Dutch Cuisine - Fast Food

Fast Food

The Dutch have their own types of fast food, sold at a snackbar. A Dutch fast food meal often consists of a portion of french fries (called patat or friet), with a sauce and a meat product. The most common sauce to accompany French fries is fritessaus (a low fat mayonnaise subtitute), while others can be ketchup or spiced ketchup, peanut sauce, a pickle relish of chopped vegetables and spices, such as piccalilli or joppiesaus. Sometimes the French fries are served with a combinations of different sauces, most famously speciaal (lit. "special"), which consists of mayonnaise with spiced ketchup and chopped onions, and oorlog (lit. "war"), with both mayonnaise and peanut sauce which is sometimes topped with chopped raw onions. A quite new addition to Dutch fast food is the kapsalon (lit. "barbershop"), consisting of either shawarma or döner, and with fries, salad, cheese and various sauces, all put into one take-out box. It was given its name because the original (Patat) Kapsalon, which was a lunch meal as ordered by the owner of a barbershop in Rotterdam.

Snacks made with meat are usually deep fried, this includes the frikandel (a skinless minced meat sausage), and the kroket (a meat ragout roll covered in breadcrumbs).

A smaller, spherical version of the kroket, the bitterbal, is often served with mustard as a snack in bars but also at official receptions. Regional snacks include the eierbal (a combination of egg and ragout) in the north and east of the country, and the slightly spiced Brabants worstenbrood or saucijzenbroodjes, slightly spiced sausage meat baked in pastry (similar to the English sausage roll).

Other snacks are the Indonesian-inspired bamihap or bamischijf (a disk shaped mie goreng patty which is covered with breadcrumbs and deep-fried), nasibal (similar to the bamischijf, but then ball shaped and filled with nasi goreng), and kaassoufflé (lit. "cheese soufflé" but in fact a deep fried puff pastry envelope with a small amount of cheese in the center, popular amongst vegetarians).

Almost all fast food meat products are factory made from cheap cuts of meat and supplied to the snackbar frozen. French fries need to be deep fried twice at different temperatures. In most cases the fries are supplied frozen and pre-fried, only needing to be fried once at the snack bar. Some snackbars offer locally prepared snacks, e.g. sliced pork belly covered in breadcrumbs.

Fish is also sold as fast food at the so-called viskraam, most often street stalls and market stalls that specialise only in prepared fish products. The Netherlands is famous for its raw herring, optionally served together with chopped raw onions and gherkins, and which is eaten by lifting the herring high up into the air by its tail, and then biting into it upwards. Raw herring is also commonly sold in a soft white bun. Other popular fish snacks are kibbeling (deep-fried nugget-sized chunks of cod), lekkerbek (deep-fried cod, similar to the British Fish and chips, but delicately spiced and with a more tempura-like batter), gerookte paling (smoked eel), and rolmops.