Archive link Following /u/sparksbet's request for tasty snacks in Germany, I've idly wondered if German cuisine is as generally bland as I recalled from a visit many years ago and subsequent...
Following /u/sparksbet's request for tasty snacks in Germany, I've idly wondered if German cuisine is as generally bland as I recalled from a visit many years ago and subsequent restaurant meals. It seems they've leaned hard into that reputation... and I've learned some idiomatic German slang today, for better or worse.
The idea that spices or strong flavors are associated with uneducated tastes or poor health is certainly novel to me.
That reminded me of a mild family altercation. We all traveled as a large family group to a beach destination. There was maybe 20 of us. We had our main meals together at different restaurants....
That reminded me of a mild family altercation.
We all traveled as a large family group to a beach destination. There was maybe 20 of us. We had our main meals together at different restaurants. And every single time everyone at the table would comment on the fact that they didn't like salt. "Oh I like it here because there wasn't much salt on the food", or the inverse when there was much salt. Every single meal with the fucking salt. I started to think that was a way to repeatedly demonstrate to each other just how sophisticated and ethereal they all were. Of course, it is good to control your salt intake, but. I could go without the endless salt chronicles. So I called them out. I said something along the lines of "we get it: you don't like salt. Can we move on?". They never mentioned the salt again. They also wanted to eat from my plate, which is just not how I like to do things. Dinner was a little tense. I probably shouldn't have said anything.
I was a greedy child and didn't want to share my dishes at the Chinese restaurant, so I put chili oil on everything and learned to love it. I'm now apparently a menace if I actually do want to...
I was a greedy child and didn't want to share my dishes at the Chinese restaurant, so I put chili oil on everything and learned to love it. I'm now apparently a menace if I actually do want to share...
This past week, I was out at a brewpub in Maine (Cushnoc Brewery, awesome food and beer) that offered a pizza with the lightest drizzle of hot honey, that I thought was mild and great... My very Midwestern coworker was gulping water after trying it, making hurt noises as if I'd tried to poison him.
The way I see it, my plate is a work of art. I don't wanna watch 90% of a movie, I must watch the whole thing. Same thing. It's not selfishness, everyone at the table has their own plate. They're...
The way I see it, my plate is a work of art. I don't wanna watch 90% of a movie, I must watch the whole thing. Same thing. It's not selfishness, everyone at the table has their own plate. They're not gonna go hungry without eating from mine. My meal is an aesthetic experience and I should be allowed to have it in full.
I'm just a picky eater and compulsive optimizer - when I choose a dish, it's because I really did not want any of the other inferior/distasteful/revolting options. If offered, I'll try a taste of...
I'm just a picky eater and compulsive optimizer - when I choose a dish, it's because I really did not want any of the other inferior/distasteful/revolting options. If offered, I'll try a taste of something else, but it usually only confirms my preference.
Oh, absolutely. I'm not a picky eater but I'm a very good "restaurant orderer". I have a set of rules that exist to minimize disappointment and they work great. Some people order in a more...
Oh, absolutely. I'm not a picky eater but I'm a very good "restaurant orderer". I have a set of rules that exist to minimize disappointment and they work great. Some people order in a more adventurous fashion, and when their food is crap, they wanna eat mine! Lol
I mean, is it really my fault if someone thinks it's a good idea to get sushi at a barbecue joint or steak at a seafood restaurant? 🤷🏾♂️
Hey sometimes they surprise you. I've been to a sushi place inside a burrito restaurant. The chef had trained as a sushi chef, and was Mexican I believe and wanted to make sushi so he did. (He's...
Hey sometimes they surprise you. I've been to a sushi place inside a burrito restaurant. The chef had trained as a sushi chef, and was Mexican I believe and wanted to make sushi so he did. (He's opened his own standalone sushi place now.)
It's not my favorite because they do a lot of fusion rolls and cooked fish/spicy tuna where I prefer raw fish and less fusion in my sushi, but it's above supermarket and quite good for not a major city in the Midwest.
Had excellent Indian food in a gas station restaurant too. They owned the gas station too and had a small grocery there.
