Wentelteefjes: Dutch French Toast

We did not eat wentelteefjes much when I was growing up. They were not a Sunday morning thing in our house, and I have no memory of my mother standing at the stove with a plate of them. That came later.

What I do remember is high school. Whenever there was some kind of event, somebody always made wentelteefjes. Not one particular person, and not for any reason anyone ever announced. They just showed up. Somebody had a loaf going stale, somebody had eggs, and there they were. I think that is the most honest picture of what this dish actually is. It is not fancy, it was never planned, and nobody has ever really owned the recipe. It is what you make when there are people around and there is bread that needs using.

That is also why I wanted to get this one right instead of writing down the obvious version. Dip bread in egg, fry it, done. Anyone can do that. But there is a real difference between wentelteefjes that come out soft and slightly wet in the middle, which is what most people end up with, and wentelteefjes with a thin crisp shell that crackles when your fork goes through. The difference comes down to two things, and neither one is an ingredient.

The first is how long the bread sits in the eimengsel. You want the egg and milk to soak about three or four millimeters into each side and no further. The very center of the slice should stay drier than the outside. That dry core is what holds the slice together when you lift it, and it is what lets the outside brown while the inside sets into something creamy instead of soggy. Leave the bread in until it is saturated all the way through and there is so much liquid trapped in the middle that the slice steams from the inside while it cooks. The outside can never crisp, no matter how long you leave it in the pan.

This is why day-old bread matters so much. Fresh bread is already full of its own moisture and has nowhere to put the eimengsel.

The second thing is sugar, and where you put it. Most recipes have you dust the finished wentelteefjes with cinnamon sugar at the table. That is fine, but it stays powdery and dissolves into the surface. Instead, sprinkle a light pinch of kaneelsuiker on each slice right before it goes face down in the pan. The sugar melts against the hot metal and caramelizes into a brittle layer fused to the bread. Same sugar, completely different result. Go light, because too much will burn and turn bitter before the slice is cooked through.

The bread, and why I leave the crust on

I use casinobrood for these, the square loaf baked in a lidded pan. The crumb is fine and tight, so it takes up the eimengsel steadily rather than gulping it in one spot the way an open crumb does, and the square slices lie flat in the pan so the whole face makes contact and browns evenly. It also goes stale more slowly than a free-form loaf, since the crust on all four sides gives moisture very little surface to escape from, so give it two days rather than one.

But any bread will do, and I would rather you make these with what you have than skip them because you do not have the right loaf. This is a dish that exists because somebody had bread going stale, and it has never been particular. An open-crumb rustic loaf drinks unevenly, so cut it thinner and check it by feel. Volkoren absorbs faster and browns faster, so shorten the soak and drop the heat a notch. Stokbrood wants a sharp diagonal cut and a longer dip. Suikerbrood or leftover kerststol makes a much richer version and needs about half the soaking time. The full notes are in the recipe below.

One thing worth saying, because a lot of the old recipes disagree with me. They tell you to cut the crust off. The Roman version in Apicius specifies crustless bread, and the instruction turns up again and again in later ones. There is a decent reason for it. Bread out of a wood-fired oven had a thick, hard crust, and crust does not absorb the way crumb does, so it stayed tough and dry while the middle went soft. Cutting it away made the slice worth eating.

Modern bread does not have that problem, and there is a real reason to leave the crust where it is. The rim takes up far less liquid than the cut faces do, which means it acts as a frame around the outside of the slice. It is the part holding everything together while the middle softens, and it is why a slice with the crust on is much less likely to tear when you flip it. Cut it off and you have thrown away the only structural part of the bread. The rim stays chewy instead of crisping, since there is no egg in it to set, and I like the contrast against the crackly faces.

Where the name comes from, and why most of what you have read is probably wrong

If you have looked this dish up in English, you have almost certainly run into the claim that “wentelteefje” translates to something rude involving a female dog. It gets repeated on nearly every blog and it makes for a good joke, but the etymology is far less settled than people make it sound.

The first half is easy. Cornelis Kiliaan’s Etymologicum Teutonicae Linguae, published in 1599 and the first real dictionary of the Dutch language, records the terms ver-wendt brood and ghe-wendt broot, meaning turned bread. That is the wentelen part, and all it describes is flipping the slice in the pan.

