Hungry in Berlin

As a native Californian, I speak culinary Spanish (with an emphasis on the Mexican dialect). Four years of college in San Diego proved that a person can gladly and happily live on rice and beans (and salsa and tortillas) alone. And although my Heimstadt gave birth what has come to be known as the “San Francisco burrito” (see Dolores in Mitte for an up-market, but not totally authentic, version), nothing beats a homemade feast of carnitas, frijoles refritos, handmade tortillas and smoky, spicy salsa. Us gringos celebrate Cinco de Mayo (Mexican military victory over the French, 1862; gradually morphed into a “hooray for all things Mexican” celebration in the U.S., sponsored by Corona) with food. I’m going to focus on the proteins in this post — how to make carnitas, or boiled-then-fried pork shoulder, and refried beans. See “part dos” for a how-to on flour tortillas and chipotle salsa — with ingredients that can be found all here in Berlin. Read the rest of this entry »

Gray winter days call for baked apple crumble, a topping otherwise known as “streusel” here in Deutschland. It’s a simple concept: “streusel” means crumble. Streusel (not to be confused with “strudel,” the super-thin pastry dough) is essentially a lazy pie “dough” that never quite gets its act together, baking crisp yet crumbly over fruit or cake. To make a streusel topping, all you need is flour, butter and sugar, and perhaps a touch of spice. The American and British versions of crumble tend to be a bit more, well, crumbly than the German versions — German recipes seem to call for more sugar (and a bit of egg), which makes the crumble more of a crunchy (and keeps the topping on the cake, rather than the table or your lap). I’m really more of a fan of the messy, brown-sugary and cinnamon (think coffee cake) kind of crumble, which goes especially well with baked fruit. You don’t need to do much: peel, core and chop some apples or other fruit that bakes well. Assemble a streusel: there’s suggestions for recipes here, and here, and here. (I added some granola and chopped hazelnuts to mine, for the crunch factor.) Sprinkle the streusel on top of your fruit and bake until the fruit’s bubbly and the streusel’s browned and slightly crunchy. Not a bad way to pass yet another gray Berlin day, eh?

Short Version: Eier Plätzchen = Vanilla Wafers

Long Version: My wife is a very, very s’phisticated women…a Hamburger, born with pearls rundum her neck…unless it has to do with her tastes in literature, men or food. The other day, before we went to a dinner party with a few compadres up the strasse, I asked my frau: “What should we mit?” Having spent a year in rural Ohio as an exchange student, she (naturally) responded: “Banana pudding.” Hmmm. My initial thought: “Well, schnooks, where the ‘ell am I s’posed to find the one key ingrediant — vanilla wafers?” Well, ladies and gentlemen, believe it or not, as I later discovered, you will find among the cookies in your local grocery store something called “Eier Plätzchen.” These are exactly the same as vanilla wafers.

The only sad thing to report is this: After making what I thought was some arschtretende banana pudding, my wife said: “Well, this isn’t how they do it at Magnolia’s.” Ugh.

I’m a little late to the Christmas cookie-making party, but for heaven’s sake — it was -8 degrees this morning. What else can one do but bake to warm up the blasted apartment? But before I get ahead of myself here, first, some good news for Yankee bakers: eagle-eye HIB contrib John spied this lovely bag of brown sugar (see photo) at our Asia Markt on Kopenhagner str. It’s the first we’ve found in the hauptstadt. Not to be confused with granulated, or “natural” brown sugar, this is the soft, moist and packable brown sugar used in lots of cookie recipes and sometimes barbecue sauces — and apparently is also key in Thai cooking (news to me, but explains the packaging.) Our bag of light brown sugar is the real deal, if not a bit rustic — we found a few small, dark chunks of sugar amid the fluffy stuff inside. Didn’t seem to bother the cookies a bit.

So to celebrate the new year (and the cold weather), here’s a quick recipe for chocolate “flake” cookies that use one hard-to-find item (brown sugar) and one re-purposed German item (”raspel Schokolade,” or chocolate flakes.) Thin layers of chocolate flakes melt together to create a cookie that appears practically stuffed with chocolate. It rules.

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Who doesn’t want a Parma ham for the holidays? (Vegetarians, put your hands down.) I came across this great spread of hanging hocks at Frische Paradies, a wholesale/retail gourmet outlet on Moresestr. 2 in Charlottenburg/Mitte. Whether you celebrate Christmas, it’s certainly time for gatherings and parties — and that means often buying lots of food, in large quantities — which is where the wholesalers in the hauptstadt come in. (And no, there is no Costco. Thank Gott. But! You don’t have to “belong” to any of these places to buy.) If you plan on doing a large roast or other dish that requires a specialty meat, Frische Paradies is one place to start — yet be forewarned that you will pay a premium.

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As some visitors may have noticed, we’ve been down for a week. We’ve been in the process of switching hosts, and apparently got stuck in the domain system’s Bermuda Triangle. Many apologies to those who have tried to visit in the interim. We’re still working out a few kinks, but everything should be back to normal this week.

