plate 13: the netherlands

I’m confused. Is it Holland or The Netherlands? I’m a little worried I don’t know – surely I learned this in primary school. For those of you who are as clueless as me, the official tourism site – www.visitholland.nl - clarified that technically it’s incorrect for the country to be called “Holland”. This is because North and South Holland in the western Netherlands are only two of the country’s 12 provinces. Weird then that the website is “Visit Holland” and not “Visit The Netherlands”. Anyway, I’ll stop stewing on this and just focus on the food.

The last few weeks have been savoury dining, so it was time for some sweets in the Destination Degustation journey. It was also the weekend before Passover and, since I observe this holiday that requires refraining from yeast, flour and wheat products for eight (torturous) days, I needed to get my flour fix.

I’d heard of poffertjes (“POF-ert-jez”) before. Reading up about these mini Dutch pancakes I found that they’re often served at fairs, sold on the streets from portable stands called poffertjeskraam and eaten in homes for anything from breakfast to dessert.

Making the mixture was really easy – dissolve yeast in milk, add it to a bowl with buckwheat flour, plain flour, eggs, sugar and milk then let it rest for an hour.

The cooking part wasn’t so easy. Unfortunately my kitchen cupboard doesn’t feature one of those poffertjes pans that allow you to cook about 15-20 poffertjes at once so that they come out looking totally uniform. I just had my large frying pan, which according to the recipe would do me just fine. It kind of did, but it was fiddly.

I had to negotiate placing teaspoonfuls of the mixture into my sizzling pan while carefully watching them cook, but the poffertjes were ready so quickly that by the time I’d put the second spoonful in, the first spoonful had to be flipped over. Needless to say there were a few burned ones in the batch. Plus, the mixture I made was enough to produce what looked to me like a thousand poffertjes (it really was about 60), so standing over the hot stove for 20 minutes caused profuse and uncomfortable sweating.

While the end result wasn’t disastrous – they sure looked cute, especially with a sprinkling of icing sugar – it wasn’t anything to write home about. Sadly this week was a bit, well, meh. On their own the poffertjes tasted a bit bland, which was interesting given everything I’d read about them said they should taste nice and sweet. With a smothering of butter and a dollop of sweet berry jam, they tasted OK, surprisingly even a little addictive (not ideal when they constituted our dinner). Maybe it was the recipe, maybe it was my cooking, maybe it was because they weren’t piping hot from the pan … I don’t know, they just didn’t excite me. For all those poffertjes lovers out there, I’m sorry.