The Food of Germany Part 1: Berlin!

Between 28 March and the early morning of 8 April, I went to Germany with my friends Andrea, Siew Ching, Shangyi and Joanna, to see its sights, enjoy its natural beauty, and--most importantly for this blog--to sample its cuisine! Now you'd think Germany is all about wurst, wurst, and more wurst (sausage, sausage and sausage!) but I assure you it isn't! ...Though wurst does play a big part, undeniably.

While by no means exhaustive (sometimes I forgot to take photographs before tucking in), I've managed to get most of the different things we ate--such an experience it was, too!

28 March: Berlin



Well, here's me posing in front of the Brandenburg Gate with a bottle of Berliner beer--yes, you can't come to Germany without trying its beer! Germany, after all, is possibly the only place in the world where beer actually manages to be cheaper than Red Bull. Yes, and in Munich, it even managed to be cheaper than mineral water!

But I'm jumping ahead of the story--for this bottle of Berliner had actually accompanied our first meal in Berlin--lunch.

This here is possibly Berlin's greatest culinary gift to the world--currywurst. It's amazing comfort food, and possibly the most common street food to be found sold in roadside stands, together with the foreignly-named pommes frites, which is just posh for French fries.

Currywurst taught me the value of curry powder as a condiment, instead of as a mere ingredient for curry. It's just a simple pork bratwurst, covered in ketchup (or some special tomato sauce for the more creative), and curry powder, and served mit brot (with bread). But it was absolutely delightful--the bratwurst was boiled till it was resistant but still soft, and the curry was a surprising burst of flavour that countered the now-boring tanginess of ketchup. Incidentally, currywurst is a Turkish creation--Berlin has one of the largest Turkish populations in Europe outside of their mother country. Hardly surprising that you see a doner kebab wherever you turn, then.

The four ladies I travelled with--from left, Andrea, Joanna, Shangyi and Siewching, digging into our Berlin street-food lunch near the Brandenberg Gate.

After a day of touring, we decided to find a restaurant that served local Berliner cuisine in order to sample what the old Margravate of Brandenberg had to offer. Andrea ordered this--a fried Camembert covered in blueberry jam, served with toast and salad. While technically a French dish (and built around the quintessential French cheese, too), this dish made me melt inside, much like the cheese had after frying. It was fascinating--the outer skin of fungus paper-thin after what moisture it had had been sweated out by the oil, and the cheese inside fragilely solid. The blueberry jam's sweetness balanced the sour-saltiness of the Camembert just right and lightened what might have been a cloying dish were it pure Camembert, since the only portion of the cheese whose taste was altered was the skin.

This is the distinctive meat dish of Berlin--a specialty that was created in this eastern region of Germany. Eisbein, or pickled pork knuckle, was my meal for the night. Served with sauerkraut (German pickled cabbage) this heavily-marbled cured knuckle made me very apprehensive when it was served, for all my desire to taste the famed German pork knuckle.

And with good cause too--my arteries just went clang when I set eyes upon it. The eisbein was boiled, allowing it to retain the pickled juices within the meat, with the meat turning really soft and supple, and incredibly fatty. It reminded me of Dongpo meat, 东坡肉, which is also just as fatty, but all over rather than just on the outside. Under the skin, the meat fell off the bone very easily, and was also extremely salty--enough that sodium-loving me could not remain completely impassive as I ate it. I confess to a slight cringe when I was hit with the intensity of the flavour for the first time.

This was only intensified when I took my first spoonful of sauerkraut.Pickled meat and pickled vegetables together is definitely not a dish for the unintrepid--it was sour, as expected, with a powdery, pasty texture. Sauerkraut is cabbage allowed to ferment in lactic-acid bacteria, so it is hardly surprising that it would be really sour, but nothing had prepared me for just how sour it was. The two combine for a sense that the more intense gourmand in me can only describe as shiok. Intense.

