My Love Affair with German Food

I'm going to be honest and say that I'm not the biggest carnivore the world has ever seen. I go through meat phases, but generally avoid pork because it's just how I was raised. I knew that traveling to Germany would be a meat-filled experience, so I told myself I was just going to let everything go and embrace the meats. And boy, I'm so glad I did.

I'm going to go through some German specialties and local phenomenons I experienced.

First of all, the bakeries. You couldn't go anywhere without passing at least two Baeckerei. The bakery is the place to be, pretty much anytime before dinner. You stop in on your way to work or school for a coffee and a pastry. I can tell you that Schokocroissants were my sweet standby, but I also switched it up and got apple pastries, almond pastries, or when spring hit, rhubarb pastries! There was the sweet and also, perhaps even more importantly, the savory. Brezeln (Pretzels). Butterbrezeln. The Germans do amazing things with pretzels. They slice them in half and spread them with gobs of butter. They cover them with melted cheese and little bits of ham. Sometimes they make sandwiches out of them. Then, there's Lauge-anything, which I interpreted to be pretzel bread. Laugenbroetchen (lye rolls) or Laugenstange (lye baguettes--literally "sticks"), gorgeous, shiny brown breads with chewy soft centers, topped with salt. Many places made sandwiches, and indeed I purchased many a Laugenstange sandwich from the little cafe in the forestry school building where I had my Uni classes.

This is a Laugenstange. The sight of it nearly brings me to tears.

This brings me to an important note, on German use of condiments. In Germany, butter is the condiment most used on sandwiches. Meat, cheese, lettuce, tomato, butter. I have to admit I was a little bit weirded out when I first noticed that I was eating gobs of butter, not mayonnaise, but I learned to love it. And mustard is reserved for Wurst. 

Back to bakeries, everything is lined up behind the glass and when it's gone, it's gone. By late afternoon there's just a few things left, and the bakeries close up shop as soon as their products are gone. 

German bread is in my opinion, without equal. The bakers created such dense, hearty loaves of bread, sometimes studded with every kind of seed imaginable. A sandwich on German bread, or even just a slice of toast with a smear of Nutella (my breakfast every morning), is unparalleled by anything American. Pre-sliced sandwich bread isn't really a thing in Germany. People go to the bakery, or the open-air market, or the separate bakery part of every grocery store for their daily bread. And if you happen to shop at Aldi, they've got an amazing Brotautomat, which is basically a bread vending machine. You press the button next to the picture of the bread you want, and out pops a fresh loaf, still steaming.

The Aldi Brotautomat. Press button. Get bread.

I would buy the densest, seediest, most whole-grain loaf of bread I could find, which means I got a lot of Dinkelvollkorn Brot, which I guess translates to "whole grain spelt?" When I was feeling on the lighter side, I'd go for Bauernbrot, which translates to "farmer bread," which was more of a sourdough. A lot of the loaves were small and square, I wonder if it's because people would buy their bread daily and want only what they could eat in a day or two before it got stale. Pre-sliced sandwich bread was not a big thing at all, in fact prepackaged bread in general was slim in grocery stores. If you bought bread at the grocery store, you bought it at the separate bakery at the front of the store.

Oh, the bread offerings!

My favorite breakfast/snack.

Such good bread.

Germans seem to have an obsession with Eis. Ice cream. There were Eiscafes everywhere in Freiburg, and I was fortunate to live in the neighborhood of Limette, arguably one of the best ice cream places in town. There were 0,90 Euro Kugeln (scoops) everywhere, so I spent a lot of my loose change on Eis. Eiscafes generally serve a variety of coffee drinks, as well as coffee+ ice cream drinks, and amazing ice cream sundaes and creations. In Germany, ice cream is ART. Most ice cream dishes come artfully arranged with slices of fruit and a wafer cookie sticking out, but by far the most interesting phenomenon is Spaghettieis. It's an ice cream sundae made to look like spaghetti: a mound of whipped cream covered with a tangle of spaghetti-like strands of vanilla ice cream, topped with a strawberry sauce for marinara, and white chocolate shavings for parmesan. Every Eiscafe worth its weight in salt features Spaghettieis on its menu. One of the fancier places in town, Cafe Incontro, had a whole section of its menu reserved for meals recreated in ice cream: I'm pretty sure they had lasagne and pizza and all sorts of things; wish I took a picture of the menu. Even in cool weather, I would see tons of Germans walking around with ice cream cones. When my Ecology professor told my group how to get to our research site, he oriented us based where the nearest ice cream shop was, and he told us we had to stop there to try the Eis. So we did, every day after we collected our samples.

