Taai-taai is a chewy honey-and-anise dough product that occupies a particular slot in the Dutch Sinterklaas calendar. It is shaped, almost without exception, into figures — most commonly the saint himself, his horse (Amerigo), or one of the Pieten — and is sold flat, somewhat rubbery in texture, and large enough that a single piece is a substantial item rather than a handful candy. The name taai-taai is straightforward: taai means "tough" or "chewy" in Dutch, and the doubled form is the conventional Dutch onomatopoeic intensifier ("very chewy"). The dough is made from rye flour, honey or stroop, anise seed and oil, sometimes potash as a leavening agent, and almost no butter or sugar; the resulting product is dense, chewy, modestly sweet, and strongly flavoured by the anise.
The form is older than the chocolate Sinterklaas letter. Taai-taai recipes are documented in Dutch household manuals from the late seventeenth century, and the figural shaping was already established as a Sinterklaas convention by the nineteenth. Among the principal Sinterklaas confections, taai-taai is the form most resistant to the late-twentieth-century industrialisation that flattened so much of the calendar's character: it is still produced largely by regional bakeries rather than supermarket chains, and the supermarket versions, while available, are generally regarded as inferior to the bakery product.
Composition
The classical taai-taai dough is rye-based, in contrast to the wheat-based kruidnoot dough that has come to dominate the rest of the Sinterklaas trade. The rye contributes the slight tackiness and the dense crumb; the honey or stroop contributes the binding and most of the sweetness; the anise seed (used both whole and as oil) is the dominant flavour. The dough is rested overnight at minimum and often for several days, during which the rye starches partially gelatinise and the anise oil migrates evenly through the matrix.
The traditional recipe also includes potash (potassium carbonate) as the leavening agent, although modern industrial recipes often substitute baking soda for handling reasons. The potash leavens the dough chemically and contributes a faint alkaline note that has, over centuries, become part of the expected taste of the product; commercial taai-taai using only baking soda is sometimes characterised by Dutch food critics as "missing something," and the something is usually the residual potash flavour.
The figural tradition
Taai-taai is essentially never sold as a generic cookie or block. The form is, by convention, figural: large flat figures of the saint (typically 200–300mm tall), smaller figures of the Pieten, occasional figures of horses, windmills, ships, or other folk-iconographic shapes. The figures are produced by pressing the dough into wooden or modern silicone moulds, baking, and demoulding; the result is a flat figure with the moulded detail (faces, beards, bishop's mitre on the saint) embossed on one side.
The wooden moulds are themselves an object of folk craft. Antique taai-taai moulds — handcarved fruitwood, often from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries — are collected by Dutch folk-art enthusiasts and turn up regularly in regional auctions. A small number of contemporary Dutch craftspeople still produce hand-carved wooden moulds, and several artisanal bakers prefer to use such moulds rather than the modern silicone equivalents on the grounds that they produce a slightly better surface texture.
Production and producers
The contemporary taai-taai market is split between three categories of producer. The first is the artisanal bakery — typically a regional Dutch or Belgian baker — that produces taai-taai in small quantities for local sale during the Sinterklaas season. The second is the specialty industrial producer — most prominently Bolletje and Van Delft — that produces taai-taai in larger volumes for supermarket distribution. The third is the supermarket house brand, which contracts production to one of the larger industrial bakeries and sells under store-brand labels.
The quality differential between artisanal and industrial taai-taai is substantial and is more noticeable than the analogous gap in most other Sinterklaas confectionery. Industrial taai-taai is typically softer (because of the substitution of baking soda for potash and the use of more sugar), less dense, and less strongly anise-flavoured than the artisanal product. Dutch consumers who care about taai-taai will typically buy from a bakery rather than a supermarket; consumers who do not care will eat the supermarket version without complaint, and the two markets coexist without much overlap.
Regional variants
Taai-taai shows more regional variation than most Sinterklaas confectionery. In Friesland and Groningen, the rye proportion is conventionally higher and the texture denser; in Limburg and Noord-Brabant, the dough is sweeter and the rye is sometimes partly substituted with wheat. The Belgian Flemish version of taai-taai, called peperkoek or kruidkoek, is closer to a slab of gingerbread than to the figural Dutch product and represents a substantially different commercial tradition; the figural Sinterklaas form is essentially Dutch rather than Belgian.
The Frisian variant in particular has retained a strong artisanal character: several bakeries in Leeuwarden and Sneek continue to produce taai-taai in small quantities under recipes that have been substantially unchanged for a century. The Frisian version is regarded by purists as the closest contemporary product to the historical taai-taai, and is occasionally available outside Friesland through specialist regional-product retailers.
As a Sinterklaas object
Within the Sinterklaas distribution, taai-taai occupies a particular slot: it is the candy that stands in for the saint himself in figural form. Where the chocoladeletter represents the recipient (through their initial), and where kruidnoten represent the scattering of largesse by the Pieten, the taai-taai figure represents the saint, the horse, and the Piet helpers as visible characters. A child receiving a taai-taai figure of Sinterklaas is, in a sense, receiving an edible icon of the saint himself, and the gesture has a different valence than receiving a generic cookie.
The figures are eaten at varying paces: very small children typically eat them whole over several days; older children and adults break them into pieces and consume them at the rate of a normal cookie. The figures keep well — taai-taai is one of the most storage-stable of the Sinterklaas confections — and a figure received in early December may legitimately survive through to January, although the dryness of the dough will increase noticeably over that period. Bakeries selling taai-taai will routinely note that the figures are best eaten within ten days of purchase but will remain edible for several weeks longer.