Hungry in Berlin

We’d been hearing about it for years: a huge Vietnamese market somewhere in the deep east, where the freshest herbs and vegetables you could want for your Chinese, Thai, and Vietnamese cooking were available, and the space was dotted with lunch-stands serving many kinds of phô, the famous beef-and-noodle soup. The question was, where was it?

Which was exactly the question we found ourselves asking yesterday noon, as four of us, in two cars, in the wilds on the border of Lichtenberg and Marzahn, pored over cell-phones and GPS units, looking for this place one of us had scrupulously researched on the Internet. As it turned out, we’d found where it had been, but where was it now?

Eventually, an answer bubbled out of cyberspace: the word Herzbergstrasse appeared on a cell-phone, and buttons were pressed, speculation was tossed around, and eventually our caravan made its chaotic way towards the Dong Xuan Center, another planet in the Berlin cosmos.

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No, not the classic Homer & Jethro album, but a query from a reader:

I was wondering if you all at Hungry In Berlin know if there are any places
around Berlin to pick wild berries this summer. There are so many woods I was
hoping to get some good picking in. This applies also to wild fruit, veggies,
mushrooms, etc! Thanks in advance, any advice is appreciated.

We immediately forwarded this question to our Far South Berlin correspondent, for no better reason than she lives closer to the woods than any of the rest of us, and sure enough, she had an answer for us:

Spargelhof Kleistow is a good stop for picking strawberries and high bush blueberries (don’t know what else to call them). Thankfully not so much bending involved, although the inside of the berry is white, not blue. But generally very good, big flavorful berries.

You can buy all sorts of fresh local produce and bread in their store, they also have a restaurant and places to play for the kids. They have a lot of festivals, too, which certain short, underaged people in the family enjoy.

Any of our other readers know of pick-your-own places in the vicinity? Tomatoes near Werder? Apples in Brandenburg? And are there any laws regulating mushrooming or wild-berry picking on what might be private land? Because come fall, the woods are filled with mushroomers.

For a very short time, it’s asparagus season in Germany. No matter that asparagus fields will continue to produce into the early summer: local tradition decrees that it is over on June 1. Only clueless foreign vegetable stands (ie, those run by Turks or Vietnamese, which is where I prefer to buy my vegetables anyway) will continue to offer any.

And now let me introduce some heresy: I just don’t like white asparagus, which is what you mostly find in the markets here. It’s flavorless, has no discernable vitamins, and is usually masked by some ultra-rich sauce to distract you from its blandness. Nope, I grew up with green asparagus, and that’s what you’ll find on my table.

There are some advantages to having this preference: for one thing, the elevated cost of thick white spears is outrageous, as is the fetishistic insistence on all-white (as opposed to “purple,” which has the tips in the process of turning green — horrors!). Green asparagus — when you can find it — is cheaper. Plus, the best green asparagus is thin, and, thanks to our overlords in Brussels, listed as Class III. The best, cheapest asparagus I’ve ever found in Berlin was courtesy of a couple of ladies who’d set up in the Winterfeldtplatz market to dump this “trash” at about a Euro a kilo.

You can find green asparagus for €1.50 to €2 a 500-gram bundle all over the place at the moment, coming in from Greece and Spain, so make the most of it. I like it steamed and covered with a garlicky balsamic vinaigrette, or garlic butter, but I also make a killer pasta dish out of it.

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I thought it was a gimmick. A joke. Purple carrots, die neue Möhrensorte; just 99 cents a bag at our local Extra. Maybe they’ve even been there forever, and I just haven’t noticed them before this week.

Turns out they’re quite serious, older in fact than orange carrots, and genuinely tasty. The Brits among you may be more familiar with these; I see from an old BBC article that they landed on UK shores a half-decade ago. I think they’re in some farmer’s markets in the States too, but certainly not in any grocery store I’ve ever seen. And I’ve certainly never cooked with them.

As you can see from the picture, die Möhre Violett or purple carrot is a dark, huckleberry color around its outside, with a more traditional orange core. The protesteth-too-much bag advertises them as sweet, crispy, and offering a “saftiges Aroma;” and indeed, we found them to be slightly sweeter than the ordinary variety, and if a little woody, then no more so than any other supermarket carrot here.

According to the excellent online Carrot Museum (of course there is one, it’s the Internets), carrots at least as far back as Roman times were either purple or white. By the 14th century, traders from around the world had brought a regular rainbow of black, violet, red, yellow and white roots to Southern European shores.

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A wonderland of green vegetables Berlin may not be, but one thing she’s got in spades, especially this time of year, is Pfifferlinge. Petite, fluted, and the color of pale mustard, Pfifferlinge (in English, chanterelle; in French, girolle) are the fungus of fall and seem to find their way onto every menu in town, at least for the few weeks when they’re abundant. Pfifferlinge can cost a small fortune in my home town (San Francisco…but then, so do most fancy mushrooms there) so it’s particularly exciting to pick up a generous basket of mushrooms for just a few euros here in the Hauptstadt.

Pfifferlinge are easy to cook but can be just as easily goofed if you’re not careful. (Tough and chewy mushrooms = not delicious.) They can be fairly dirty — take a small brush (or slightly damp cloth) to wipe off the remnants of the forest. If you don’t get off all the dirt, no worries. Just consider it added “natural” flavor. Trim the ends slightly. Try to avoid dunking or soaking them in water; the mushrooms bloat and get tough.

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“Scharf,” or spicy, is a relative term here in Berlin (and perhaps in other parts of Germany, too.) Most of the Asian stir-fry dishes I’ve tried that come with a “scharf” warning tend to lack the fire one might expect when eating in San Francisco or London. Which is why I raised a skeptical eyebrow at a Saturday Kollwitzplatz farmers’ market sign, posted next to a pile of these freaky red beauties, that included the warning: “super-scharf.” Super? I queried. Just how super? A tad more than a jalapeño, I was told — which is hot but not fuego, for sure. But good enough for this evening’s corn salsa and cuban black beans. The problem is, I was so Read the rest of this entry »