More treats from Belgium

These were treats we brought home with us:



Belgian chocolate: worth the hype.

Also, we discovered the secret of Belgian waffles! When you purchase a waffle from a little waffle stand, they're made in advance. At first this seems disappointing - wouldn't a fresh waffle be better? But it turns out that the key is in the reheating. After the magic Belgian waffle makers make these treats, they sprinkle sugar on them, then let them sit. Then when you stumble up to the counter in a gueze-induced haze and order one, they put the waffle back on the iron to warm up. In re-heating, the sugar sprinkled on top starts to melt. You can tell this is what happens because when they remove said waffle from the iron, a thin wisp of candy sugar trails behind it, and waffle is encrusted in sweetness. To quote the old Italian woman who was in line in front of us, "Oh, che buono!"

Beers of Belgium

This is far from comprehensive, of course.  You’d need months of dedicated, er, work, to get through the breweries of Belgium.  Instead, here are images of some of the beers we had on our trip to Belgium.  Belgians take their glassware seriously, which means less need for captioning.

 

Gueuze at the Cantillon brewery.  Gueuze is a combination of variously aged lambics, which are naturally fermented and uncarbonated.

Kriek, more or less the cherry version of gueuze.  Take lambic and soak cherries in it for a while.  This is a far cry from the Lindeman’s fruit lambics you sometimes see in the US, which the Cantillon brewery pooh-poohs as cheating (they add sugar to help along the fermentation and sweeten the final product).  ‘Pleasantly sour’ is the way I’d describe this.