Cooking with Speklap

One of the great things about living abroad is checking out the new foods. Many things are familiar, but every once in a while you encounter something new that tastes great, even if it isn’t good for you. Since I’ve been doing all the cooking lately, I get to pick out the new foods to try.

Speklap (or Bacon Flaps or Streaky Bacon) is one of those foods. Basically strips of long and thick bacon, Speklap is available marinated or plain at nearly any grocery store (and probably the butchers’ as well). It is a fairly inexpensive cut of meat and, since it a fatty cut, four slices can be made to stretch over a couple of meals when combined with a starch and veggie. It is also sold chopped up for those sorts of dishes.

Cooking Suggestions
When it comes to dinner, I like to keep it simple. I recommend buying the Speklap pre-marinated (the orange marinate is good and a bit spicy) and pan frying it on medium heat until the pink is gone. Then I serve it with rice and a vegetable. The “a la minute” Speklap cooks very fast, but even packages that don’t indicate that cook pretty quickly.

Leftovers can be chopped up for breakfast the next day or for American omelets. Its also good with potatoes, but really nearly everything is.

We haven’t tried it yet, but speklappen appears to be popular for BBQ. Since it cooks up quickly and takes marinades well, I can see why.

Real Recipes
Of course others have much more experience with speklappen then me. Here are a few recipes that I hope to try in the future.

Beans with Apples and Pork: A traditional Dutch dish according to GoDutch.com.
Speklappen with a Crispy Herb Crust (Dutch only)
Grill Speklappen Sate: (Dutch only) Dan & I are suckers for the peanuty flavor of sate sauce.

Do you have a favorite recipe or ideas for a good one? Share it in the comments.

Handy Cooking Conversion Websites

I love baking and brought American measuring cups & spoons along with a couple of cookbooks when we moved to Maastricht. Even so, I frequently need to make conversions from Fahrenheit to Celsius and from cups to grams. The follow sites are indispensable to me when baking.

Albireo.ch Temperature Converter: This simple site converts both ways between Fahrenheit and Celsius and allows you to chose whether to round the number or not.

Gourmet Sleuth Gram Converter: Grams are trickier. Most Dutch recipes and packaging use grams to indicate the amounts you need, but the number of grams is determined by weight rather than volume (like cups). This Gourmet Sleuth tool is useful because it provides the estimated grams per cup of several common foods. I rarely use the actual tool, but I’m always referencing the chart below and using my kitchen scale.

The kitchen scale is a new tool in my kitchen, but it is great to have. If you are looking for one in Maastricht, Media Markt has a nice selection of scales at a variety of price points.

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