You’ll also notice that the look of the site has changed. We’ve redesigned, adding new features and more ways to browse through the content. Our hope is that this site slowly becomes a comprehensive resource for Berlin cooks and foodies, not solely a place to read the latest blog post.

If there are other things you’d like to see here, or you have thoughts on the new look, leave us a comment here or shoot us a message.

There are black beans, and black beans.

I haven’t been in Berlin long enough to lose my craving for Mexican and Cuban food yet. Californians, maybe New Yorkers, you’ll know what I mean. Another post entirely will deal with whether the burritos (and thankfully, even nopalitos) are acceptable; but at home, I’m a fan of straight-up black beans and rice. Moros y Cristianos. Boil, spice, throw in some rice, drizzle with olive oil. Delicious.

But it takes black beans. Schwarze Bohnen, you’d think. But it turns out it’s not that simple.

After running through through a supply of beans from home, I went to our local, lovely Asia Markt, where they sell numerous types of beans very inexpensively. One package was labeled “Black Bean,” and in German, “Schwarze Bohnen,” and to the untutored eye, the contents looked almost exactly like ordinary, Mexican black beans. The French “Soja Noir” was a tipoff that something was wrong, but lets ignore that for a moment.

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I used it this morning to shred partially-cooked potatoes. I didn’t use it yesterday. The day before I made pizza dough with it. The day before that, Caesar salad dressing. And the day before that I ground up the ingredients for pasta puttanesca with it. There’s no getting around it, something I once thought was an indulgence is now a necessity.

No doubt about it, the food around here has gotten better in the years since I bought my Braun K 3000 food processor.

I’m old enough to remember when the first Robo Coupe machines escaped industrial kitchens into the homes of food enthusiasts and then changed their name to Cuisinart. I was very skeptical; when would I ever need a hundred identically-thick slices of cucumber? What was wrong with the undoubtedly therapeutic kneading of bread dough? And a lot of the things these machines were supposed to do — most notably chop onions and grind meat — they screwed up horribly.

Naturally, being a guy and a gadget freak, I eventually got one. I remember the array of discs it came with, slicers in various thicknesses, odd grating tools, and the completely non-functional “french fry maker,” most of which I never even used once. But I certainly did wind up using it. For the first time I could grate cheddar cheese without adding that personal touch of a bit of finger and the accompanying blood. I discovered the pasta puttanesca trick: anchovies, garlic, capers, olives, parsley, whizzzzzz! and there you go.

But there was a down-side, too. The blades just didn’t go fast enough for some chores, and when it came to bread dough, before the stuff came together, if you weren’t lucky, there’d be the scary smell of hot machine oil, meaning the motor was seriously overheating. Naturally, when I moved to Europe, with its other electrical system, I left it behind.

I still wanted one, though, and finally I bought one, and it was inferior to my old Cuisinart. Again the hot oil, again the slow spin. Then I was in some department store or other and saw the Braun on sale. Even on sale it was expensive, but the more I looked at it the more I realized its logic.

Here’s the deal: it has three separate containers. One’s your standard plastic Cuisinart-style tub, with the discs (including the damn “french fry maker”) and the scythe-sharp rotating blade. Then there’s the bread-maker, a stainless steel tub with a dough hook, far superior to the dull plastic rotating blade the Cuisinart had. Finally, there’s a glass container not unlike a blender, with a blender blade and two little whisks, which I admit I’ve never used. I think they’re for egg-whites or frosting or something else I don’t do.

Now, compounding the usefulness is the control button. This has a rubber center, which you can press and get one pulse. Or you can turn it to the right for a continuous cutting/blending motion, or turn it to the left for a pulse. Furthermore, there’s a little wheel which varies the speed along a really wide continuum, which is incredibly useful. And — and this is the beauty part — the motor is huge. 950 watts, not quite enough to winch a Jeep out of the mud, but almost.

All of this would be nice engineering, but there’s one more aspect: the design. This thing is designed to be cleaned up easily. That was always one of the drawbacks of my previous food processors: do I really want to spend the time cleaning them after a few seconds’ use? But somehow Braun’s figured out how to make this thing come apart easily, wash up easily, and reassemble in seconds. Frosting on the cake: the odd-shaped spatula that comes with it turns out to have a half-dozen uses when it comes to getting the last molecule out of whichever tub you’ve used, which, again, makes it easier to clean.

So I use it a lot without even thinking about it. I even had to replace a part once, and not only was the local Braun store friendly, the piece — the lid to the plastic tub — was unbelievably cheap.

You can say what you want about German cooking — and I do — but when it comes to the equipment, this country has it down.

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Alert readers will note that there’s a link in this post. This is part of Hungry In Berlin’s new partner deal with Amazon.de, which brings us 5% of any transaction through one of our links. Not much, it’s true, but enough to pay the Typepad bill, or, if enough of you buy food processors, maybe get me Fuchsia Dunlop’s new Hunan cookbook!

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