If the restaurant has another restaurant inside it that is clearly active the odds are much better. In regular non-recursive restaurants the issue is that if you ask for something that is not the...
If the restaurant has another restaurant inside it that is clearly active the odds are much better. In regular non-recursive restaurants the issue is that if you ask for something that is not the main cuisine of the place, you are likely not getting fresh ingredients. If not enough people order steak at a restaurant, they won't keep a good amount of fresh meat. And if you're getting pasta at a non-Italian restaurant, your sauce is coming from a can. You're also ordering something that is probably not the chef's strong suit. So while it can be surprisingly good, my rules are not meant to maximize good surprises but rather to minimize disappointment. I'm okay avoiding a few good surprises to avoid a lot of disappointment.
I understand, not attempting to change your rules, just share a few times my default "rules" wouldn't have held true. It was more that the sushi line and the burrito line were separate but you...
I understand, not attempting to change your rules, just share a few times my default "rules" wouldn't have held true.
It was more that the sushi line and the burrito line were separate but you paid at the same register so idk how they managed the actual business part.
I actually do get all kinds of foods at Brazilian churrascarias (which around here we just call "churrascaria"), but that is because it's a buffet so why not? I've had decent sushi at...
I actually do get all kinds of foods at Brazilian churrascarias (which around here we just call "churrascaria"), but that is because it's a buffet so why not? I've had decent sushi at churrascarias. Not stellar, but perfectly fine and made to order.
It seems so obvious. I do sometimes have to remind people that no, you shouldn't order fish in a landlocked country and no, don't eat beef at an Indian restaurant. Or something along those lines....
It seems so obvious. I do sometimes have to remind people that no, you shouldn't order fish in a landlocked country and no, don't eat beef at an Indian restaurant. Or something along those lines. It served me well.
That's a really outdated rule of thumb, IMO. Almost all seafood is flash frozen directly on the fishing boats themselves these days... and in most Western countries (like here in Canada) it's even...
you shouldn't order fish in a landlocked country
That's a really outdated rule of thumb, IMO. Almost all seafood is flash frozen directly on the fishing boats themselves these days... and in most Western countries (like here in Canada) it's even required by law for seafood to have been frozen for at least 7 days (at -20C) or 15 hours (at -35C) before it can be prepared, if it's intended to be marinated or served raw/partially cooked, since the freezing process kills parasites.
So unless you're eating at a restaurant near a pier that specializes in cooking fresh caught seafood, and buys directly from local fishermen who don't flash freeze their catches, even in a country bordering the ocean the fish being served at the vast majority of restaurants will have been flash frozen at some point between being caught and being served... especially (depending on local regulations) those being served as sushi, ceviche, or poke (which, ironically, most people assume are dishes that use only the "freshest" fish ;).
Consider that the infrastructure to get fish from sea to plate in a meaningful timeframe isn't always in place. Nevertheless the example never was about the freshness of the fish, it's about the...
Consider that the infrastructure to get fish from sea to plate in a meaningful timeframe isn't always in place. Nevertheless the example never was about the freshness of the fish, it's about the expertise of the people preparing the fish. Considering there's now two people questioning my statement I was probably wrong in saying "it seems so obvious".
Skills are transferable, and people move. If your rule of thumb was "don't eat seafood at a restaurant where none of the chefs know how to cook seafood properly" I would agree, since that's...
Skills are transferable, and people move. If your rule of thumb was "don't eat seafood at a restaurant where none of the chefs know how to cook seafood properly" I would agree, since that's obviously true. But it's not always easy to judge that without knowing who the chefs at that restaurant are, where they have lived, or who they trained under.
Don't eat seafood at a mall food court or a big chain restaurant where the chefs are just cogs in the machine and turnover is high? Yeah sure, I can agree with that too.
Don't eat seafood at any restaurant in a landlocked country? Nah, that's a really dumb rule, IMO. And I say that as someone who was born in Vancouver, lived in Boston and Miami, and so knows and loves good seafood. But even in Austria (a landlocked country) I have had some pretty amazing seafood dishes.
