Ingredients
Equipment
Before you Start
- The bread needs to be a day or two stale. A slice should stay stiff when you hold it by one corner instead of drooping. If yours is still fresh, dry the slices on a rack in a 95°C oven for 12 to 15 minutes.
- Slice about 1.25 cm thick, and leave the crust on.
- Use a nonstick or well-seasoned carbon steel skillet. See the notes if cast iron is all you have.
Method
Mix the kaneelsuiker
- Stir the sugar and cinnamon together in a small bowl and put it within arm's reach of the stove. Some of it goes into the pan and the rest onto the table, and you do not want to be measuring cinnamon with one hand while a slice browns in the other.
Make the eimengsel
- Crack the eggs and the extra yolk into a wide, shallow dish. A pie plate or small baking dish works far better than a bowl, because you need to lay a whole slice flat in it.
- Whisk until the yolks and whites are completely combined and no ropy streaks of white remain. This takes longer than you would think, around thirty seconds of steady whisking. Any unmixed white sets into a rubbery patch on the finished slice.
- Add the milk, sugar, cinnamon, vanillesuiker and salt. Whisk again until the sugar has dissolved and the cinnamon is dispersed through the liquid rather than floating on top in dark specks.
- The extra yolk brings fat and lecithin. The fat coats the egg proteins so they set tender instead of tightening into a rubbery layer, and the lecithin keeps the milk and fat from splitting in the pan. One extra yolk is plenty. More and it stops tasting like fried bread and starts tasting like baked custard.
- The salt is not there to be tasted. Without it the sweetness has no edge and the plate reads flat.
Soak two slices at a time
- Do not soak all six up front and stack them. Stacked slices drip-feed one another and the bottom ones compress under the weight, so by the time you reach them the dry core is gone. Soak two, cook them, then soak the next two while the first pair is in the pan.
- Lay a slice flat in the eimengsel, let it sit, turn it, and give the other side the same time:
- One day old, still slightly soft: about 10 seconds per side
- Two days old, properly stiff: 15 to 20 seconds per side
- Oven-dried, or dry heels: 30 to 40 seconds per side
- Lift the slice and let the excess drip back into the dish for a second or two.
- The clock is a starting point. Your finger is the test. Lay the slice flat on your palm and press the center lightly with a fingertip. It should feel firm and springy, with real resistance underneath. Squishy, with no push back, means it has gone too far. You will have it calibrated after two or three slices.
- You are trying to get the eimengsel three or four millimeters into each face while leaving the center drier. That dry core is structural. It keeps the slice from folding in half when you lift it, and it lets the outside crisp while the inside sets creamy.
- Soak until the slice is saturated all the way through and two things go wrong. The bread loses the strength to hold itself together, so it tears when you move it and falls apart in the pan. And there is so much liquid trapped in the middle that the slice steams from the inside out, which means the outside never crisps no matter how long you cook it. That is the most common way this recipe fails.
Heat the pan
- Skillet over medium heat. Not medium-high, not high. Add half the butter and half the oil and let the butter melt and stop foaming. When the foam subsides the water has cooked out and the pan is ready.
- Butter is where the flavor is, and browned butter is a large part of what makes these taste Dutch rather than generic. But the milk solids in butter scorch at a fairly low temperature, and you need the pan hot enough for long enough to set the egg through the middle. A little neutral oil raises the point where things start to burn and buys you the extra minute.
- High heat browns the outside long before the egg in the middle has set, and you get a slice that looks perfect and is raw and wet in the center. Medium lets the browning and the setting finish together.
Fry
- Sprinkle a light pinch of kaneelsuiker over one face of a soaked slice and lay it in the pan sugared side down. Sprinkle a second light pinch over the face now looking up at you. Do the same with the second slice, and do not let them touch in the pan.
- Cook 2 to 3 minutes, until the underside is deep golden brown. Lift a corner with a spatula and look before you flip. You want real color, not pale tan. Flip, and give the second side about 2 minutes.
- Sugar sprinkled on before the slice hits the hot metal melts and caramelizes directly against the pan, forming a thin brittle shell fused to the bread. Sugar dusted on afterwards just sits there and dissolves into the surface moisture. Same sugar, completely different texture. Sugar both faces before they go down and both sides crackle. Sprinkle after the flip and only one side does.
- Use a light hand, lighter than feels right. The first face is now against the pan for the full two to three minutes rather than going down bare, so the sugar has more time to go from caramelized to scorched and bitter. If your first batch comes out darker than you want, drop the heat a notch for the next one.
- Slide the finished slices onto a plate. Before the next pair goes in, take the pan off the heat for a moment and wipe it out with a folded paper towel held in tongs. Add fresh butter and oil and bring it back up to temperature.Small bits of egg and caramelized sugar are left behind after every batch, and there is more of it now that both faces are sugared. It is already fully cooked, and left in the pan it carbonizes, sticks to the next slice and tastes burnt. Ten seconds with a paper towel keeps every batch as good as the first.