It was a blessing that the kartoffelsalat (potato salad) had been provided--it provided a mild, sweeter and creamier counterbalance to the eisbein and sauerkraut. On balance, the eisbein was not an experience I would care to repeat, that is to say, it was not much to my liking, because it was so fatty, and it was soft--a matter of personal preference. It did not also help that just that morning I had burned my tongue drinking hot coffee, so the acid of the sauerkraut and the brine-saltiness of the eisbein stung more than it should have on the still-scalded tongue of the morning.


29 March: Still Berlin

For lunch on the 29th we decided to go to Cafe Buchwald, a famous cake shop whose fare was good enough to merit a mention in the Dorling-Kindersley guide I was using to navigate us through Germany. Apparently, Buchwald goes back a long way--it was founded in 1852 and it used to supply the German imperial court with cakes! Impressive credentials indeed.

Prior to that, though, we decided to get some proper lunch. Unfortunately, it was Sunday and we had entered the suburbs after walking through the Tiergarten--a massive park in the middle of Berlin functioning as a kind of green belt--which meant that most shops and restaurants were not open, or at least not yet. We decided therefore to pop into the first place we saw, which turned out to be a Turkish doner kebab shop (to Siew Ching's delight). Doner kebab food is fairly common, so I'll not use up my photo memory allowance to feature it. Suffice to say, I had another currywurst, which I enjoyed somewhat more than the one I ate at the Brandenberg Gate since this one was roasted and hence somewhat harder and chewier.

But what really interested us was these two items being sold in the kebab store--on the left, Honigringe, or honey rings, which were really sweet honeyed sweetmeats, and on the right, baklava, a traditional Turkish sweetmeat said to have been invented in the Topkapi Palace of Istanbul to delight the tastebuds of Ottoman sultans. In order to explain what Honigring was, the shopkeeper flapped around and made a buzzing noise. Unfortunately, his flapping was not very flappy, so I thought he was shivering... It was easy to mistake the baklava for sausages, but that impression departs the moment one tastes it; their consistency and taste bear no similarity whatsoever with any form of wurst, being very sweet and soft.

By way of anticlimax, I shall confess that I was too enamoured with the really delicious and amazing-tasting cake in Buchwald, so much so that I quite completely forgot to take any pictures either of the place itself, or of the cakes. Whoops. But suffice it to say that those were the best cakes I have tasted in Germany, and I would be hardpressed to name any place else that has made a cake which has so touched me, apart from the Sweet Secrets cheesecake back home.


Here Joanna holds another specimen of German food--the humble pretzel! Which, I might add, grows to positively Olympian proportions here in Germany. The breze Joanna holds is the typical size sold in bakeries--but some of them can go up to twice the size. The real pretzel (ignore Auntie Anne's) is hard on the outside--hard enough to give your jaw an ache chewing through it, but really soft on the inside. Sometimes, too, they cut the pretzel open lengthwise and fill it. My favourite is a pretzel with a sour cream and chives filling--absolutely delightful. A thing to note about the German pretzel is that it is salty--indeed, many even have crystals of salt embedded in the outer surface, which not only imparts a speckly look to the pretzel but also provides surprising bursts of savour amidst the sweetness of the bread.

During dinnertime, we found ourselves yet again in Alexanderplatz--Alexander Square, where we had planned to have dinner since we saw it on the evening of the 28th. There happened to be a food market there, with various stalls and shops selling all kinds of food from local delicacies to cheeses from around the world, as well as a beer garden. Like a hawker centre, we decided to split and each get what we wanted.

I got this--a Flammkuchen, an Alsace-Lorraine dish shared with French cuisine. In French, it would be called a tarte flambee. Either way, it is the same thing--a circle of very thin dough covered in ingredient a la pizza, but laid on a base of what I thought was sour cream, instead of tomato puree sauce as in the Italian version. It is then baked in a wood oven and served hot. It cost me 6 euros for what I felt was a bit little, but it was worth every cent, and it was far more filling than it appeared for a bacon and onion Flammkuchen.

