Stroopwafel

Now's your chance to also taste the other local delicacy, stroopwafel. A wafer-and-syrup pastry sandwich served atop a steaming cup of coffee, stroopwafel slowly transforms into a warm, soft treat.

A waffle is the action, or inaction, of making up your mind. In Holland, when you slice a round one in half, and glue fill it back whole again, with warm caramel, it becomes a vice. And clamped Between the Cartwheels of the stroopwafel, I was the syrup, holding them together, and apart.

[B]akers in Gouda […] were perfecting their well-known diamond patterned stroopwafels ("syrup waffles") which were handmade in Gouda for more than three centuries, lore says, as a way to make use of sugar refinery by-products. Stroopwafels, in spite of their name, are not waffles as North Americans know them. Goudse stroopwafels are another form of cookie, a buttery yeasted iron-baked cookie-dough wafer sliced in half and filled with a unique warm toffee-like mixture of molasses or treacle, sugar, butter, vanilla, and cinnamon, then joined together again.

The Dutch work hard to satisfy their sweet tooth. The quintessential Dutch treat is a stroopwafel—syrup sandwiched between two crispy, thin waffles. Prepackaged stacks of stroopwafels are sold in grocery stores, but a fresh, hot stroopwafel from a street vendor is a revelation.

He paused while the waitress deposited his coffee and stroopwafel on the table. He picked up the stroopwafel and put it on top of the coffee cup, like a lid.

Want to support the DutchNews podcast and keep up our stocks of stroopwafels and orange tompouces?