A quick search for "Eiskarte" (ice cream menu) yields results like this.

So many varieties of Spaghettieis!

Here's a closeup, so I can prove I'm not lying to you.

Germans also have a wondeful afternoon tradition of Kaffee und Kuchen (coffee and cake), sometimes called Kaffeklatsch. Between lunch and dinner, people gather for a break and enjoy a cup of hot coffee or tea and a slice of cake. It was a really nice excuse to eat dessert at 4pm.

Kaffe und Kuchen exhibit A.

Kaffee und Kuchen exhibit B. 

Kaffee und Kuchen exhibit C, at the Ritter Sport Bunte-Schockowelt factory in Berlin.

Speaking of Ritter Sport, that was my favorite German chocolate. Thick square bars of chocolate with clever resealable packages; it quickly became our mission to try every single variety. We were lucky enough to stumble upon a Ritter Sport factory store in Berlin, which pretty much made my life.

One time I decided to save all of my Ritter Sport wrappers to see how much I ate, and that was a very bad idea. 

Finally, no discussion of German food would be complete without Wurst. Sausage, duh! Every region of Germany has its own special variety of Wurst, but I couldn't really keep them straight. There were red ones and brown ones and white ones, spicy ones and pork ones and lamb ones and fat ones and little tiny ones, ones you ate in a roll with mustard and ones you ate with a fork and knife with potato salad and greens. There were also ones filled with cheese. There's also Currywurst, which is really big in Berlin: steamed, then fried cut-up sausage with curry ketchup. In Freiburg, the best and cheapest lunch was Wurst from the Muenstermarkt; the daily farmer's market outside of the cathedral. You could tell where the best place to go based on how long the line was: I think Pauls was generally thought of as the best.

Wurst from the Muensterplatz. Hot dog buns are not a thing. Your Wurst will stick out of the bread, sometimes a lot. 

Currywurst mit Pommes. French fries are served with mayonnaise in Europe.

I'll be honest, I found Bavarian Weisswurst to be pretty weird. It's white and spongy and boiled. It's said you have to eat it before noon because it's traditionally made in the morning and is super perishable.

But WAIT. I forgot one of my most important discoveries of all: doener kebab, and a brief lesson in German-Turkish history! So Germany has a huge population of Turkish people, mostly because it opened up the country to Gastarbeiter ("guest workers") to help rebuild the nation's infrastructure after it got razed in World War II. Lots of Turkish people (and also Italians) moved to Germany to work, some just made money and then went back home, others remained in Germany. Turkish food is basically the Mexican food of Europe...it's cheap fast food available in lots of places, especially Germany. The specialty is Doener Kebap, meat shaved from a vertical rotisserie and served in a pita or wrapped in a tortilla-like bread called a Yufka with a red cabbage slaw, onions, cucumber, a garlic yogurt sauce, and chili flakes. It comes in lamb, veal, or chicken variety and quickly became one of my favorite meals. Doner places were very popular with the young crowd and were the restaurants open the latest, so I enjoyed many a Doner on my way home from the bars... The Turkish restaurants also served great falafel, amazing salads, and baklava. There was a strict division among my friends about which place served the best doener in Freiburg: Euphrat or Uni-Doener.

See? Even Angela Merkel likes Doener.

One of the many ways to eat a Doener.