Jennifer's German Food Blog

If you've visited Germany in the summer, one of the biggest treats is to go to the Italian ice cream shop (Eisdiele), sit in the shade of an umbrella and order a sundae. German ice cream sundaes often contain liqueurs and fruits, are less sweet than in the US and not as large. That's why you can indulge without as much guilt. That and you walk everywhere.

Try this recipe for Fresh Cherry Sauce and make your own sundaes.

I love to eat at friend's houses because you get good food and companionship but don't have to do the dishes or pay the bill. When we had people over we made the vinaigrette for the salad in the bottom of the mixing bowl, whisking garlic, mustard, oil and vinegar together and then tossing the salad fixings in it. When we went to friends, they often served their salad with a thin, white sauce. It tasted really nice but I could never figure out what it was or how to duplicate it. It took several years to realize that all it was made out of was cream, lemon juice and a bit of sugar! Try the ratios in this little Cream Dressing recipe and see if you like it.

If you are looking to duplicate tastes that you had in Germany, this is the right place to go. Try asking around in the German Food Forum, where many experts in German Food can comment on their solutions. If you are an expert, make sure you chime in with your ideas and recipes!

Germans seem to be very concerned with what goes into their mouths and bodies, more than most Americans are. At least it appears so from the litigation going on in Germany and the EU about chickens, milk, trans-gene food and the like. The next story I am going to talk about has been going on for a couple of years and involves a potato with the prosaic name of Linda.

Linda is a tasty potato variety on the market for 30 years. A couple of years ago, Linda was suddenly pulled from the market. Why? Its patent was about to run out and the company selling Linda seed stock decided that there were better potatoes more disease resistance out there. These better potatoes were, you guessed it, still under patent.

Linda is especially liked by organic farmers, who were looking forward to it being royalty free, too. They have been fighting "Big Corporate" ever since. Read on for the whole story...

Click for larger image

Looking for a potato salad that you can take on a picnic? One with no mayonnaise? Look no further. This salad with a bacon vinaigrette-style sauce is actually meant to be eaten warm or room temperature, which enhances the sweet-sour nature of the sauce.

This is a traditional-style German potato salad with bacon. Here is another, good, Swabian potato salad recipe from Germany. It's made with broth and vinegar and seasoned with onions and mustard. It can be made vegetarian by using vegetable broth.

A long time ago, on my first visit to Germany as an exchange student I lived with a family from down south in Swabia. Their grandmother dubbed me "die kleine Backfee", or little baking sprite and gave me her recipe for a very simple cake that is baked in a bread form. It's a Rührkuchen , like the well-known Königskuchen (rum, raisins and orangeat), which we might call a one-bowl cake.

This cake has as its highlight almost a pound of chocolate bars chopped up into little 1/2 inch bits in a vanilla cake batter. It freezes well, so that even small households can bake this cake and warm up a slice or two at a time. I really like it with a cup of tea as an afternoon pick-me-up.
Recipe here.

I was slumming at the natural food store yesterday when I came across real German breads. These are variations of "Vollkornbrot" or "Schwarzbrot" which are very dense, with whole grain kernels in them. A five hundred gram (17 ounce) package cost between $2.29 and $2.75, which I thought was a good deal compared to buying them online and paying for shipping.

Vitamin Cottage (store locations) sells "Mestermacher" brand (3-grain, whole rye and sunflower seed flavors) and "Genuine Bavarian" (multigrain, pumpernickel, rye oat and some others) in Colorado, Texas and Albuquerque, New Mexico. Or you can order from them online here.

Still looking for other breads? I have a list of bakeries that ship fresh bread, here.

President Bush visited Germany in June, 2008. Apparently, some of the German press thought that Herr Bush did not enjoy his dinner of white asparagus, so in this press conference he loudly proclaimed his passion for the delicate vegetable. See it at minute 4:53 on the tape.

"The German asparagus are fabulous."—Meseberg, Germany, June 11, 2008

Now that the dairy farmers have begun delivering milk again, we breath a sigh of relief, knowing that we will still be able to buy fresh milk in the future. Because German agriculture has been historically a lot of pasture and dairy, a majority of our recipes have some dairy product in them.

Take, for instance, these "Milchhoernchen", or milk rolls. The proteins and sugars in the milk make a soft dough, which transforms into a "melt-in-your-mouth" roll. They are especially good warm from the oven and spread with butter and jam. The photo shows the roll filled with cinnamon and sugar. This other close up shows "Milchhoernchen" with a chocolate filling.

Photos © J.McGavin

Common Carp (Cyprinus carpio) is eaten in just about every country as a delicacy, but regarded as a "trash fish" in the US. Introduced in the 1800s from China, they eat grass and underwater plants and grow large (up to 90 pounds). They thrive in slow moving waters, ponds and lakes. The carp pictured (right) weighs about 10 pounds and was shot with a bow and arrow on Crawford Reservoir, Colorado in June.

It's the same kind of carp that the Germans like to take home and eat at Christmas time. In my German hometown, the official "fishermen" took an electric fence and pulled it from one side of the lake to the other so they could pull out the carp alive, but we don't fish for carp that way in the US.

Here is a carp recipe that is as good in the middle of summer as it is at Christmas. It uses a fish and bread stuffing and can be made with whole fish or filets.

Photo © J.McGavin

Correction: This carp was originally identified as Grass Carp, Ctenopharyngodon idella.

The EU (European Union) is getting ready for a vote on whether packaged chicken should be imported from the US (German article here). This is a sore point all over Europe: The Bush administration has repeatedly asked the EU to repeal their import-stop on chickens, and allow free trade to occur (one paragraph in this article near the bottom) and now it looks as if Brussels is going to allow it, even though a majority of citizens reject the idea. Strangely enough, the US coverage of Bush's European trip omits this topic almost completely.

There are the obvious objections to importing chicken: the Europeans have stricter animal rights laws which they should want to uphold, for one; and shipping a cheap, perishible commodity halfway around the world with today's gas prices being number two. But the biggest problem right now is that the US chickens are dipped in a chlorine solution to disinfect them after being slaughtered.

While there is no proof that this is harmful to human health, there is little proof that it is safe, at least Europeans think so. They point to chemical reactions that occur with chlorine and meat that do not occur when disinfecting water, for instance. These reactions might be mutagenic, which could lead to cancer with high enough exposure. They also say that the US hygiene does not have to be as high as in the EU, which makes it less expensive to prepare chicken meat for market.

The EU may be caving to US insistence on a free market, however. A final vote is expected in the next few weeks (June or July, 2008). What do you think about disinfecting chickens with chlorine? Comment here and let's see if we can understand this issue better!

Also, if you feel like you don't want to eat chicken for awhile, try one of these recipes:

• Vegetarian Hamburger Patties
• Grilled Stuffed Chili Rellenos
• Grilled Tofu

Photo © Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images