In the past week the heat has been slowly ramping up and it will continue to go up the next couple weeks. So staying home and inside is actually not that bad. One thing that I do have noticed is that we are going through our supply of food slightly faster than normal. It seems like I am quite easily distracted by snacks. Luckily, in the past week we had an opportunity to order some items from a Dutch food import shop. So today I am going to share some typical Dutch food and snacks. Of course I will go through the not so famous examples, because everyone knows about Dutch pancakes, raw herring and liquorice.
The most important part of a Dutch diet is bread. According to statista we are eating 60kg of bread on average per year, that is more than double the US average https://www.world-grain.com/articles/8702-three-bread-trends-shaping-american-diets. This also leads to aisles full of products that you can put on your bread in the Netherlands. One of our favorite products is hagelslag (sprinklers) and we do not kid around with them. There is a large variety of hagelslag, from sweet to sweeter to sweetest. Mainstream sprinklers are chocolate sprinklers and you can find them anywhere. Whenever you find that chocolate is not really your flavor you can just switch to fruity flavors (who am I kidding, there is never enough chocolate).
Another option when you do not really know what chocolate to pick exactly is the mix, where we have just mixed different flavors of chocolate.
We have three flavors of chocolate sprinklers and two fruit flavors, and now you may think that is it. But, luckily we are not even halfway through all sort of sprinklers. If the sprinklers are to small for you, there is always the xxl hagelslag. And of course this one also comes in many flavors.
If you do not like these 3D shapes of hagelslag you can always go for vlokken (flakes). Vlokken are, well, flakes of chocolate.
All these types of sprinkles come from the invention of the anise sprinklers that were created in the early 20th century. Dutch tradition dictates that you secretly place a tray of biscuits with ‘muisjes’ (anice sprinklers) in the common area of your workplace if you are expecting a baby. Then the other people will try to guess who placed it there. Another quirk of the muisjes is that you usually pick the color of the gender of you baby, pink for a girl and blue for a boy.
And then finally we end up with the luxurious line of sprinklers which have been created in last couple years. If you are feeling that the normal chocolate is too sweet and therefore for children, we have the perfect type for you. You can always enjoy a more adult flavor of extra pure chocolate. This means that you get your hagelslag with a higher concentration of cacao or a little bit of coffee flavor.
So by now I hope you are convinced that hagelslag are a very good idea and that you can create an endless variety. That is it for today and I will be picking up my new box of hagelslag that just came in!
For the song of the day I picked shipwrecked by Alestorm as we are all shipwrecked at home.