Thursday, March 18, 2010

Food!

I think it's about time I wrote about the food here in Germany. Important, really. 


Chocolate
Yes, there is a lot of chocolate. And no, it's not everywhere, but it's mostly very good. Milka parallels Cadbury back home, but Milka wins. The "Alpenmilch" thing works and it is tasty and more affordable than Cadbury. There is also Lindt here, but it's the same as it is back home. 


The "Student's Kiss" chocolate was invented (designed? made?) here in Heidelberg and is just a heart-shaped chocolate. Tasty enough. 


Breakfast cereal. There seems to be a chocolate variant of every type of breakfast cereal on offer. This includes muesli (müsli?) and so on. I can't imagine chocolate muesli, but it does exist. 


Cheese
Cheese seems to be standard, it's everywhere, and I can find whatever it is that I want at the supermarket. Something that I've not seen anywhere else is is quark. It's a bit like cream cheese, but it's not. 


Bread
The bread here is fantastic. It's always fresh and the variety is something I've not seen before. There is the sweet stuff, the savoury stuff and the normal stuff. Pretzels are big too, with different seeds on top. In the pedestrian zone, I think there is a shop selling bread of some sort at least every 20 metres. Bit hard to go hungry around there. 


Still, supermarket bread is good and comes in smaller packages. That makes more sense. There is a lot of seed bread, as in, sunflower seed, pumpkin seed and so on, available. It's quite tasty, but a lot heavier than regular bread. Good for a change. 


Water
Here in Germany, bottled water seems to be the thing. Most people drink bottled water. Most people drink carbonated bottled water. In short, it tastes a bit funny. Every so often, with food, I can take it. But not as my main source of water. And no, letting the bubbles escape doesn't make it taste any better. It just tastes funny. 


People buy bottled water in crates from the supermarket. It seems to be quite affordable and you get a refund when you bring the bottle back. Almost forced recycling. 


I guess one of the reasons for drinking bottled water is because the water is quite hard here. It seems to be especially hard here in Heidelberg and more so here, in Im Neuenheimer Feld, so I'm told. Without talking like a chemist too much, the precipitate in my kettle is quite off-putting. 


Sausage
I think everyone knows about Germany's obsession with the sausage, or Wurst. There is every possible kind imaginable. There are normal sausages, spreadable sausages, Leberwurst, canned sausages, flavoured sausages and so on. I think that the variety of sausage in supermarkets is greater than the variety of breakfast cereal. 


Coffee
Maybe I'm being picky, but Australian coffee is better. Or at least, Australian coffee from a place that cares about the coffee. Still, people seem to consume a lot of coffee here, mostly with cake. Filtered coffee seems to be the norm here, with boxes and boxes of filters everywhere. 




I'm sure there's plenty more to write, but this was just some of what stood out. More later!

2 comments:

Claudia said...

mmm i like this post.. now i am hungry

Unknown said...

nice post and a really good summary of our food. You should try a chocolate variant of breakfast cereal. Some are pretty good.