Hungry in Berlin

Here’s a guest post from Bowleserised, a very talented lady who knows both her food, ponies and the writerly life in Berlin, and who often is called upon by bizarre British TV talent to explain the Hauptstadt to them.  This is an ideal Dönerspende dish, as it’s got few ingredients but is also flexible — i.e., what you’ve got in your ‘fridge or pantry will probably get you by. Enjoy.

This is an adaptation of a Claudia Roden recipe for Brinjal Albaras from The Book of Jewish Food. It’s a dish from the Bene Israel community in India. It should have fresh coriander in the coconut milk mix, which might still be possible depending on the pricing, and the courgette substitution is one I’ve improvised.

I usually use a can of coconut milk so my version is more liquid than the purist’s, which involves creamed coconut milk and water. I like the more liquid version though as then you can eke the meal out with rice. Obviously you can use fewer potatoes and more aubergine or any different combination, according to preference and available ingredients.

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You don’t need us to tell you that there’s winter happening out there, which means you also don’t need reminding that it’s Christmas carnival season.  I know I’ve read plenty of times that this or that German city claims the oldest, or the largest and oldest, Weinachtsmärkte — but Berlin, ever its own master, methinks is looking to claim the prize of Germany’s “largest number of nearly identical Christmas markets and vomit-inducing swirly rides”? You can’t throw a quarkball without hitting one, and this is a big city.  But speaking of quarkbällchen…

Yes, I know we ranted about the joys of fried foods (and the perils of grunkohl) last year. But since we’re already in the holiday mood, we thought we’d get a head start and warm ourselves up with at least a few samples of doughy goodness before the crowds build up.  But lo!  Perhaps it’s a sign of the global economic slowdown, but the quarkballs we’ve had — and we do love them when they’re good — are decidedly lacking quark this year.  Pancake dough fried in Biskin?  Ick.  That’s a big lump of coal in the stocking for you, Alexanderplatz market.  You know who you are.

Save yourself from disappointment.  If you find yourself at the Prenzlauer Allee S-Bahn station, and are hankering for some fried dough, check out the small white truck usually parked on the south side of the exit.  The gentleman stirring the batter is kind, jolly (yes, believe it) and makes a damn good quarkball.  With quark. It is rich, slightly gooey inside and perfectly fried. And covered in powdered sugar.

Here’s a list (brought to you by the Berliner Morgenpost) of the Hauptstadt’s Christmas markets; if you hit a good one (especially if the food is interesting/good/or something to avoid), let us know below.

A few days ago, our local Extra started carrying a type of citrus I’d never seen. Green, the size and shape of a grapefruit, they carried stickers proclaiming them as “Sweeties.”

Turns out this is an Oroblanco (called a Sweetie in Japan and Israel, and now apparently here). A cross between an acidless pomelo and a white grapefruit, created by University of California researchers, it’s apparently becoming something of delicacy in the Japanese market. The idea being that it is (surprise) sweeter than an ordinary grapefruit, and less bitter.

A single-serving review: Interesting, but a tad pricy. Ours was sweet, but not as sweet as a good ruby grapefruit. A decently complex taste, with a sour finish. Which I like. This particular one had very thick pulp walls, giving it a bit more of a crunch than a normal grapefruit. Definitely more intereresting to look at than an ordinary grapefruit, but at 99 cents apiece, I’m not sure they warrant the extra spendiness — unless you’re looking for a striking color for the table, in which case they’re an excellent pick indeed .

A quick Kollwitzplatz market spotting yesterday: The dark, sweet muscat grapes are here, which make my eyes light up like a kid’s with candy. Because they are essentially candy. I fell in love with a variety of golden muscats in California, but I like the ones here better –  ludicrously sweet with a hint of jasmine or honey, but balanced by the bitter almost-black skins. I think these might be a variety called Black Hamburg, but since my grape expert is currently picking them in France, y’all are on your own with that one.

(However, assuming I’m right, let’s go for moment to the very earnest Charles M. McIntosh, who in his 1855 “The Book of the Garden” (thanks, Google Books) calls this “the best of all black grapes, and introduced (into England) from Hamburg, in 1724 by a Mr. Warner.”  So there you are.)

I generally can”t do muscat wine. Too sweet for me, my head explodes (although I quite like the Pisco, a distilled muscatel liquor, and the national drink of Chile, which Aimee brought back for me this month). But a handful of these will make me happy indeed.

