Spekdikkens: or, Dutch meat cookies!

Waffle irons do strange things to me.

Spekdikken(s) 166 g light brown sugar(¾ cup) 17 centiliters (¾ cup) water 66 g butter or margarine (generous 5 tablespoons) 250 g rye flour (2¼ cups) 83 g all-purpose flour (¾ cup) 1 teaspoon salt 1 egg 116 g sliced breakfast bacon (4 ounces), into 1" or 2" pieces 1 hectogram (3½ ounces) dry Drentse sausage in thin slices* 1 tsp ground anise seed, if desired In a large saucepan, boil the sugar and water to dissolve, stirring constantly. Cook until a spoonful drizzled over a cold plate is about as thick as pancake syrup when it cools off. Remove from heat and stir the butter into the syrup until it melts. Allow to cool completely. Add rye, flour, salt, egg, and anise seeds (if using). Whisk everything into a batter (it will be lumpy). Cover the pot tightly and let it sit overnight in a cool place.† It will thicken overnight. The next day, add water to the dough until it is a little thicker than pancake batter. Stir in only a spoonful water at a time at first to prevent having to chase down hard lumps in the bowl. You can add the water more freely as the dough softens. Heat up a wafer iron. When ready, brush it with melted shortening. (It really does work better than cooking spray.) Drop a spoonful of batter onto the iron. Use a knife to push the batter off the spoon. Add a slice of bacon and two slices of sausage, close the iron and cook for about half a minute. The bacon does not become crispy, but remains limp. *If you, like me, can't get Drentse sausage, pick a dried, cured sausage that is ready to eat without further cooking. †While the batter may have enough sugar and spices in it to keep the egg from going off when left out overnight, I decided to play it safe and refrigerate it. To soften it the next day, I microwaved the batter on the microwave's lowest power setting. I stopped and stirred every 15 seconds until the batter was back to room temperature. Note: This batter also makes very good cookies. Add cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, and similar spices when you mix it. Let it sit overnight as directed, but do not thin it out with additional water the next day. Roll the dough into small balls, and pat each one about ¼" thin between your hands. Place on a greased cookie sheet and bake until golden around the edges. They are better the second day- the spices get stronger overnight. Note 2: If you're not into the whole meat-and-cookies business, these make very good spiced wafers if you add ginger, cinnamon, allspice, nutmeg, etc. They come out very crisp. After baking them, let them rest overnight for the spice flavors to strengthen. Source: Landleven Magazine via Google Translate

Today, we are once again getting recipes through Google Translate. Because I hate having a waffle iron that only exists for one recipe, I went online and asked what other things I could make on it. Today's recipe, which comes from the Netherlands, was my favorite suggestion. 

Unfortunately, the person simply said "You could try spekdikkens" without saying what they were, much less giving a recipe. So I looked them up. The images I saw were quite mystifying to my uneducated American self. I couldn't imagine how wafers with sausage and bacon on them would taste, so I had to make them.

Speaking of Google Translate, here's how to pronounce today's recipe!

I would love to know what occasions spekdikkens are for. Do people only make them on special holidays? Are they a once-a-week treat that people make at home? Do people make spekdikkens any time they get together with friends or relatives? Or, are they something people make to keep on hand? I'd love to know. If anyone from the Netherlands happens to drop by, do share!

Moving back to this side of the Atlantic, a lot of my friends had reservations about spekdikkens. One said "That looks like a heart attack."

I answered "Well, it's from northern Europe. It gets cold up there."

The hardest part of making spekdikkens wasn't getting the waffle iron, which (as previously mentioned) I simply found on Ebay. No, the hardest part of this entire recipe was finding rye flour. When I checked the baking aisle, the shelf space for the rye was empty. I thought I would simply wait for it come back into stock, that never happened. (Or maybe they got a steady series of shipments over the next few months, and people snatched them off the shelves. Is there some baking fad involving rye that I haven't heard of?)

After several weeks with no rye, I went to the foofy, fancy grocery store to see if they had rye flour. After all, the sort of people who buy organic quail eggs are more likely to dabble in artisan baking than the rest of us. Not only did the store have no rye, they didn't even have any vacant shelf space where the rye should have been. And so, like nearly every time I go into upscale supermarkets, I left empty-handed. At this point, I wondered if there's a rye shortage going on. However, the only news articles I found about rye shortages were from a few years ago.

