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.
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.
Belgian winter food is stews, braises, roasted meats, cheese, and things cooked for a long time in red wine or beer. Most of this is excellent for keto. The season does most of the work for you, in terms of aligning what you want to eat with what you’re supposed to eat.
February is also grey and cold in a specific Brussels way: not dramatically cold, but persistently damp and dark in a way that makes you want to eat something heavy and sit near a radiator.
A month is long enough to know whether something is working and short enough that you haven’t adjusted your life completely around it. Here’s what I actually found out.
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What was harder than expected The bread. I knew intellectually that Belgium is a bread culture and that every meal would involve bread somewhere nearby, but knowing it and living it are different things.
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.
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The standard Belgian breakfast is tartines: bread with butter and jam, or butter and speculoos spread, or cheese. Maybe a boiled egg if someone is being ambitious. It’s perfectly nice and also entirely off-limits on keto, which means you need a different approach from day one.
The good news is that the alternatives are straightforward and the ingredients are easy to find. The bad news is that you will eat a lot of eggs.
The Marché du Midi runs every Sunday morning under and around the elevated railway at Gare du Midi. It’s one of the largest markets in Belgium, it covers several city blocks, and it sells an enormous range of food, a lot of which is excellent for keto and costs significantly less than the supermarket equivalent. It’s also loud, crowded, and parking anywhere near it on a Sunday morning is a genuine ordeal.
Belgium doesn’t get enough credit for its cheese. You hear about French cheese, Dutch Gouda, Swiss everything, but the Belgian stuff is genuinely good, and for keto purposes, it’s also convenient. Cheese is fat and protein with minimal carbs. Belgium happens to produce a lot of it and sell it everywhere.
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Belgian hospitality is generous and it expresses itself primarily through food. If someone invites you to their home for dinner, there will be a lot of food, and refusing it will be noticed. If a colleague has a birthday, there will be cake in the office kitchen at 10am, and standing next to it with a coffee while not eating any will attract comments. If you go to a family dinner, there will be potatoes in some form, probably bread on the table, and possibly a waterzooi or a carbonnade flamande that you can eat around but not entirely avoid.
Most people come to keto with two hopes in roughly equal measure: to lose weight and to feel less wrung out during the day. Both are reasonable, and both tend to arrive, but not on the schedule the before-and-after photos imply. The first few months follow a fairly predictable shape once you know what you are looking at, and knowing that shape in advance is the difference between staying the course and quitting in week two when the scale stops moving and your legs feel like lead.