Austria has some good sized lakes though and they weren't always landlocked. Really though, it's a rule of thumb, not law. If it looks like the restaurant specializes in fish then by all means go...
Austria has some good sized lakes though and they weren't always landlocked.
Really though, it's a rule of thumb, not law. If it looks like the restaurant specializes in fish then by all means go for it. But in general, while the skills are transferable they often aren't actually transferred. A fish or seafood culture really does prepare better fish dishes than a meat n potatoes country.
If you're counting lakes and whether or not a country ever bordered the ocean in its history, is there even any countries in the world that can be eliminated by the rule? The list of landlocked...
If you're counting lakes and whether or not a country ever bordered the ocean in its history, is there even any countries in the world that can be eliminated by the rule? The list of landlocked countries is already pretty damn small to begin with. :P
I do get what you're saying, but I still think it's wrong to take outdated food restriction rules like that seriously in these modern times. I've eaten at an amazing, authentic Korean restaurant in the US. I've eaten at an amazing, authentic Eritrean restaurant here in Canada. I've eaten at an amazing, authentic Malay restaurant in the UK. People move, and they bring their food culture and cooking skills with them, and often train others along the way who aren't from the same birthplace.
I could admittedly also be biased though, since I have been privileged enough to eat at some truly fantastic restaurants. But in my experience, even cheap, hole-in-the-wall, foreign food places can usually surprise you too. E.g. The Eritrean restaurant I used to regularly eat at when I lived downtown Toronto was a super cheap, take-out-only place that mostly served the local cab drivers who were from Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Somalia.
p.s. If you're ever looking for authentic food from another country, ask the local cabbies who originate from that country what restaurants they go to when they're craving a taste from home. They usually know the best, cheap, super authentic places that nobody else outside their in-group knows about. ;)
An illustrative example that isn't true seems somewhat oxymoronic. As cfabbro points out, this rule of thumb seems rather useless these days, maybe it's worth just dropping it?
An illustrative example that isn't true seems somewhat oxymoronic. As cfabbro points out, this rule of thumb seems rather useless these days, maybe it's worth just dropping it?
Oh, sure, I've got a similar set of heuristics for restaurant ordering, but they also have to include details like "no ground meat", "the fryer oil smells bad, so no fried things", "no sweet...
Oh, sure, I've got a similar set of heuristics for restaurant ordering, but they also have to include details like "no ground meat", "the fryer oil smells bad, so no fried things", "no sweet sauces", and other fussy gems. Avoiding disappointment can be a complicated endeavor even at the best of places.
Oh my god if this place exists I will be so excited, the Mexican food options here make Ohio look like SoCal. As for the rest, I've often complained that I can't tell whether an Asian restaurant...
The owner of a Mexican restaurant in Kreuzberg, Chaparro Cocina Mexicana, which served truly authentic tacos, said that in his experience, Germans were interested in the spiciest stuff he had, not any bland, mild derivatives.
Oh my god if this place exists I will be so excited, the Mexican food options here make Ohio look like SoCal.
As for the rest, I've often complained that I can't tell whether an Asian restaurant labels a given dish "scharf" because it actually has chilis or if it's just got garlic or peppercorns. I'm a total white girl in the US but I'm a spice fiend compared to the average German, apparently.
My favorite is the Mexican restaurant run by Americans--with a Mexican chef--that has to offer a burrito smothered in...beef broth...because it's in Germany. Or the place I went in northern France...
My favorite is the Mexican restaurant run by Americans--with a Mexican chef--that has to offer a burrito smothered in...beef broth...because it's in Germany. Or the place I went in northern France where I could hardly taste my food lol
The worst part is that my friend ordered it when he came to visit from the states. He admitted he had no idea why he got it. It was just calling to him.
The worst part is that my friend ordered it when he came to visit from the states. He admitted he had no idea why he got it. It was just calling to him.
It's the "smothered in gravy" part that's reminiscent of the German wet burrito described above. Poutine looks revolting, but I agree that it tastes wonderful... with some hot sauce. Could be...