Anyway, since I'm on greeting terms with most of the late-night stockers at the supermarket, one of them got out her phone and checked when the next shipment of rye was due in. They even offered to put a bag of it on hold for me. That didn't quite work out. I ended up calling my mother and asking her if the stores had any rye flour where she is. And so, she bought a bag and saved it until we next met.

This bowl contains precious rarities.

Having finally gotten the rye flour, we finally had all the ingredients we needed. And so, we begin by boiling a sugar syrup. At first I thought we were supposed to just heat the water until the sugar dissolves. And so, I got out a tiny pot (we're quartering the recipe) and put it on the stove. The sugar was dissolved in about a minute.

After I turned off the burner, I wondered if I understood the directions correctly. After all, today's recipe was translated by a computer which has never baked anything in its entire existence. Our instructions were vague, but it seemed that we are supposed to dump the flour into the boiling-hot syrup. While I've seen a few recipes like that (choux paste comes to mind), usually adding flour to a boiling pot results in miserable gelatinous clumps of failure. And so, I decided to find some videos of people making these things. This would prove more difficult than I thought.

If you poke around YouTube, you can find plenty of videos for spekdikken. Many of them show people lovingly placing batter and meat onto hot waffle irons. A lot of spekdikken-making videos are filmed at various events in big rent-a-halls, and show long rows of people sitting at folding tables happily plonking meat and batter onto hot waffle irons. (I'd love to know how they manage to run 20 waffle irons without popping a circuit breaker.) So I guess spekdikkens are more of a special-occasion food than an everyday one. Also, people generally seem really cheerful when they're making them, as if spekdikkens are a happy event unto themselves.

I did eventually find a video of someone who started at the beginning of the recipe instead of skipping to the fun part that involves a waffle iron and meat. It turns out I was correct in surmising that we need our syrup to cool off before adding the flour. Also, his syrup wasn't some watery fluid like I had on my hands. Instead, his was almost (but not quite) thick enough to pour onto pancakes. And so, I put our syrup back on the stove. As our sugar water heated up, it reminded me that it needs a lot of saucepan space to boil up. I turned off the stove and got out a bigger pot.

Ahhh, that's better.

I think my annoying habit of using undersized pots and baking pans comes from my many years without a dishwasher. I have to remind myself that I no longer need to worry about cleaning each pan one at a time.

After boiling this until it looked right to my uneducated eyes, I set it aside to cool. Naturally, I tasted the syrup as soon as I turned the burner off (using a tiny spoon so our sample cooled off, of course). It was better than any pancake syrup I have ever purchased. Heck, I liked it even more than molasses (which, as I have sometimes mentioned, I pour onto waffles instead of maple syrup.) If I take nothing else from today's recipe, I am definitely making this syrup again. 

The rest of the recipe seemed pretty simple: dump everything into the syrup after it cools off and whisk it together. As our robo-translated instructions claimed, we had a "lumpy batter" which we are directed to leave overnight in a cool place. 

At this point, I sampled the batter and it was unexpectedly and incredibly good. I've never made cookies with rye, but I'd love to make something like this again. However, I was a bit leery about leaving the batter overnight because of the raw egg. Of course, I have eaten a lot of cookie dough and cake batter, but none of that was left at room temperature for several hours. And so, I decided to put the rye batter in the refrigerator. Maybe I was worrying too much, but I didn't want to create an inadvertent microbe nursery.

The next day, our batter had turned into a surprisingly hard clay. I figured the flour would absorb some of the water overnight. It was physically impossible to shove the beaters of an electric mixer into the dough. I ended up putting it into the microwave (at its very lowest power setting) to soften it.

Before we proceeded to have fun with meat, I wanted to see if this dough made good cookies. And so, I scooped some of the dough out and put it into the oven next to dinner. I didn't know if the dough would spread or not, so I flattened one cookie and left the other in a ball. 

Unfortunately, I forgot they were baking and left them in the oven for a bit too long. But if you trimmed away the overcooked edges, they were really good. They were crisp and unexpectedly light. I didn't think they'd rise at all, but they puffed up while they baked. Between the cookies and the pancake syrup, it appears that spekdikken is the kind of recipe that gives you even more recipes as you make it.

If we crack one of the cookies, we can see that it rose quite a bit. Take a look at all the little air bubbles in it.

