Recipes

Shirataki noodles look too good to be true on paper. They are made from konjac, a fibrous Japanese root, and they are essentially water and soluble fibre, which means almost no carbs and almost no calories. For anyone on keto that is the dream: a bowl of noodles for nothing. The catch is that most people try them once, cook them badly, and write them off as slimy, rubbery, faintly fishy garbage.

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A lot of people start keto by doing the same thing: they go looking for keto recipes. Keto bread, keto pizza, keto pasta, fathead dough, cloud buns, the lot. Then they spend a small fortune on almond flour, coconut flour, psyllium husk and sugar alcohols, fiddle about for an evening, and end up with a slightly sad imitation of the thing they were trying to replace. There is a much easier way, and it is the secret that makes keto sustainable rather than a chore: for almost everything savoury, you do not need a special recipe at all.

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Let’s be clear about what we’re dealing with. There are two Belgian waffles and they are different problems. The Liège waffle is made from a yeasted dough enriched with butter and eggs, studded with pearl sugar that melts and caramelises against the iron during cooking. The pearl sugar isn’t a topping. It’s structural. It’s what makes the outside crispy and the inside soft and the whole thing taste like it does.

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Hochepot, also called hutspot in Dutch or pot-au-feu à la gantoise if you’re being formal about it, is one of those dishes that exists in every northern European peasant cuisine under a slightly different name. Flemish hochepot is a slow-cooked stew of mixed meats and root vegetables, traditionally made with whatever cuts were available: oxtail, pig’s ears, lamb shoulder, beef shank, pork belly. All of it goes into a pot with root vegetables and water and cooks for a long time until everything is tender and the broth has absorbed three or four different animals’ worth of flavour.

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Paling in ’t groen, eel in green sauce, is one of the oldest dishes in Belgian cuisine and one of the least known outside of it. It originated along the rivers and waterways of the Scheldt basin, particularly around Mechelen and the towns between Ghent and Antwerp, where freshwater eel was abundant. The green sauce is made from a mixture of fresh herbs (sorrel, parsley, chervil, watercress, sometimes spinach or nettle) cooked briefly in butter with the eel and finished with a little lemon juice or white wine vinegar.

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Steak tartare is raw minced beef mixed with egg yolk, mustard, capers, shallots, Worcestershire sauce, Tabasco, and parsley, served with toast or frites on the side. Remove the toast and the frites and what you have is a dish that is almost entirely fat and protein with negligible carbs. It’s one of the best things on a Brussels brasserie menu and it requires no modification whatsoever, just the standard request to swap the side for a salad.

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Waterzooi is one of those dishes that requires almost no adaptation for keto because there’s almost nothing in it that isn’t already keto-friendly. Chicken or fish, root vegetables, cream, egg yolks, stock. That’s most of it. You don’t need to swap anything out or make any substitutions. You just make it and eat it. It originated in Ghent, and the name roughly translates as “watery mess” in old Dutch, which undersells it considerably.

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Carbonnade flamande, beef slow-braised in Belgian beer with onions, thyme, and bay, looks like a problem on keto because of the beer. It isn’t, really. The dish braises for two to three hours, and over that time the alcohol cooks off entirely and a significant portion of the sugars in the beer reduce and concentrate into the sauce. What’s left is a small amount of residual carbohydrate distributed across several portions.

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Belgian food has a reputation for being heavy, which in keto terms actually works in your favour more often than you’d expect. A lot of the classics are built around meat, fish, and cream-based sauces, and the problem is usually the accompaniment rather than the dish itself. What adapts well Stoofvlees, beef slow-cooked in beer with thyme and bay, is the Belgian comfort food. The dish itself is fine on keto, but the traditional pairing with frites is obviously not.

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