🇳🇱 Traditional & Easy Dutch Recipes 🇳🇱

These easy Dutch recipes at home are the dishes Dutch families actually eat on a weeknight, not the tourist version with a stroopwafel on top. Every recipe is written in both cups and grams, so you can cook from an American kitchen without converting anything. Where an ingredient is hard to find in the US, the recipe tells you what to use instead: rookworst, the smoked sausage that goes with every stamppot, swaps well for kielbasa. New to Dutch food? Start with hutspot, a mash of potatoes, carrots and onion that's on the table in 30 minutes.

Growing up in Brabant, Sunday dinner meant something that had been simmering
since morning, the kind of food nobody had to explain, because everyone
already knew what it tasted like. That's the food I still cook most:
hutspot, stamppot, erwtensoep, the dishes that showed up at every family
table I ever sat at, made the way they're supposed to be made, but tested
until they work in a normal weeknight kitchen too.

Dutch food isn't only the old classics, though. It's also orange treats on
King's Day, raclette nights in winter that have become just as much a Dutch
tradition as a Swiss one, and the Indonesian and Surinamese dishes that are
everyday cooking here, even if the rest of the world hasn't caught up yet.
Everything on this page is developed, cooked, and tested in my own kitchen
before it goes up.

Where to start: classic Dutch recipes

Weeknight dinners. Stamppot is the backbone of Dutch winter cooking: potatoes mashed together with a vegetable. Begin with classic hutspot with carrots and onion, then try boerenkool stamppot with meatballs and gravy. For a Sunday pot that cooks itself, my grandmother's hachee, a beef and onion stew, goes in the slow cooker.

Soups. Erwtensoep, thick Dutch split pea soup with ham hocks, should be thick enough for a spoon to almost stand up. Want something faster? Groninger mustard soup with leek and bacon takes 30 minutes.

Snack bar favorites. Homemade kroketten with beef ragout, bitterballen with three fillings and kibbeling, battered fish nuggets from the market stall.

Pancakes and sweets. Dutch pannenkoeken from scratch, poffertjes with butter and powdered sugar, oliebollen for New Year's Eve and appelflappen, Dutch apple turnovers.

FAQ

What is stamppot? Mashed potatoes with a vegetable stirred through, such as carrots and onion (hutspot), kale (boerenkool) or endive (andijvie). It's a Dutch cold-weather dinner, usually served with smoked sausage.
What can I use instead of rookworst? Kielbasa is the closest match in US grocery stores.
Do I need a kitchen scale? No. Every recipe on this site is written in both US cups and metric grams.
When do Dutch people eat oliebollen? On New Year's Eve. From late December you'll see oliebollen stands everywhere in the Netherlands.