With or without? - speculaas/speculoos

rosemary
2 days ago
6 min read

"Loos in old Dutch means without. Speculaas is with a lot of spices, speculoos is speculaas without most of those spices." reddit

As I often do I started with a random, well a few, in this case, random recipes from somewhere, and you travel the world in time and space, learning a few fairly trivial and mildly interesting things along the way. Mind you I have sort of done this one before with my Biscoff for a rainy day post - and apologies for the missing pictures - I accidentally deleted them. I have just re-read it, so am hoping to not repeat myself too much.

Today I began with my pile of books which included the November edition of the Coles Magazine, whose cover featured this recipe for Mini caramelised biscuit cheesecakes.

Not that I had earmarked that at all. What I had noted for investigation were a couple of recipes in a section of the magazine dedicated to speculoos - the original inspiration for biscoff. And we have moved on in time since October 2022 so there's a little more to say on the commerce side of things.

As I said back then, about origins:

"In the 17th century the Dutch started making speculaas - a type of heavily spiced biscuit that was stamped with the figure of St. Nicholas or scenes from his life. The biscuits were traditionally given to children on St. Nicholas' day - December 5 in the Netherlands, December 6 in Belgium. The children would put out shoes stuffed with straw in the hope that St. Nicholas would leave them speculaas in exchange for the hay for his horses, because they had been good little children."

Below, and here are pictures from Maison Dandoy - an upmarket Belgian producer of the traditional speculoos.

They also make smaller versions of course, but for the gourmet market, not the supermarkets.

Regula Ysewijn, whilst presenting her recipe for Speculaas shown here, also provided a whole lot of background information including the fact that the sugar used in the recipe is not just brown sugar, but something called 'kandij'. When Felicity Cloake takes us through the process of making Perfect speculaas for The Guardian, she references Regula Ysewijn's words re the sugar (and other things) - well she seems to be the expert on all things speculaas / speculoos / biscoff

"The type known as kandij, she explains, is made from white beet sugar slowly and repeatedly heated until it caramelises and crystallises." Felicity Cloake

Not easily found outside Begium or The Netherlands of course, so Felicity tells us to make do with dark brown sugar. Stella Parks of Serious Eats, however tells us more about it:

“in Belgium … sugar cane was historically unavailable, leading sugar beet refiners to develop a different sort of brown sugar, one made with refined sucrose and caramel … So, instead of the acidic, malty, slightly bitter, and vaguely fruity taste of molasses, Belgian brown sugar gives Biscoff a backbone of caramel flavour. That means no American brown sugar will ever do the trick. Fortunately, homemade caramel sugar is kiiiiiinda my thing. Throw a bag of refined white sugar in a low oven, stir from time to time, and in about five hours you’ll have a deeply caramelised sugar perfect for homemade Biscoff.” Stella Parks/Serious Eats

Felicity tried this, but not only was it a faff, but also not very successful:

"the first lot turns from toasted sugar to dark caramel in the time it takes me to fail to jump-start my car in the rain – the second, which I watch like a hawk for three hours, is more successful, and has a pronounced caramel flavour, but without the richness and depth of the dark brown sugar the other recipes use."

Felicity's cookies are shown below, (and they look pretty good), along with those from Stella Parks for Serious Eats with her Homemade biscoff (Belgian speculoos cookies (not quite as good) and also, of all people Yotam Ottolenghi and Helen Goh - Speculaas - the recipe for which appears on a website called Commendatore of the Kitchen.

They all really threw themselves into it, with Stella Parks admitting that really you could just buy some but:

"This isn't about a cookie; it's about a way of life—learning how to make my all-time favorite speculoos from scratch. It's about picking apart a recipe to find out what makes it tick, not so I can make a "better" version, but so I can better understand what makes the original so great." Stella Parks/Serious Eats

Which is something that can be applied to just about anything that you cook really - well anything established that you cook.

And here we come to Biscoff - or as Felicity Cloake says: "Biscuits for coffee; they now do what they say on the packet." Regula Ysewijn on the other hand is rather more critical:

"What bothers me about speculoos/speculaas is that people around the world now think that Biscoff speculoos is our traditional Belgian speculaas biscuit, while in reality Biscoff biscuits are their own category of biscuit. Speculaas is our traditional biscuit and it contains more than one spice, preferably several and it is a harder biscuit, using less butter. It’s like apples and pears, both fruit but not the same flavour and texture."

Or you can just buy some Biscoff cookies or as Coles points out in it's feature you can now also buy some Coles Finest Speculoos thins - aiming for the higher end of the market here - 'thins', 'expertly crafted' and the using of the original name point that out - plus the Coles Finest label. It allows you to charge more.

Today's effort however is not really inspired by Biscoff, or speculoos/speculaas, but by Biscoff like spreads. Indeed the whole feature in the Coles Magazine is really a promotion for their Caramelised Biscuit spreads - smooth and crunchy - and I won't go into the whole smooth or crunchy thing - that's a whole other controversy. Lotus who make Biscoff biscuits have their own version - Coles is several dollars cheaper. I don't know if they are as good. I have not found a review.

And how did the spread thing come about? Well according to Regula Ysewijn:

"Many people also love dunking speculaas in their coffee and then placing the biscuits between two slices of bread, this is how the Biscoff speculoos spread came to be."

I'm not sure I'm much taken by the idea of soggy biscuits in a bread sandwich, but then the northerners of England love chip butties which also don't sound tempting.

Lotus is the company that makes Biscoff, but obviously they haven't been able to stop others producing similar spreads.

And, as a complete aside, spreads seem to be an in thing of the moment. In an earlier magazine I had bookmarked pistachio spreads as a thing to look at - abandoned for now, and I also noticed that in America there is an ongoing thing with Nutella and something called El mordjene. Another time perhaps.

Back to the biscoff, speculoos type spreads. What can you do with these? Well obviously thousands of things, but for today I'm just going to concentrate on the Coles Magazine offerings, plus two more which are not theirs. Coles themselves - recipes developed by Gemma Luongo we are told in tiny and very light and difficult to read print, in the fold of the page - have come up with four - all of which, I have to say look pretty good and all using their new spread, plus Biscoff biscuits, which they decline to name - referring to them as 'caramelised (speculoos) biscuits'. The four are: Caramelised biscuit and banana pavlova roll; Medovik (Eastern European honey cake); Caramelised biscuit rum balls and Caramelised biscuit white Christmas

The Coles Magazine is a chance to advertise their wares, and enhance their reputation, and this set of recipes aligns with both of those aims, but it also gives them a chance to encourage some of their producers to also advertise (and pay Coles for the privilege) their wares in similar vein and so we have - in the same section - and side by side with the Coles recipes Butternut snap mango cheesecake - from Arnott's/House and Garden and Banoffee cheesecake pies - from Philadelphia/Cadbury's/Oreo. I wonder how they shared the costs on that one.

I didn't go looking for Ottolenghi - or anybody else this time - but I'm now beginning to think inevitably - as well as his recipe for standard speculaas - he and Helen Goh also published in their book Sweet a recipe for Gevulde speculaas of which he says: "I thank Hennie Franssen, who translates my books into Dutch, for this marvellous recipe."