The second half is murkier. The earliest known use of the full word as a dish comes from a 1623 poem by the Hague painter Adriaen Pietersz. van de Venne, Tafereel van sinne-mal, where he writes about baking wentel-teven from sugared white bread and buttery fat. Almost a century later, in a 1717 comic play about student life in Leiden by Jan Jacob Mauricius, the word turns up in a way that deliberately blurs the line between a pretty girl and something you would want to eat. So the suggestive reading was clearly in circulation by then.

The explanation you will run into most often, though, is neither of those. It is that the word is a worn-down “wentel het even,” meaning turn it over for a second. That one sounds plausible and it does not survive contact with the evidence. There was a word appelteef, used in Dordrecht in the nineteenth century for the same dish, and “apple turn-it-over-for-a-second” is not a thing anybody ever said. The teef part behaves like a noun that attaches itself to other words, which is what the name of a pastry does and what a contracted verb phrase cannot. The dating works against it as well. The 1623 form is wentel-teven, a plural noun, not an instruction to somebody at the stove.

Which leaves the duller answer. Ewoud Sanders laid the case out in NRC in 2004, and in 2024 the Instituut voor de Nederlandse Taal published an overview of all the competing explanations. The position both land on is that teefje is most likely the name of some kind of pastry, and that nobody knows which kind. I lean toward the dull answer. Food names usually come from food.

There are older regional names too, and some of them are considerably worse. Draaireuen and gebakken hondsvotjes both turn up in Dutch dialect. I will let you look those up on your own.

The dish is much older than the Dutch name

Bread soaked in something and fried is about as old as bread and frying, and almost every European country has a version. The French call it pain perdu, lost bread. The Spanish have torrijas. In Germany, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland it goes by some variation of arme ridders, poor knights.

The recipe most often pointed to as the ancestor is aliter dulcia in Book VII of Apicius’s De re Coquinaria, a Roman collection from around the first century. It calls for breaking crustless white bread into large pieces, soaking them in milk, frying them in oil, and pouring honey over the top. Worth noting that there are no eggs in it at all. Whether that dish is genuinely the ancestor of ours or simply an early example of an obvious idea is a question I do not think anyone can answer, and I would treat the straight line people draw between the two with some caution.

Eggs show up later. Le Viandier de Taillevent, the French collection attributed to Guillaume Tirel and dating in its earliest form to around 1300, has tostees dorées, which uses hard white bread and beaten egg yolks but no milk. The earliest version I know of with both milk and egg together, which is what we would actually recognize as wentelteefjes, is a payn purdeuz recipe in the English manuscript Harleian MS 279 from 1430.

On the Dutch side, my favorite find is De Volmaakte Hollandsche Keuken-Meid from 1745, which has a recipe under the heading of how to bake gewend brood. The technique is not what you would expect. The old bread is soaked in sweetened milk with rose water, then fried in butter, and only then is the beaten egg poured over the slice in the pan. You turn it, fry the other side, and pour egg over again. The egg was a coating applied during cooking rather than something the bread was soaked in beforehand. Somewhere between then and now we simplified it into a single dip, which is faster and honestly probably better, but I like knowing it was not always done this way.

What they taste like

The outside should be deep golden and slightly crackly, with a thin caramelized layer that gives a little resistance before it breaks. Underneath that, the bread turns into something closer to a set custard than to bread. Soft, a bit dense, still holding its shape. Not wet.

The flavor is butter first, then cinnamon, then the faint milky sweetness underneath. There is browned butter in there from the pan, which is a big part of why these taste different from American French toast even though the ingredient lists are nearly identical. Americans usually reach for maple syrup, which brings a lot of flavor of its own and covers everything else up. Wentelteefjes are meant to be eaten with nothing but kaneelsuiker, and once you try them that way you notice how much is going on in a dish with five ingredients.

They are best straight out of the pan and they do not wait well. Within about five minutes the steam from the inside softens the crust. So serve them as they come rather than holding them warm for everybody, or bake a large batch in the oven so they all finish at once.

If you make these, I would really appreciate it if you came back and left a star rating on the recipe card below. It genuinely helps other people find the recipe, and I read every comment.