Bavarian Food And Beer

Beer kegs at the Paulaner brewery.

I'll start this post with some statements I never thought I would make. The beer in Bavaria was almost universally disappointing and was without doubt the part of my recent trip to Europe that fell farthest below my expectations. The food in Bavaria, on the other hand, was absolutely amazing; I loved almost every serious meal I ate while I was on vacation there. If you had asked me to describe my expectations for beer and food before I boarded my flight to Germany two months ago, I would have said I was looking forward to the beer more than most aspects of my trip and I was dreading the food. Something strange happened between the time I took off from Dulles Airport and arrived back in the United States ten days later.

When I arrived in Frankfurt and presented my passport to enter through immigration, I was asked the purpose of my visit. When I responded that I was on vacation, the follow on question was if I was visiting to drink German beer. I responded enthusiastically that I intended to drink a lot of German beer. About eight hours later, I was downing my first liter of dunkles beer at the Hofbrauhaus near the Marienplatz in Munich feeling a little let down and hoping that the rest of my beer drinking experience in Bavaria would be better. It was, but only a little.

Munich is surrounded by breweries; there are at least nine world renowned breweries in or near the city. The rest of Bavaria is not much different; there are breweries almost literally everywhere. Each brewery in Bavaria generally brews three types of beer: a helles, which is essentially a beer which tastes like Bud Light but with about twice the alcohol content; a dunkles, which is a little deeper in flavor and color than helles because of the roasted malt used in the brewing process; and a weissbier or German wheat beer, which is a chewy citrusy wheat beer.

My first mug of beer in Bavaria (in the foreground).

In addition to the breweries, Munich and the rest of Bavaria is full of bars and beer gardens. Each bar or beer garden is usually aligned with a single brewery meaning two things: you have no choice of beer brand when you sit down to drink and you typically have three types of beer to choose from: helles, dunkles and weissbier. That's it. That's all you can get. There are some exceptions to this rule. Sometimes, you can find a bar that serves a helles and dunkles brewed by one brewery and a weissbier brewed by a second but you still end up with three choices. Pretty daunting, especially if you consider it's impossible to find non-Bavarian beer in Bavaria. It made me realize the kind of creativity and variety in beer we can now get in the United States. It has to be one of the premier beer brewing nations, unconstrained by strict adherence to brewing tradition.

Before you lament my dilemma with only three beers to choose from, let me say that I really like German weissbier. It has a ton of delicious flavor with not too much yeast taste and the texture and body of the beer is wonderful. Think Samuel Adams Summer Ale if you need a point of comparison. It's so much more satisfying than Belgian style witbier, which I generally find watery and sometimes lacking in taste. Of all the weissbier I had on my trip, I thought the König Ludwig and Munich's Augustiner Bräu were the best although not by a lot. If you like the taste of weissbeer, I don't think you can really go too far wrong in Bavaria. But drinking weissbier for nine straight days was not why I came to Bavaria. 

Now because I like to work hard at finding good beer, I refused to let the situation presented to me keep me down. So I worked at it (meaning I kept drinking). Where I was frustrated with the limited beer selection in bars and beer gardens I visited, I found greater variety at breweries' official beer gardens. Hofbrauhaus offered four beers to choose from but Paulaner, Andechs Abbey and Hacker-Pschorr all offered at least five and the selection beyond the ubiquitous helles / dunkles / weissbeer choices were worth seeking out.

Both Hofbrauhaus and Hacker-Pschorr's beer gardens served a summer beer, which is a medium colored unfiltered lager with good body and far more taste than the helles or dunkles beer but without the sweeter yeasty taste you get from a weissbier. The Nockherberg beer available at the Paulaner beer garden had a similar profile and was perhaps the better of those three beers. I also found a bottled Hacker-Pschorr keller beer at the end of our Paulaner brewery tour (ironically) that was far tastier than the helles beer we were assaulted with at other places. I'd liken it more to a full bodied pilsener beer than the standard light German style lager we found elsewhere. Sometimes hard work pays off.

And then there's the food. If I had to give my impression of Bavarian food prior to my trip, I would have described it as meat and potatoes based and would have displayed very little enthusiasm for it at all. Add in to the equation an experience I had at an Alsatian restaurant in Paris on a trip I took in 2004 where I was served blood sausage and my piece of pork still had the pig's hair on it and I would say I was positively dreading the food possibilities on this trip. I've loved English, Dutch, Belgian and Finnish food on trips to Europe. I was absolutely not looking forward to food on this journey.

