🇳🇱 Netherlands · Family: Frikandel, Kroket & de Automatiek
The Broodje Kaassoufflé is a deep-fried cheese-filled pastry tucked into a soft roll. The kaassoufflé itself is a flat, breadcrumbed parcel, thinner and crisper than a croquette, fried until the shell is brittle and the cheese inside goes fully molten. Dropped into a broodje with mustard, it is a fixture of the Dutch snack-in-broodje tradition, the snack-bar logic of taking anything fried off the automatiek wall and making it lunch by adding bread. Where the croquette is round and creamy inside, the soufflé is flat, sharp-edged, and shatters; the eating experience is closer to a fried cheese crisp wrapped around a lava core.
The build is spare and time-sensitive. The kaassoufflé is fried to order so the crust is crisp and the cheese is liquid rather than set, then slid whole into a soft white roll, plain or barely buttered, and finished with a line of sharp Dutch mustard. Good execution is a soufflé straight from the fryer, the shell genuinely crackling, the cheese pulling in strings when bitten, the roll soft enough to fold around it, and just enough mustard to push acid against the fat. Sloppy execution is a soufflé that has gone limp and oily under a heat lamp with the cheese congealed into a rubbery sheet, a roll too firm to give way, or a flood of mustard that buries the filling entirely. The flat shape works against it once it cools: there is little internal mass to hold heat, so a kaassoufflé that has waited even a few minutes loses both its crunch and its molten center, which is most of the reason to order it.
Variation is narrow because the snack itself is fairly standardized, mostly a thin processed-cheese filling in a crumbed wrapper, but the bread and finish flex. Some bars serve it in a denser roll, some swap the mustard for curry ketchup or fritessaus, and a few add raw onion. It sits alongside the Broodje Kaaskroket, its rounder, creamier cousin, and the Broodje Frikandel and Broodje Bitterballen, each a separate fried snack that deserves its own article rather than being crowded in here. Eaten hot off the fryer, the Broodje Kaassoufflé is the crispest, most uncomplicated way the Dutch put fried cheese between bread.
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