Breakfast craziness

- Dutch people are weird, same as their food. Who the hell is eating chocolate sprinkles on bread for the breakfast?! In my country we're using these for decorating cakes and desserts - said one of the students during our coffee break between one of our first lessons.

- Actually... it is weird, but I like it - I shocked my company - I even have a sandwich with hagelslag today for lunch.
- Really? How does it look? How do you eat that... Show me your sandwich! - other student got intrigued.
So this is what happened, I had to take out my lunch, open my sandwich and show it to everyone to satisfy their thirst for knowledge.

The famous hagelslag in its traditional form

That's true, dutch breakfast can be surprising. Especially if someone's a sweet tooth. In almost every single house in Holland you can find a jar of peanut butter, nutella and a box of hagelslag, the chocolate sprinkles I mentioned above. It's super popular among the children and even adults, and the best proof for that you'll find in supermarket. There are many sorts and tastes of these little chocolate-sandwich-candies: dark chocolate, milk chocolate, white chocolate, with a fruity or anise taste, small sprinkles, bigger strings... in winter you can even find a special edition: spekulaas taste (cookies with gingerbread spieces).

The most dutch product ever CHEESE: young - soft and creamy or old - a bit harder and way more flavoury

Thre's basicly one rule: whatever Dutch people eat for breakfast, it has to be on bread. Cheese, ham, jam, pate, hagelslag... even fried or scramble eggs are served on a break as a sandwich. The citizens of this counrty are crazy about their bread, which is a perfect explenation for their amazing bakaries. But what if suddenly someone has a completly irrational idea and wishes to eat something else that the bread? Well, they have for example sweet buns, like krentenbollen with raisins. They are not too sweet, since they are made of yeast dough. They eat it also with butter, just like a normal buns. An extraoridinary morning dish, perfect on Sunday morning and loved but the Dutch could be poffertjes, a tiny little pancakes. They are delicious, puffy and served with a lot of powder sugar or supersweet sirop stroop. There are also fruity versions of this sirop and I think the most popular one is sweet and sour appelstroop. Lekker!

Mini krentenbollen, meaning the yeast dough buns with raisins

A slice of bread with appelstroop and with hagelslag

And what did you have for breakfast today? :)