Spaetzle at Hacker-Pschorr's beer garden in Munich.

But I was surprised. And very pleasantly so. Of the first seven days I was in Bavaria, I think I ate sausages at some point on six of those days, before varying my diet just a bit the last three days. The sausages in Germany, be they frankfurters, bratwurst, knockwurst or whatever, are unlike American versions of those same foods. The grind on the meat is super fine, the casings snap and the taste is amazing. There's no gristle or hard crunchy things when you bite into them. I hate to say it was like eating hot dogs every day because the sausages tasted so much better but that's my only point of comparison. I do love hot dogs by the way. I would eat them every day if I thought it was healthy.

Sausages are eaten hot and cold in Bavaria. The cold salami I ate at Andechs Abbey and the weisswurst I ate on a beer and food tour in Munich were equally as good. And each type of sausage is paired with their own spicy or sweet mustard which improves the overall taste of the meat. I didn't see any blood sausage at any of the places I visited, although that's probably because I didn't visit the right (or wrong) places.

The best meal of the trip: pretzels and sausages at Andechs Abbey.

Besides the sausages, other highlights of Bavarian cuisine that I will long for include pretzels and spaetzle. The only real exposure I had to pretzels before this trip was at sporting events (think rock hard brown pretzels with tons of salt) and Rock Bottom Brewery (think fresh baked brown pretzels with tons of salt which get rock hard quick). The pretzels in Germany are works of art: crusty and slightly salty on the outside with warm doughy bread on the inside. And they are served with raw sliced white onion and a spiced cream cheese and butter mixture that is out of this world good. I would kill for some of that stuff right now. Also, for the record, raw white onion makes pretty much everything better. Call me crazy on that one.

I only managed to have spaetzle once on my trip, so the sample size is admittedly difficult to rely on, but the cheese spaetzle I had at the Hacker-Pschorr braureihaus was incredible. It was like a lighter, fluffier version of macaroni and cheese and it was absolutely delicious. If I ever go back, I'm having more spaetzle, if I can give up the sausages and pretzels.

Apple strudel in Salzburg.

Finally, a word about dessert. I'm not much of a dessert guy but I did have to have some apple strudel in both Germany and Austria (especially Austria). If there was a food I thought would be incredible but wasn't, it's the apple strudel. I found the three servings I had to be pleasant, with a lot of apple, but the traditional vanilla custard served with the strudel didn't do much for me and the plates I had were ultimately a little disappointing.

My advice to traveler seeking out good food and beer in Bavaria is this: find the kind of beer you like and drink your beer at brewery beer gardens if you have to; eat plenty of sausages and pretzels; and when presented a chance to eat cheese spaetzle, take it and don't look back. If you don't like it you can always order some more pretzels. Oh, and if you ever make it to Andechs Abbey, get some of the pork roast or convince a friend to get some and steal some of the crispy pork fat. Delicous. Prost!

The Original Mozartkugeln

For the last 20 or 30 years (here my memory is not reliable at all so I'm approximating), I have received from my mother on Christmas morning a box of Mozartkugeln. I don't know why she first bought me these chocolates but I'm guessing it is because they contained marzipan, which I loved as a kid growing up in England but which we struggled to find after we moved to the United States.

For the uninitiated, a Mozartkugeln (literally "Mozart ball") is a chocolate containing pistachio marzipan covered in a layer of nougat coated with dark chocolate and they are absolutely delicious. I love getting these chocolates for Christmas and they don't last long. I'd say mid-January at the latest and they are all gone. Just so I am clear on this, German nougat is traditionally a chocolate and hazelnut praline which is different than the term sometimes used to describe other candy in the United States; this ain't the same stuff in Snickers.

The Mozartkugeln my mother buys me are made by the Reber company located in Bad Reichenall in southeast Bavaria. But the origin of the Mozartkugeln is in the chocolates' namesake Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's home town of Salzburg, Austria. The chocolates were introduced to the world in 1890 by Paul Fürst, a Salzburg chocolatier. The original Mozartkugeln were a sensation if for no other reason than they were spherical, which Fürst achieved by placing the marzipan and nougat ball on a stick, dipping it in chocolate and setting it to dry vertically on the stick. When the chocolate had dried, the stick was removed and the hole filled with chocolate. The Mozartkugeln was then wrapped in Fürst's signature blue and silver foil for sale. I know the method of achieving spherical chocolates is not revolutionary, but we're talking 1890 here.

The contenders: the original Mozartkugeln in my right hand; the Reber version in my left.