Serve immediately
- These are at their best straight out of the pan and they go downhill fast. Within about five minutes the steam working out from the middle softens the crust. Put them on the table and let everyone add as much of the remaining kaneelsuiker as they want.
Nutrition
Notes
Choosing your bread
Any bread will work, and I would rather you make these with what you have than skip them for want of the right loaf. This is a dish that exists because somebody had bread going stale.
I use casinobrood, the square loaf baked in a lidded pan. The crumb is fine and tight so it absorbs steadily instead of gulping liquid in one spot, and the square slices lie flat in the pan so the whole face makes contact. It goes stale more slowly than a free-form loaf, because the crust on all four sides gives moisture very little surface to escape from, so give it two days rather than one.
A rustic loaf with an open crumb drinks unevenly, since the large irregular holes take up liquid at different rates. Cut a little thinner, around 1 cm, shorten the soak, and check the firm spots by feel rather than trusting the clock.
Volkoren absorbs faster and browns faster, because of the bran and the higher sugar content in most whole grain doughs. Cut the soak by about a third and drop the heat a notch. The result is nuttier and less delicate.
Stokbrood wants a sharp diagonal cut for more surface area, and gives a chewier result. Very dry baguette can take a full minute per side.
Suikerbrood or kerststol makes the richest version of all. Both already contain sugar and fat, so they soften quickly and scorch easily: halve the soak, drop the heat, and watch the pan closely. Leftover kerststol going stale after the holidays is the classic use for this, and the amandelspijs softens in the pan beautifully.
Why the crust stays on
Plenty of the old recipes tell you to cut it 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 from a wood-fired oven carried a thick, hard crust, and crust does not absorb the way crumb does, so it stayed tough and dry while the middle went soft.
Modern bread does not have that problem, and the rim earns its place. It takes up far less liquid than the cut faces do, which means it works as a frame around 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 away and you have removed the only structural part of the bread.
The rim stays chewy rather than crisping, since there is no egg in it to set and no sugar on it to caramelize. If you would rather soften the difference, hold each edge down against the pan with tongs for about five seconds before plating.
If cast iron is all you have
It can work, but start it cooler than feels right and pull it off the heat between batches.
The problem is not really the egg, it is the sugar. Molten sugar grips a bare iron surface hard, and when you flip, the caramelized layer can stay welded to the pan while the top of your slice comes away with it. A genuinely well-seasoned pan largely solves that, since a good build-up of polymerized oil releases nearly as well as nonstick.
The thermal mass is the harder issue. Cast iron holds heat so effectively that once it climbs past where you want it, you cannot bring it down without taking it off the burner and waiting. Sugar goes from caramelized to burnt in well under a minute, and the pan gets hotter with every batch. A lighter pan lets you correct in seconds.
On vanilla
Vanillesuiker comes in small paper sachets in every Dutch supermarket and is what most Dutch home cooks reach for. A teaspoon of extract does the same job. Plenty of the older recipes skip vanilla altogether and they are not wrong; it is a modern addition to a very old dish.
I would not use a whole vanilla bean here. The aroma compounds are fat soluble and need warmth and time to come out of the pod, so whisking a scraped bean into cold milk and egg for thirty seconds pulls very little out of it. You would be paying for a pod and getting less flavor than extract gives you, and the two loudest flavors in the finished slice are browned butter and cinnamon, which bury the nuance anyway.
If you want to do it regardless: split and scrape the pod into the milk, warm the milk gently, steep off the heat for 20 to 30 minutes, then cool it completely before adding the eggs. Warm milk poured onto raw egg will scramble it. If what you are after is the look of the specks, vanilla bean paste gets you that for a fraction of the cost.
Basterdsuiker
Lichtbruine basterdsuiker is a soft, slightly moist Dutch sugar. It is not the same as American brown sugar, though light brown sugar is the closest substitute available outside the Netherlands. In the kaneelsuiker it gives a faint caramel note instead of straight sweetness.
Cooking a large batch in the oven
If you cannot keep up two slices at a time, soak them as described and lay them in a single layer on a well-greased baking sheet. Bake at 200°C for 10 to 15 minutes, turning once halfway.
They will not be quite as crisp as pan-fried and you lose the browned butter, but they come out evenly and all at once, which counts for a lot with eight people waiting.
On sweetness
This sits on the leaner end of what Dutch home cooks use, because wentelteefjes began as a way to use up bread rather than as a dessert. If you want them sweeter, add the extra sugar to the kaneelsuiker rather than the eimengsel. That way you get it as crunch on the outside instead of a softer, wetter interior.
Cardamom instead of cinnamon
A legitimate substitute if cinnamon is not an option. Use the same quantity.
Storage
These do not keep well and were never meant to. Refrigerate leftovers covered for up to two days and reheat in a dry skillet over medium-low heat, or in a toaster oven. Skip the microwave, which turns them soggy.
