Volkoren Broodje

A volkoren broodje is decided at the mill. The whole kernel goes in, bran and germ and starchy middle together, and Dutch food rules allow the word volkoren on a bread only when all of those parts are in the flour in their natural proportions, whether the miller ground them in one pass or separated and recombined them. What comes out of the oven shows it. Tear a fresh roll and the crumb is close and springy, speckled with bran, and it smells of toasted hazelnut and warm husk. The crust is thin and gives a small crackle before it yields. Under the sweetness there is a slight bitter edge from the bran, which the better bakeries keep to a whisper.

Butter goes on the cut face first, thin enough to see the bran through it. The usual fillings are the ones on the card: a slice of jonge kaas, ham, a boiled egg sliced thin, egg salad. The chew is longer than a white roll gives, and the bran leaves a faint grit against the molars that clears with the first swallow. The nutty crumb stays audible under the cheese, where a plain white crumb tends to disappear into it. The sweetness shows up late, after the salt of the cheese has already faded, and it is the reason a volkoren kaas stays interesting through the last bite.

A volkoren broodje often gets eaten hours after it was filled, at a desk or a school table. After a morning in a lunch tin the crust of a volkoren roll has gone leathery and the butter has seeped a little into the crumb, and the bran-studded middle still holds together when bitten. Dutch nutrition advice leans on this kind of roll. The Health Council's 2015 guidelines set a floor of 90 grams of wholegrain products a day, and the Voedingscentrum counts volkoren bread inside its Schijf van Vijf and white bread outside it. In a six-month Gezonde Schoollunch trial at three primary schools, in Amsterdam, Lunteren and Vlaardingen, the share of children eating wholemeal or brown bread rose from 52 percent with a lunch from home to 85 percent with the school lunch.

Bakers vary the recipe within the same name. Some roll the dough in sunflower seeds or linseed, which toast on the crust and crunch against the soft middle. Others bake a larger, crustier roll that a counter will fill with something warm, a croquette among them. The close crumb keeps a firm shoulder under a heavy filling that would flatten a white roll. At a broodjeszaak the pre-filled rolls sit in a glass case labeled with the bread as well as the filling, and ordering volkoren is a one-word decision made before the cheese is even mentioned.

Time separates a good one from a poor one. The germ carries oil, so flour from the whole kernel turns stale sooner than white flour, and a roll baked from old meal tastes faintly of cardboard. Bran also needs water and a slow rise to soften, and a hurried roll comes out dense and dry in the center and sheds crumbs at the first bite. A well-made one springs back under a thumb, smells of sweet grain when torn, and still tastes good the next morning, which is why bakers who sell volkoren tend to bake it daily.

Origin and history

For centuries in the Low Countries the whole-grain loaf was the poor household's bread and white wheat the loaf of the wealthy. Around 1900 the order began to flip. Doctors in the later nineteenth century were recommending brown and whole-grain bread for its fiber and vitamins, and and the British physician Thomas Allinson, a loud advocate of wholemeal, inspired a brown-bread bakery on Amsterdam's Ceintuurbaan in 1892.

The best-documented Dutch bakery in that story is Bakkerij Hartog. Aagje Hartog baked farmhouse bread in Aartswoud, in West-Friesland, and visitors from Amsterdam liked it enough that the family was persuaded to sell whole-grain bread in the capital. In 1896 the bakery opened on the third floor at the back of a house in the Jordaan, with room for twelve loaves. In 1901 it moved to Ruyschstraat 68, where Aagje, unhappy with the flour from the steam mill, bought a mill of her own and ground her grain herself. In May 1970 Hartog was one of three Amsterdam bakers, with Westerbos on the Overtoom and Post on the Dintelstraat, supplying wholemeal bread to the shops of the Kabouterbeweging.

The bakery stayed in the Ruyschstraat area for more than eighty years before urban renewal moved it to a new building on the corner of Ruyschstraat and Wibautstraat in 1984, and in 2019 the bakery and its mill moved again, to Wibautstraat. The mill that Aagje Hartog bought because the steam mill's flour disappointed her still grinds Dutch wheat every day, and the bakery says it grinds in a single pass so the whole kernel stays together.