This summer has seen an outpouring of fresh vegetables like I’ve never seen in 14 summers here. Not only that, the “bio” versions in the outdoor markets are no more expensive — and in some cases cheaper — than the same items in the supermarket.

Making a very rare appearance this year are absolutely fresh green peas. In the past, you’ve been able to get these delightful legumes maybe one year in three or four, and by the time they got to Berlin, the pods were beginning to brown and you had to throw out 10% of the peas inside them. The ones I’ve seen this year are shiny and bursting with fat peas.

The other star of the show is a crop of green beans which are unlike any I’ve seen here previously. Also fat and shiny, they are surprising because, despite their heft, they’re not at all fibrous, and, when properly cooked, give up a wonderfully nutty flavor in addition to the green taste.

I’ve adapted two of my favorite pasta recipes for this joyous occasion, so click away and start boiling some water.

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Alphonso mangos have arrived in Berlin.

If you’re from the United States, you may never have tasted an Alphonso mango. A pale yellow papaya color, the mango has a deep orange, pulpy flesh that you can tell will be more appetizing than those Brazilian greens you find in Plus and Aldi. In India it’s used in the mango products exported to Indian restaurants abroad—juice, ice cream, lassi base—that all taste mysteriously better than what you can buy at home. No wonder: there was a ban on all imports of this special variety to America until last year.

Alphonse mangos (in all their spelling variations) hit the markets in India from March through May. Yet a Pakistani variation has suddenly popped up in Berlin during June, under the trade name of Honigmango.

You won’t find them at your weekly local market, at least not the schmancy one I go to in Charlottenburg, but they’re all over the foreign food shops. The picture is from a Persian food store (also selling merguez!) on Kantstrasse just west of the Charlottenburg S-Bahn. I’ve noticed that some Thai shops in West Berlin have boxes at their checkout counters as well (see the Thai-Viet Markt on Wilmersdorferstrasse), almost as an afterthought.

You can spot the mangos easily: they’re the ones packaged like fragile Christmas tree balls, in tinsel and shredded paper. Don’t be discouraged by the high per-box price; I bargained my man at the Persian shop down to 1.50 last week for a perfectly ripe Alfonso clone and 1 euro for a smaller one.

The exotic flavor is worth the splurge. Try it with yogurt or quark: the juices get all over the place when you cut the thing, and you won’t want to let them go to waste.

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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One of the things I struggled for years to find in this city was good fresh pasta. For a while, there was a place near where I worked in Charlottenburg called Ali Baba Pizza (I certainly think of Ali Baba when I think of Italy, don’t you?) that would sell good ravioli and tortellini out of the back of the store, like it was dope or something. Sometimes their stuff showed up at miscellaneous Italian delis, and then it vanished.

This seemed to be the way it worked: you’d find a good supply of the stuff and then it would vanish. There was no trouble getting it in restaurants, but for home use, it was hopeless. The stuff in bags that Buitoni and other commercial manufacturers like Rana was good as far as it went (although some of the Rana stuff had MSG in it), but it never really got al dente: it was either gummy from the git-go or it had a sort of industral hardness that didn’t go away.

Then, one day, I was at the market in Hackescher Markt on a Thursday and discovered the Pasta Ladies. That’s not their name: their name is Nudel & Co. I call them the Pasta Ladies because they’re all women, and from what I can tell, all their employees are women. They usually have about eight kinds of ravioli, five or six kinds of tortellini, two of tortellacci (huge fist-sized tortellini, usually with very exotic fillings), and a few other fresh Italian shapes. They also have a couple of kinds of Maultaschen, occasional Knödel, Schupfnudeln, and Spätzle for you Swabian food-lovers.

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It’s enough to make a Californian giddy. Our local Aldi (and perhaps other outlets, too?) is starting to stock more and more items from Trader Joe’s — the slightly upscale but still super-cheap grocer based in the U.S., which is owned, curiously, by Aldi. (For those unfamiliar with the grocer — imagine a small, quality bioladen with Lidl/Aldi prices. That’s Trader’s.) Perhaps these simple items just fell off the boat and then off the loading truck on to one of Aldi’s many tasteful pallet displays, but I’m hoping it’s a sign of more good things to come.

“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 »