And so, at long last, it was time for meat cookies! Although I found very few videos of people mixing spekdikkens together, there are a lot of videos that skip to the fun part where you start putting meat on a waffle iron. I'm sure everyone has their own recipe, but the batter looked about the same from one video to the next. We want something that looks like this:

RTV Noord

From a lot of experience, I knew that if I dumped a lot of water in this all at once, I would end up with hard lumps swimming in slurry. The trick with this is to gradually add the water at first, starting with so little water that it can't even form puddles on top. You want the water to disappear and leave a few soggy spots on the dough, which you disperse through the dough as you stir. (This will involve a lot more spoon-force than you're probably used to using on a bowl of dough.)

After doing this a few times, the dough will have softened enough to add the water more generously. Eventually, you end up with a batter that looks like this. Or at least, I think it's supposed to look like this. Like I said, I can't read Dutch and have nothing but a robo-translated recipe and some videos to go on.

With the batter ready, it was time to bring out the meat. 

I'm sure no one will be surprised that I don't have the means to order a "Drentse sausage" from over the Atlantic. However, I found homemade sausage from last year buried at the bottom of the chest freezer. My aunt and uncle gave them to everyone two Christmases ago, and I froze mine for a special occasion. As often happens with chest freezers, I forgot that it was there and it fell between the containers of leftovers and stayed hidden. The lesson here is don't save the nice food for a special occasion. Just eat it.

At any rate, when I undid the vacuum-packing plastic that encased it, the delicious smell of wood smoke filled the kitchen. I was so glad I got this out of the freezer for this recipe. I didn't want to put cheap meat into our homemade waffles (store-brand bacon notwithstanding).

I can't get over the sight of a meat-and-cookie-dough assembly line. I'd love to hear what everyday foods in America would provoke a similar mildly-dumbfounded reaction in this recipe's home country. Again, if anyone in the Netherlands happens to pop in, do share your thoughts!

I must be getting better at using this iron. On my first attempt, the batter came almost to the edge without oozing out.

After things started to smell toasty, opened the lid just a bit so I could have a peep. I saw that we were going to have some structural integrity problems with our spekdikkens. The bacon clung to the lid of the iron and ripped free of the waffle.

After some angry muttering and spatula-jabbing, we got everything involved in today's recipe to let go of the waffle iron. But the batter had shrunk away from the meat on all sides. Even if nothing had gotten stuck, our first-ever spekdikken would have fallen apart. And so it did.

Our next spekdikken also stuck to the iron, but at least the batter didn't pull away from the meat as it cooked. Things were slowly improving. By now, the kitchen smelled like a breakfast buffet.

After we made a few of these, it became obvious that the meat would stick to the iron no matter what we did. But we developed a working technique for getting spekdikken out of the waffle iron. First, we barely opened the iron enough to slide a spatula in there. Then we ran a spatula directly under the iron's lid to dislodge everything that needed dislodging. Having liberated the spekdikken on one side, we could open the iron and extract the meat cookie. But I should disclose that none of these were sturdy enough to stack or to carelessly drop onto a plate. 

Our spekdikkens' fragility could be the result of my inexperience. But I should note all the spekdikkens I saw in other people's pictures also looked like they could fall apart at any minute. So I think I got these right.

As for the taste: if you have ever slid your breakfast sausages across the plate into the puddle of pancake syrup, these are like that... but a lot more so! The rye part stayed soft, the sausage got crisp, and the bacon... well, it certainly was bacon. I honestly thought that the spekdikkens would be too weird for my ignorant American tastes, but I liked them a lot. But after a while, wondered if the vegetarian version was any good. (Also, I was getting tired of dislodging meat residue from the waffle iron.) But before putting any of the remaining batter on the waffle iron without the meat, we paused to add a lot more spices.

Without the meat in there keeping the iron from shutting all the way, the wafers came out wonderfully crisp. The rye flour added such a good flavor that I wondered why you don't see it in a lot more gingerbread recipes. (Then again, maybe rye flour has always been sporadically unavailable, and therefore a shaky foundation on which to build a culinary tradition.)

In conclusion, once one gets over putting meat in the cookies, these are unexpectedly good. And if one doesn't want meat in cookies, they're very good without it. Also, if you stop after the first few steps of the recipe, you've made the best pancake syrup you can get without tapping a maple tree. 

I've thoroughly enjoyed this trans-oceanic recipe journey. While I couldn't possibly get away with serving these to family with a straight face, I am seriously contemplating bringing a plate of these the next time any of my friends has a gathering.