Until this month, I had never had a Mozartkugeln other than the ones my mother buys me. But on July 4 of this year, I visited Cafe Fürst in Salzburg to sample an original Mozartkugeln or two. I came to Europe equipped with a few Reber Mozartkugeln, afraid that I would be unable to find these in Salzburg, so I could compare. My fears in this regard were completely unfounded. In addition to being able to purchase them in a ton of stores, Reber actually has at least two stores of their own in Salzburg's altstadt. The taste test was on!

I started with the incumbent and very familiar Reber that I had brought with me (purchased at Cafe Mozart in D.C. in case you live near Washington and want to go get some of your own).  The original Mozartkugeln, as I mentioned before, contains pistachio marzipan wrapped in nougat. The Reber version is a departure from the original. It actually has three layers below the chocolate coating: a center of nougat, the marzipan which makes up way more than 50% of the candy's volume, and a final layer of nougat outside the marzipan. It's sort of a Mozartkugeln in reverse.

Because of the proportion of the ingredients, the Reber Mozarkugeln tastes almost entirely of the pistachio marzipan, with only a faint hint of chocolate flavor. For the marzipan lover, it's always a delicious bite and satisfies very well the craving for this ingredient that I brought with me as a kid to the United States.

The Reber Mozartkugeln.

After I devoured the Reber candy in two quick bites, the Fürst Mozartkugeln was next, freshly purchased from the Cafe Fürst on the Alter Markt for one Euro. Biting into the Fürst version is quite different than the Reber candy. It is a true Mozartkugeln, containing the traditional pistachio marzipan center wrapped in a hazelnut and chocolate nougat.

The taste is sweeter and way more chocolate forward, a conclusion easily drawn from comparing the amount of chocolate in the picture below to the chocolate above. The taste of hazelnut is also prominent and who doesn't love hazelnut and chocolate? Overall the flavor is more complex. You can taste the chocolate first and foremost, followed by the hazelnut and then finally the pistachio marzipan. It's way more layered than the Reber version, rather than being all about the marzipan. It also has the nostalgic charm of being the original, rather than an imitation. Authenticity appeals to me.

Cafe Fürst's original Mozarkugeln.

I intended to visit Salzburg to find the true Mozartkugeln and declare a winner in my taste test. To this end, I enlisted my friends Mike and Bryan, giving them each one Mozartkugeln from each contender. I believe I did find the true Mozartkugeln but I can't declare a winner. I am a complete sucker for original things and usually disdain copies. But while the Fürst is undoubtedly richer and more complex, it was a little sweet for me and doesn't hit you over the head with marzipan flavor, which for me is what eating these chocolates is all about. I liked both, but if I could only have one for the rest of my life, I'd opt for the Reber. I just love them too much.

The original Mozartkugeln was well liked by our taste test panel. Mike and Bryan actually both preferred the Fürst Mozartkugeln. That doesn't make it a 2-1 victory. It's my blog after all.

Rock Me Amadeus

Salzburg Cathedral seen through one of the cannon ports in Fortress Hohensalzburg.

It's been three weeks now since I've returned from Bavaria. My blogging has been derailed by a trip to Vegas and a visit with my niece but I think it's about time I got back to my what-I-did-on-my-summer vacation posts before the impressions of that trip become too dulled by the liters of German beer I consumed while over there.

After four nights in Munich, my Bavarian itinerary took me to Salzburg, Austria for a couple of days before returning back to Germany for three more nights. The side trip to Salzburg was primarily to get us closer to the Berchtesgaden National Park but I thought crossing the border would allow us to take in the culture of a different city, learn a little bit about the city's most famous son, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and find some apple strudel.

The trip from Munich to Salzburg by train takes about two hours, about the same time as it took to get to Hohenschwangau two days earlier. And just like the trip to Hohenschwangau, the ride to Austria takes you from the flat country around Munich into the beginnings of the Alps, although the terrain becomes hillier way sooner. You start to see mountains in the distance about a half an hour into the journey and the climb is pretty obvious.

As a city, Salzburg is a lot smaller than where we had been the previous few days, with a population of about 200,000 compared to over 1.3 million in Munich in an area about one fifth the size. Both cities have an old city or altstadt. Munich's is walkable in about 30-45 minutes; Salzburg's takes about 15. The city is established along the river Salzach and is situated around a large hill which is topped by a forbidding looking castle. The altstadt, complete with the church after church after church which are ubiquitous in Bavaria, sits at the bottom of the hill. The entirety of Salzburg's altstadt is designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site for its collection of baroque buildings. Perhaps embarrassingly, we compared walking down the streets of the altstadt to walking in the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas. What can I say...we are sometimes very American.

