Country Cuisine Confidential 2010, Part 3: Belgium

Welcome to Part 3 in a series examining each of the national cuisines on display at the 2010 Epcot Food & Wine Festival. Today's port of culinary call: Belgium.

Belgium is making its debut this year at the Food & Wine Festival. You'll find the Belgian booth next to the Spanish booth in the France Pavilion right outside Chefs de France.

Let's look at our menu:

Steamed Mussels with Roasted Garlic Cream

Mussels are popular in Belgium and the closest thing they have to a national cuisine. In the United States, mussels were once also quite popular but consumption gradually decreased, and some people now avoid them because they're afraid of eating shellfish, in general, or because mussels are often served without much attention to flavor or presentation.

The mussels at the Belgian booth certainly won't taste bland: pairing them with roasted garlic cream sounds like a gutsy move but it will dramatically enhance the flavor of the mussels, perhaps to the point of overpowering them if the garlic is too liberal. The other risk you take with mussels is whether they've been cooked just long enough to be safe but not so long as to lose their tenderness.

Freshly Baked Waffles with Berry Compote and Whipped Cream

Maybe the Belgians thought steamed mussels with roasted garlic cream would be a hard sell and so they chose a second dish everyone likes: waffles. There's nothing extraordinary about waffles and I'm sure you've eaten them dozens of times both plain and topped with fruit.

A compote, however, is different than the glutinous, sickly sweet 'fruit paste' they dollop atop your pancakes at Perkins: to make a compote, large bits of fresh fruit (in this case, whole berries) are cooked over low heat with sugar and spices, then served as-is or spooned over things like ... waffles! But what will elevate this dish isn't so much the compote as the whipped cream which should be thick and freshly made, not scooped from a dish like Cool Whip or squirted from a can.

Beverages

The menu includes an eclectic mix of beer and iced coffee. Belgium brews fantastic beers but you won't get any of the really good ones here. Stella Artois is a mass-market lager readily available in the United States (and brewed mostly in the United Kingdom). Leffe is a mass-market pale ale with a higher alcohol content than the Stella Artois. The last of the bunch, Hoegaarden, is by far the best: it's a wheat beer (or Witbier) which has a spicier, fruitier taste than regular beer and looks cloudy in the glass. I drink a lot of wheat beer in the summer; not so much in cold weather.

But the most compelling beverage on the Belgian menu isn't beer but the Godiva Chocolate Iced Coffee, a good mate for the waffles or a take-away by itself.

Taste It or Waste It

Is the Belgian menu a disaster? Serving steamed mussels with garlic cream and waffles with whipped cream from the same booth is surreal, and I wouldn't order both because the garlic would do unspeakable things to the berry compote.

For most folks, the waffles will tempt more than the mussels. And we've got a match made in heaven here: sipping chocolate iced coffee with your waffle will fool your taste buds into thinking the berry compote is chocolate-covered. If you're in the park early, make a bee-line to Belgium and enjoy a late breakfast of waffles and chocolate coffee.

Otherwise, Belgium seems a bit of a disappointment. It's a shame there isn't something more substantial than mussels to accompany the beer, especially the Hoegaarden, one of my favorite wheat beers and a good traveling buddy to take with you to another booth with sturdier proteins. If you do order mussels, you'll want the lager or the pale ale since they're more capable of taming the garlic cream than the wheat beer.

The Series So Far: Argentina | Australia | Belgium | Brazil | Canada | Chile

Contact the Author: Bob McLain