When you enter a Dutch supermarket, you will be amazed at the number of sweets that can be found on the shelves. The Dutch have a real sweet tooth and love their favorite Dutch sweets. Did you know that the Dutch also have traditional sweets that are sold or known almost nowhere else in the world? In this blog, we take you along to some traditional Dutch candy sweets!
Drop
Drop (liquorice) is a typically Dutch product and comes in every imaginable shape and flavor. There is sweet liquorice, salty liquorice, sugar-free liquorice, English liquorice, hard liquorice, soft liquorice. If you can’t think of anything else, it probably exists. Although liquorice was once made for medicinal purposes, liquorice is now perhaps the most widely eaten sweet in the country. The flavor is hard to explain but liquorice is only liquorice if it contains the extract of the liquorice root. Next to the salt of sal ammonia, this is the most characteristic ingredient of liquorice and therefore for its flavor. There are many different brands of liquorice, so the Dutch eat 32 million kilos of liquorice per year.
Pepernoten
Typical Dutch sweets that are only produced and eaten in the Netherlands are the well-known “pepernoten”. These Dutch mini cookies are baked during the time of Sinterklaas (the Dutch Santa Claus) and are actually mainly sold and eaten during the winter period. Every Dutch family has grown up with the pepernoten and chances are that you, when you grew up in the Netherlands, used to bake pepernoten yourself with your parents or grandparents. The flavor of pepernoten is produced by the many spices used in the dough, namely: cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, ginger powder, cardamom and white pepper. This gives the miniature biscuits a spicy sweet flavor that the Dutch people love.
Want to try some Dutch sweets yourself?
Dutch candy is really something different and many of the flavors are not comparable to anything else in this world. Therefore it’s really worthwhile to order some Dutch candy sometime! When you are abroad, you will notice that it is quite hard to get the Dutch sweets. With The Dutch Expat Shop, that is no longer a problem. This online Dutch supermarket sells countless types of Dutch sweets and many other Dutch and Belgian products. Are you looking for something typically Dutch? No doubt you will find it here. The advantage is that the Dutch Expat Shop delivers all over the world, so your location is never a problem at all.