Settlement in the Salzburg area stretches back to before the time of Christ but the place became the beginnings of today's city in the late seventh century under the Archbishopric of Salzburg. From that time until the city's surrender to Napoleon in 1803, the city was church run, with the succession of Archbishops of Salzburg as the city's top official. There were times that the city was part of the Holy Roman Empire during this period, but whoever the Archbishop was at the time remained essentially the ruler of the city. This was very much a revelation for me. I had run out of time to research the history and importance of the city prior to starting this trip. As it turned out, the two major buildings we visited were both built by the Archbishopric and served as very different illustrations of that office's power.

The most prominent building in Salzburg is Fortress Hohensalzburg (literally high salt fortress - Salzburg was named for salt, the source of its wealth), first erected atop the city's highest hill in the year 1077 and added to over the subsequent centuries. Construction of the fortress was started by Archbishop Gebhard von Helfenstein as protection from the Holy Roman Emperor in the event that there was some dispute between the Emperor and the seated Pope because the Archbishop would inevitably take the side of the Pope. Apparently in those days, disputes could easily devolve into armed conflicts. Actually it's probably not much different today. 

After a couple of days climbing large hills / small mountains in Hohenschwangau and Andechs, the climb to the base of Fortress Hohensalzburg looked daunting. Fortunately, we elected to spend a couple of extra Euros on the funicular ride which got us to the top in about two minutes. Once you are at the base of the fortress, the entire city of Salzburg becomes visible and you can really understand how packed the altstadt is.

The Fortress itself is huge. It's like a small city built to hold the entire population of Salzburg in condensed form. It is without doubt a real castle built to withstand sieges, unlike the two castles I visited in Hohenschwangau two days earlier. The Fortress was equipped with its own water and salt stores for curing food, meaning the city had the ability to withstand assault for some time. The Fortress, as it turns out, was never taken by force and that's very easy to understand having visited. Not that I'd want to try to take over any castle, but looking up at Fortress Hohensalzburg, the thought of conquering it seems extremely daunting. The only time it was ever turned over was when the region surrendered to Napoleon during his conquest of Europe.

Interior of Fortress Hohensalzburg.

From the tower of Fortress Hohensalzburg looking about 8 km to the south, one can make out Hellbrun Palace at the base of a small hill. This was our next destination. Just like the Fortress, Hellbrun Palace was also built by the Archbishopric of Salzburg. But instead of being built for protection of the entire city, Hellbrun Palace was built basically as a day trip getaway for the Archbishop to party with neighboring noblemen. I'm not kidding.

The Palace was built from 1613-1619 by Archbishop Markus Sittikus von Hohenems. Apparently the Archbishopric was flush with cash in the early 1600s because the whole place was built entirely for his own amusement. The property features a small palace (OK, small for a palace) with room after room for entertaining and then vast gardens with the main attraction being a series of fountains to entertain, soak and sometimes just make fun of guests visiting for the day.

The highlight here truly is the fountains and I can imagine at the time these were first built that they were amazing to behold. There are static fountains featuring many many ibexes (the Archbishop's personal symbol); man made grottoes with fountains made to amuse visitors; various scenes featuring mechanical figures which move based on the movement of water nearby; and hidden fountains designed purely to douse the guests.

Some of these fountains, all seen via a timed tour, are actually really remarkable considering they were built 400 years ago. The most impressive for me was the fountain that elevates and lowers a shining crown on a column of water. The rise and fall of the crown symbolizes the rise and fall of royal power, which to me just illustrates how much power the church enjoyed 400 years ago in Salzburg. They clearly thought they would outlast royal rule. I guess nobody rules forever.

The Roman Fountain. If you go and the guide asks for volunteers to sit at the table, do it. But sit at the head. Trust me.

The juxtaposition of these two attractions on this day was not intentional but provided a good overview of the history of the city before exploring some lesser attractions. The remainder of our time in Salzburg was spent roaming the altstadt; eating and drinking; and visiting the two Mozart themed attractions, his birthplace and his family's residence. If you decide to go to these last two, take my advice and just visit his birthplace. The building is original to Mozart (rather than a reconstruction like the residence) and tells the story far more authentically and thoroughly than the residence. If your aim is to know how to identify portraits of Mozart, go to the residence. It covers that subject in great detail throughout its six rooms. For me it offered little else.