It all starts with cheese, naturally. What would we do without it? Then eggs, meats like ham and smeerleverworst, peanut butter (we call it pindakaas, which literally means peanut cheese), and jams. And then the sweet things, which is where it gets properly Dutch: appelstroop5, and hagelslag6 in all its forms (vruchtenhagel, muisjes, vlokken, chocolate hagelslag).
Anise, chocolate or fruit hagelslag
Hagelslag is the collective term for sprinkles, a very Dutch topping for bread. There are multiple variations. The fruity ones (vruchtenhagel) are bright, sweet and coloured — they taste more or less like candy hearts. Then there are muisjes (small mice, literally), made of anise. The coloured ones (pink, blue, purple or orange, always paired with white) are traditionally scattered over beschuit (a sort of rusk) to celebrate a new baby, but there are also plain white ones, or even gestampte, crushed to a fine powder.
Chocolate hagelslag and vlokken are both chocolate sprinkles. Vlokken are larger flakes, made from cacao or a lower-cocoa blend, while chocoladehagelslag must, by law, contain at least 32% cacao.
You would expect only children to go wild over hagelslag, but grown-ups are equally fond of it. Some brands offer flavours aimed at adults: coffee, or extra bitter. My father is a huge fan. He likes to refer to a white slice of bread with a thick layer of creamy butter and chocolate hagelslag as his own special cake.
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5: More slices of bread for lunch
After breakfast, we are still not done with bread. Dutch lunch consists mostly of bread too. The Netherlands has a very modest and Calvinist lunch culture. It is cheap, it is quick and very practical. A lot of Dutch people bring a container filled with sandwiches to school7 or work. Cheese obviously, but also peanut butter, meats and jam. Hagelslag is not such a good idea as it gets mushy on prepared sandwiches.
That container with bread could look something like this (Video is in Dutch):
The offering in cafeterias is not that different — mainly bread, accompanied by soup, fried snacks and sometimes salads. Or people go for a lunchtime walk, bring their own bread, or pick up a broodje — a filled bread roll — on the go.
6: Pancakes for dinner
Pancakes are not particularly Dutch in themselves. But the way they are eaten certainly is. In the Netherlands, pancakes are served as an evening meal by families with children, which makes sense, but also by adults dining together.
And they come in stacks. First, a decent pile is made (the first one always goes wrong) and kept warm on a plate set over a pan of boiling water. My grandmother made the best ones ever, of course.
The pancake with bacon is a favourite, as is the one with cheese or apple. Syrup goes on top. Over the bacon too.
At many nature reserves across the Netherlands, you will find a pannenkoekenhuis — a pancake house. A Sunday walk with the family calls for pancakes afterwards.
A miniature version of the pancake is the poffertje. These are available as a sweet snack at village fairs, funfairs, festivals and at dedicated poffertjes stalls. They come topped with a generous amount of butter and icing sugar.
7: Gourmetten during the Holidays
Like many other countries, we do serve some traditional roasts at Christmas, like rollade and sometimes turkey. But the most popular tradition during the holidays in the Netherlands is gourmetten. It sounds fancy, but it’s nothing more than cooking together with tiny pans.
It isn’t a Dutch invention, by the way. Two Dutchmen borrowed the idea from Switzerland at the end of the 1970s. It was part of a broader effort to promote meat consumption in the Netherlands. At first, it became a competitor to another popular Swiss classic: cheese fondue. Eventually, gourmetten became the clear favourite in our country.
As a child, I was a big fan. Not necessarily at Christmas, but for my birthday, just to have dinner with friends. A very grown-up thing to do.
Me (the pale one), my brother and a friend at a Gourmetten dinner party. Photo by my dad.
I think it’s strange when adults take gourmetten seriously — it’s kind of silly to use those tiny pans to prepare mediocre food. Of course, you can go wild with it, or you can stick to making pancakes or melting a lot of cheese.
Source: a screenshot of the Lidl Christmas brochure.
Around the holidays, the special gourmet platters will appear in supermarkets, mostly focused on meat, but there are options with small pieces of fish or vegetarian snacks too. Supermarket magazines like the Allerhande from Albert Heijn publish special recipes for the gourmetten gathering — recipes for tiny pans, which is exactly as silly as it sounds. During gourmetten, people tend to eat about three times the usual portion of meat. So from a promotional point of view, it has been very successful.
8: You fancy a toetje?
A dessert in Dutch is called toetje. As a dairy-rich country, it is quite common to have a toetje after dinner. This is mostly vla8 — a custard-like dairy product, available in flavours like vanilla, chocolate, caramel and raspberry — but also yoghurt with fruit. We like to combine things here: chocolate and vanilla vla, for instance (also available as dubbelvla), or yoghurt with vanilla vla, which is called vla vlip. On special occasions, the toetje is a pudding.
