Finding ingredients in the Netherlands

The Dutch like to bake from mixes. Not so much from scratch. Therefore, finding ingredients like good quality flour for cookies can be a bit of a challenge. Sugar isn't as much of a problem because the Dutch love any coffee accoutrement, so there are many kinds of sugar at our local AH grocery store. Powdered sugar, however, is another story entirely. And forget about finding chocolate chips here!

Meredith and I checked out Eindhoven's Genneper Parken watermolen (water mill) to see what they had for baking. They claim to have over 400 kinds of flour! Well... not exactly. They've got 2 kinds of plain white flour: cookie flour (zeeuwse bloem) and bread flour (wit brood bloem). Many other kinds of flour blends exist like donker volkoren (I think this is a whole wheat flour blend) and mais bloem (corn flour- NOT corn meal). Most of the 'flours' are for baking a certain thing like cherry bread or peach bread. Of course you have to add the cherries or peaches!

The bunch of stuff we came home with:

Well, not the bag of Hershey's chocolate chips of course- they are only there for comparison's sake- we did find chocolate chips but they are the mini kind- "Bakvaste Chocoladedrupples". The good news is they are made from Callebaut chocolate (the best chocolate- not that I've tried it- doodle dogs are not allowed) the bad news is that little bag was 4.95 euros (about $7.00!).

And we found "Poeder suiker" which is real powdered sugar- not the bizarre flaky stuff they sell at AH (the tube container in the upper right corner of the photo above) that blows away when you breathe on it. We also found real rolled oats! Havermout is the Dutch word for oats, but the AH version is more like the quaker quick oats you find in the states.