You can read Part 1 here.
There are a couple of sure signs that winter is around the corner in Munich. As the tourists start trickling out after Oktoberfest, council workers start to uproot the fading summer blooms from the parks. When we’re all reaching for our scarves and gloves off the back shelf, a mysterious hand is turning off the water supply to the dozens of fountains that give the city its nickname: “the northernmost city in Italy”. And a few weeks later, the army of statues around the city is boarded up with wooden planks to protect them against the impending snow and ice.
Basically, Munich goes from looking like this:
To something more like this:
A little depressing, no?
Fortunately, it’s not all doom and gloom. Even as the statues and the flowers and the fountains are disappearing, there are equally wonderful things popping up around Munich in early winter. One of the nicest things has to be the roast chestnut stands. These little wooden shacks are now appearing on street corners all over the city, wafting out a superb aroma each time the roaster is opened to serve the next customer. The nuts come in a little paper cone, still in their shells, which have a little score in them to let the steam escape during roasting. After releasing each chestnut from its shell, I like to just hold it in my hand for a bit – they have this really nice wrinkly, glossy texture. Plus, they keep your fingers warm. They taste nutty, of course, and just a little bit sweet, and are softer than other types of roasted nuts. Delicious. I’d never tasted chestnuts before moving to Germany, but quickly became a fan. Especially after the best ice creamery in the universe, Ballabeni, started selling chestnut-Grand Marnier ice cream. YUM.
The chilly half of the year is when the local fare here really comes into its element. A plate of German food will generally be a canvas of brown and beige, which is a much more appetising proposition when you’re coming in from the cold than when you’re sweltering in summer heat. (Although in the latter case, a nice refreshing mug of beer is probably all you need to put you right.)
I’ll start with this warning: Germany is not a good place to be vegetarian. You can get by, and Käsespätzle (cheesy egg noodles with deep fried onions) is undeniably delicious. But unsurprisingly, the cuisine here does heavily favour the omnivore.
Pork is the staple meat, and it’s knocked about into a wide variety of forms, from your dead simple Schweinebraten, or roast pork (best purchased from an Imbiss, or takeaway food stall, sandwiched between two halves of crusty bread and slathered with yellow mustard), to more esoteric forms such as leberwurst (pork liver ground up with fat and spices and stuffed into sausage casing – sounded a little iffy to me at first, but it’s fabulous spread thickly on a good fresh slice of Dunkelbrot or dark bread). Falling somewhere between those two on the spectrum is Germany’s most famous contribution to world cuisine: the sausage. Each region has its own sausage specialty – Munich’s are leberkäse (literally “liver cheese”, but actually neither – it’s kind of a strange meatloaf – not my favourite), and weißwurst, or white sausage (a very mildly-flavoured veal sausage that’s boiled and served with pretzels and sweet whole-grain mustard). In Berlin and Hamburg (they still fight about who thought of it first) it’s currywurst – a fried sausage chopped up and doused in “spicy” (by German standards) ketchup and sprinkled with curry powder. I won’t get caught in the crossfire of who invented it, I’ll just tell you that it’s delicious. Especially scharf currywurst, which is currywurst sprinkled with chilli so it actually has some kick to it.
Along with currywurst, my equal-favourite sausage has to be the little finger sausages they make in Franconia – the northernmost part of the modern state of Bavaria. You have to eat them hot off a wood-fired grill, teetering on a nice tall hillock of sauerkraut, with half a litre of Weißbier to wash it all down.
Oh yeah, that’s the stuff.
The Bavarians also make a mean roast duck. I’d only eaten roast duck once before, when my friend Andy Ta took me after uni one day to his favourite dodgy back alley Chinese diner in Sydney’s Chinatown. It was insanely good, but the solid layer of fat under the oh-so-fabulous crispy skin was so OTT compared to what I normally eat, that it scared me off duck altogether for a long time. But once I got to Bavaria and discovered that it’s a local specialty here too, I figured that eating roast duck twice in five years was not going to give me a heart attack. So I tried it, which I’m glad for, because the Bavarian version is so amazing. It comes floating in a delicious thin gravy with a big round potato dumpling and blaukraut (red cabbage). It’s not as ridiculously fatty as Chinese-style roast duck, but still fatty enough that the skin is crispy perfection, and the meat is tender and moist and flavourful. Phwoar.
My other favourite German dish is sauerbraten, or literally, “sour roast”. The name doesn’t sound very appetising, but we’re talking beef marinated and braised for an entire day till it’s meltingly tender and then doused in its own gravy, which, let’s admit it, can never be a bad thing. Apparently in the old days sauerbraten was always made with horse meat, until that stopped being cool in Germany. The funny thing is that whenever you order sauerbraten, you will get a different-tasting dish in each restaurant. That bewildered me for a while, until I read that just like sausages, there are many regional spins on sauerbraten, with completely distinct spice mixes used in different parts of Germany. Once I figured that out, I realised that what I really like is Fränkischer Sauerbraten, or the sauerbraten from Franconia.
This was a recipe I simply had to take out of the country with me. So I went and looked up some recipes online. Guess what is the magic ingredient in Franconian sauerbraten? Soßenlebkuchen, or a special milder type of lebkuchen (gingerbread) that’s used to make savoury sauces. Yes, lebkuchen, one of my favourite things in the whole world. In sauce. On meat. GENIUS. That’s the only way I can describe this.
I mentioned that the vast majority of German food is brown and beige – but that’s not to say it’s a bad thing. Because the Germans actually do amazing things with beige and brown ingredients. Wondrous, magical things. And I grew up eating Indian food, which is similarly transformative of humble vegetables, so my bar for wondrous and magical is reasonably high.
Let’s take the cabbage, for example: perhaps the most maligned and unromantic of all vegetables. Not only is it cheap and commonplace, it also makes you fart. But in the hands of a good German cook, it becomes one of the stars of the plate. Our hero, the cabbage, is shredded and boiled in wine for an hour or more, making friends along the way with such delicious spices as juniper berries, cumin and bay leaves. He comes off the stove transformed: he is now sauerkraut (“sour cabbage”) if he was a white cabbage, or blaukraut (“blue cabbage” – don’t ask me why) if he was a red cabbage. He is warm, tasty, and loved by everyone around him. Talk about ugly duckling to swan.
When you grow up in Australia, you learn that Captain Cook forced the entire crew of the Endeavour to eat sauerkraut to ward off scurvy, and famously, they complained about it incessantly all the way to Sydney. So when I finally ate it for myself, I was especially surprised at how good sauerkraut really is. But apparently the Endeavour’s galley chefs were missing a crucial ingredient or two, because the Royal Navy later switched to drinking concentrated lime juice for scurvy prevention – to me, a much less appetising proposition.
Given all the good food here, which with few exceptions is rather punishing on the waistline, I’m pretty proud of myself for only having put on five pounds or so in over a year of living in Germany. Although, I may leave with a few more bonus pounds, trying to hit up all my favourite dishes one last time before I leave Munich in three weeks! I didn’t expect to love the food here as much as I did - German cuisine doesn’t have the same hallowed reputation as that of its neighbours like France and Italy. But whenever I come back, and I hope that will be soon, I’ll definitely be coming hungry.
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