And on very special occasions, we call the toetje a dessert, and something home-made will be served, or ice cream. Like the holiday classic: Viennetta.
9: Birthdays
There is this image9 of Dutch birthday parties where grown-up people are gathered in a seating circle, or standing in several corners of the house (you should be in the kitchen, by the way), eating a variety of snacks. Almost never is dinner involved. It is just too much hassle for the practical Dutch.
When I was a secondary school pupil, my mother used to point out that I should pop in to watch my grandparents when they were preparing for a birthday party. (My grandparents lived around the corner from my secondary school, and I would regularly stop by for lunch or a biscuit.)
A birthday was quite an operation. First, the planning: which friends, family, acquaintances and neighbours were welcome at which time (morning, afternoon, before dinner, after dinner)? Then the seating circle, but more importantly: how to fill the circle. Who sits next to whom? Uncle Jan could go next to neighbour Gerrit, but the other Uncle Jan was better off in the far corner because of his deaf ear.
My grandmother in the kitchen. Photo by me.
Then the food. Cake, of course — several kinds. Apple cake without fail, and at least one home-made option. (The cream cheese cake with cherries from a jar was very fashionable in the nineties.)
The pièce de résistance, though, was the nibbles. This was something I could help with. Cubes of cheese topped with a pickled onion, slices of sausage, tinned asparagus rolled in a slice of ham, small cups of salmon salad, exotic olives with feta from a jar, and devilled eggs. And that was not all — there was also a baking tray. A sheet of baked puff pastry topped with a modest smear of tomato sauce and generous slices of bacon and cheese, finished with paprika powder and dried parsley.
Then a salad, already dressed — often a meat salad10 from a tub, topped with slices of boiled egg, gherkins, and little dollops of ketchup and mayonnaise. Festive!
There was one flaw in the planning: there was always an acquaintance of my grandparents who somehow invited herself to dinner. “Oh, is it six o’clock already? Time flies. Yes, I would love to join for dinner, if it’s not too much trouble.” She had, of course, made her entrance around five. The best part was watching my grandmother’s face when the lady arrived.
Old school Dutch snacks. From a 1970’s Albert Heijn cookbook.
This is the classic picture, but even today you should not expect anything too adventurous at a Dutch birthday. There is often a sequence to what you are served, though it depends on how late you arrive. Expect coffee or tea with cake first, followed by nibbles alongside a drink.
The Dutch tapas, aperitivo and apéro aesthetic
Supermarkets (there they are again) are clever at capitalising on this with a range of ready-made nibbles, often in combination deals (two tubs for five euros). It saves the hosts a great deal of time. Convenient, certainly, but not always particularly good.
The retro boards of cheese and sausage slices are rarely seen any more and have been replaced by charcuterie and a selection of cheeses. The tapas, aperitivo and apéro aesthetic11 — but still sourced from Albert Heijn. With it you can always expect bread, toast, some nuts, olives, and perhaps something slightly unusual like a stuffed date. Quality can vary. Many Dutch people remain devoted to the eternal convenience of the supermarket, but with a bit of luck you will end up at the home of someone discerning who has made the effort to visit a proper cheesemonger.
There is almost never quite enough, and yet the hosts always end up with leftovers. Especially tubs of supermarket olives.
You have probably heard of bitterballen. They are the ultimate classic amongst Dutch bar snacks. You can order them at almost every café. They taste more or less the same as kroketten, a popular snack or lunch dish (on a broodje, obviously). Be warned: they can be very hot straight from the frying pan.
There is more deep-fried on offer. You can choose between spring rolls (including the notorious vlammetjes), cheese snacks, mini-frikandellen or mini meatballs. A plate with a deep-fried mix is officially called bittergarnituur and you will find it listed accordingly on bar menus. The ‘humorous’ nickname for this platter is brown fruit — bruin fruit. 😐
A lot of people who leave the Netherlands for a long time tend to name bitterballen as the thing they miss most about Dutch food. Well, this says enough about our cuisine. People miss a fried ball filled with meat ragout. Not a stew, not a soup, not a biscuit, not a regional dish. During my longer travels, I mostly missed herring and drop.
Me holding my favourite snack.
11: Restaurant culture in the Netherlands
You would not call it a rich restaurant culture, but eating out is something we do with reasonable regularity. This ranges from a simple bite — a hapje eten — to a thoroughly extravagant dinner out. And there is a lot in between.
