Chocolate sprinkles for breakfast!

One part of the quirky Dutch culture that always amuses me is how they love their chocolate sprinkles, or as they call them: Hagelslag.

What is hagelslag?

Hagelslag translates to ‘hailstorm’, which is where they get their name from, as they look like a hailstorm and sound like it when you pour them from the box.

In the supermarket you can find 20 plus varieties of hagelslag, including aniseed muisjes, fruit flavoured hagelslag, chocolate (milk, white and dark) hagelslag, XL hagelslag, chocolate flakes (chocoladevlokken) and low-sugar versions.

Hagelslag are most commonly eaten on top of buttered bread, and served for breakfast or lunch. The aniseed muisjes variety are served on beschuit, and are mostly reserved for celebrating the birth of a baby (white/pink for a girl or white/blue for a boy).

A brief history

There are a great many producers of hagelslag, but the two most famous ones are De Ruijter and Venz.

De Ruijter has been producing muisjes since 1860 and fruit-flavoured hagelslag since 1928. Venz was the first to produce chocolate hagelslag, starting in 1936 and De Ruijter followed in 1955 with their chocolate flakes and in 1957 with chocolate hagelslag.

Eating Hagelslag

To eat hagelslag the Dutch way, you start with a slice of plain bread (white or brown), spread it with unsalted butter and sprinkle around 15 to 20 grams of hagelslag per open sandwich and spread them out to cover the whole area.

So give them a go, they do make for a very tasty breakfast. You can always buy a variety pack which contains several mini boxes of different flavours so you can have a taste of them all!