While I was digging into my flammkuchen, Andrea had gotten Fladen--essentially German flatbread. This was baked with pizza-type ingredients on top--cheese, bacon, and herbs, but the unique thing about the dish is definitely the bread. Flat, (hard but) crispy, and baked with sourdough, imparting it that distinctive and delicious slightly-sour taste, fladen is really nice when fresh out of the oven. Sadly, with the ingredients on top of the bread, it was a bit too heavy for flammkuchen-laden me. Even though I only helped Andrea finish a portion that she couldn't, it already sat on my stomach like a ton of bricks.

Wurst Part 2! This was Shangyi's dinner, with a bit of her ruby lips on the left. Called the Krakauer, it is a spiced sausage that the etymologically inclined will be able to tell, is named after the city of Krakow (or Cracow) in Poland. A Polish specialty not uncommon in this eastern part of Germany right next door to it, it was delicious and went very well with mustard. It had a slightly peppery taste, and was pretty generous in taste (it had lots of taste but spread out, neither intense nor weak.)



Last of this dinner series is this roti prata-like thing called Kartoffelkuchen--literally potato cake. It feels and tastes a bit like rosti, being potato held together by some sort of sticky stuff (not quite sure what), which when fried on a hotplate turns into a kind of pancake.

I wasn't very impressed by it, both appearance-, and taste-wise, as it was rather ordinary. But expectations of novelty aside, it was delicious, and also quite filling--definitely good wholesome German food. It was good enough for a meal for us, but undoubtedly it would only have been a light snack for the average German.

March 30: Berlin again (but after Potsdam)

The third day of our stay in Berlin wasn't technically a stay in Berlin proper--we took a daytrip out to Potsdam (which turned out to be a big disappointment, another story for another day), and ate loaves of bread and snacks that we had brought along with us on the way. Returning back to Berlin though, such plain fare was giving us one heck of an appetite, not to mention exhaustion from hunger, fatigue and a sleep deficit from staying overnight in Stansted that hadn't yet been completely repaid.

Not exactly wanting to eat eisbein again, and having run our way down the list of Berlin specialties (apparently), we opted instead for some good old English food--though technically it was an Irish pub we went to. The photo up there was my dinner--chicken breast chunks in creamy mushroom sauce and crinkle-cut fries. You absolutely cannot go wrong with any sort of meat in a creamy mushroom sauce. Except perhaps lamb which might be a bit too strong for it.

We had drinks to go with it, too--Shangyi and I had a Black Russian, which was a cocktail of vodka, Kahlua (oh how I love Kahlua), Coke and Guinness. Returning back to York I checked it up and realised that the recipe they used was highly unorthodox and creative particularly in the inclusion of the stout, since an original Black Russian is just the Kahlua and vodka alone. Andrea and Joanna had a Bailey's milkshake, which apparently turned out to be more ice than drink. I quite enjoyed the Black Russian--it was a very, very delicious taste. Given some other drink on the table (except Midori Lemonade, my all-time favourite), I would have liked the Bailey's more, being somewhat partial to it, but Kahlua just drives me through the ceiling with joy.


On our way to catch the sleeper train to Munich, we decided to while away the time at the train station by having our first German ice cream! Which was of course, just gelato, but still. There were some very interesting flavours there in the selection, and mine (in the foreground) consisted of Waldmeister flavour (the green scoop) and some egg liquor-flavoured thing on the top. Waldmeister, incidentally, is woodruff syrup, made from the plant known as Sweet Woodruff, or Wild Baby's Breath. Which I realise tells you absolutely nothing about how it tastes. But there isn't really much of a way to describe it except that it has similarities to Jagermeister, but without being so mellow and...woody. Lighter. Which, of course, tells you absolutely nothing too unless you've tasted Jagermeister.

With the ice cream ended our gastronomic adventures in Berlin, with its multinational food--I'd tasted Berlin/Brandenberg cuisine, but also Polish specialties and French crossovers. And even English/Irish food too! Next stop: Munich.