Restaurants with a foreign cuisine are often referred to as the Greek, the Chinese, the Thai, the Mexican, the Indian, the Turk, the Japanese. As if they were people. We are going to eat at the Indian.
Not long ago, my brother invited me to eat at the Libyan. A brand new restaurant in Almelo. I was excited, as I had no idea what Libyan food would look like. I still do not know, because the Libyan turned out to be Lebanese.
This does not apply to pizza places. Those are referred to by name: Capri, Colosseum, Napoli, Spuntino, and Mama Mia. We go to pizza places often — it is quick and simple. No fuss. Eetcafés are also referred to by name; these are the places for a simple dish like satay with chips at the bar. They are a dying breed, though.
The Dutch restaurant scene is better than its reputation. Which, admittedly, is not a very high bar. In larger cities, but also in many places beyond them, there are plenty of good restaurants — from comfy, simple spots for a hapje eten to Michelin-starred restaurants. And you could always ask a local. They will know exactly where to go, and they will have an opinion about it.
Photos taken (by me) at multiple restaurants in the Netherlands.
Stroopwafels are originally from Gouda, in the province of South Holland. It is easy to reach by train from Rotterdam or Den Haag. And yes, it is the same place as the cheese. It also has a very nice historic centre, and the surrounding area has a lot to offer — the Reeuwijkse Plassen and Oudewater, for example.
What wine in the Netherlands? There are, surprisingly, plenty of wineries across the Netherlands worth visiting:
The southern part of Limburg is particularly known for its wines. You can follow several Routes des Vins — walks of between 10 and 12 kilometres — through the area.
The Betuwe, in Gelderland, is known for its fruit and produces some wines too. Several vineyards welcome visitors for tastings.
The beautiful area around Nijmegen is also known for Dutch wines. You can even spend the night at one of the wineries.
Planning a cycling or walking trip? Make sure you stop at a bakery in every village or town you pass through and try one of the local specialities! Find some excellent route tips here:
As I close every Direct Dutch post with an uitsmijter12. This time it will be literal — not with a recipe, but with a report on the Dutch Championship of baking uitsmijters.
Albert Heijn is probably the most well-known (and most widely represented across the country), but you can also turn to Jumbo, Dirk van den Broek and Plus. German supermarkets Lidl and Aldi are also wildly popular in the Netherlands. The reason is easy to guess: they are cheap.
A few months ago, I shared this article by Tomek Moss as a note. It is a fun take on Dutch supermarkets, though a slightly skewed one — it is mainly a comparison with British supermarkets.
During the Covid pandemic, flash grocery delivery became popular in the Netherlands. Companies like Gorillas, Getir and Flink were all over Amsterdam and other larger cities. Today, only Flink remains, though Thuisbezorgd and Uber Eats now offer the service too.
Appelstroop is sometimes called apple butter, but that name makes no sense. It is a thick, concentrated syrup, dark and at once sweet and sour, used on bread but also a surprisingly good match for aged Dutch cheese.
School children tend to throw away those soggy sandwiches — they inevitably end up that way — and head to the supermarket for a can of energy drink and a sausage roll.
This meat salad is called huzarensalade and is known in other countries mainly as Russian salad. It can be very good when freshly made. The one from a tub is horrible.
It is a Dutch dish of fried eggs with ham and/or cheese, but also the word for a bouncer at a club, or figuratively a punchy closing remark — often a joke or a clever statement.
Two memories of Universiteit Twente - hagelpuur (adult men putting sprinkles on bread - we call it fairy bread in Australia and it’s for kids’ birthday parties) and the ubiquitous home deep fryer to make frites covered with mayonnaise and curry gewurz. Disgusting but somehow moreish.
A lot of this — the nibbles, the sandwiches, the desserts — sounds like what you would find in the US in the 1960s and early 1970s. Except we ate more meats here, back then.
The grocery shopping video was interesting. I would never purchase cut up produce in a plastic bag! I can buy locally grown, organic fruit and veg at my local market. Does it really take so much time to cut it up? No. Ditto prepared sauces, except for tomato sauce.
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Two memories of Universiteit Twente - hagelpuur (adult men putting sprinkles on bread - we call it fairy bread in Australia and it’s for kids’ birthday parties) and the ubiquitous home deep fryer to make frites covered with mayonnaise and curry gewurz. Disgusting but somehow moreish.
A lot of this — the nibbles, the sandwiches, the desserts — sounds like what you would find in the US in the 1960s and early 1970s. Except we ate more meats here, back then.
The grocery shopping video was interesting. I would never purchase cut up produce in a plastic bag! I can buy locally grown, organic fruit and veg at my local market. Does it really take so much time to cut it up? No. Ditto prepared sauces, except for tomato sauce.