It's the "smothered in gravy" part that's reminiscent of the German wet burrito described above. Poutine looks revolting, but I agree that it tastes wonderful... with some hot sauce.
Could be there are fusion cooking discoveries to be made by putting beef gravy in places it doesn't seem to belong.
Germans do seem to enjoy gravy on things (and they generally make a great brown gravy here). The failure of our local German poutine place was lacking the all-too-important cheese curds....
Germans do seem to enjoy gravy on things (and they generally make a great brown gravy here). The failure of our local German poutine place was lacking the all-too-important cheese curds. Reasonably suitable nacho fries though.
I don't feel like burrito in beef broth quite hits the sweet spot though.
They're not entirely wrong. Yes, they are wrong that spiced food is bad for you, but there are specific flavorings that are bad in large quantites, like salt, sugar, and fat. But the idea that...
They're not entirely wrong. Yes, they are wrong that spiced food is bad for you, but there are specific flavorings that are bad in large quantites, like salt, sugar, and fat. But the idea that overly spiced things are bad for you tends to be a pretty good (if imperfect) barometer for how healthy a dish is, I think. I can't speak with any degree of authority about it because I don't even know any german people that well, but here in the US almost everything people eat has a ton of added salt, sugar, and fat, so people tend to have a poorly developed palate. Most people don't eat enough fiber because they aren't eating enough vegetables, and they're not eating enough vegetables because they can only taste the bitter and not the sweetness.
(If you saw my previous comment about entertaining the idea of starting a restaurant, you can probably guess why I'm not confident my restaurant would succeed.... )
Germans eat plenty of salt, sugar, and fat. The types of spices that this article is talking about have nothing to do with them, and there's no good medical basis to claim that highly spiced foods...
Germans eat plenty of salt, sugar, and fat. The types of spices that this article is talking about have nothing to do with them, and there's no good medical basis to claim that highly spiced foods are more likely to be bad for you (this isn't even a good rule of thumb in America, much less Germany). Is a taco with pico de gallo less healthy than Bratkartoffeln? Is Schnitzel with mushroom sauce healthier than a veggie stir fry because I used chili oil? If your goal is to avoid salt and fat, German cuisine ain't it fam.
The article even cites an example of a deliberately mild diet that used to be served in hospitals and points out that it's no longer used because following it strictly was bad for one's health. I recently stayed in the hospital here, and 2/3 meals a day were sliced bread and butter, accompanied either by a slice of deli meat and slice of mild cheese or by a little yogurt cup (though I don't like yogurt so I can't speak to the "mildness" thereof). Clearly mild/bland does not equal vegetables!
I think you're taking something that's largely orthogonal to the health claims being made and trying to jam it into a mold that it just doesn't fit. Perhaps that's an attempt to be charitable to their claims. But the nutrients you describe, which are indeed unhealthy in excess, are not what Germans are talking about when they discuss mild food. It's a completely different axis to the types of flavors being discussed here.
As for vegetables, the fact that I was often served plain steamed vegetables as a kid honestly probably caused me to develop a negative association with them (kids are more sensitive to bitter tastes than adults, after all) that has only harmed my ability to eat health as an adult. Preparation methods that impart stronger flavors, such as stir frying in a flavorful sauce or dipping them in garlic hummus or use of flavorful fermented vegetables like kimchi or zhacai, have been key to getting a healthy amount of veggies back into my diet as a grown-up.
Oh no, you just reminded me that "Mild" was pretty much the only flavor of yogurt available in German Supermärkte (but let's be real--for the most part, they do not qualify as supermarkets). The...
Oh no, you just reminded me that "Mild" was pretty much the only flavor of yogurt available in German Supermärkte (but let's be real--for the most part, they do not qualify as supermarkets). The only thing that I could get with flavors was quark, but i still don't really know what that is because the descriptions online make it sound more like ricotta or cottage cheese, whereas the stuff I was buying seemed to be basically like yogurt.
Luckily I've been spared the disappointment. The Greek yogurt (at least at our grocery store) seems more normal by comparison, though (at least according to those in the household who eat it)....
Luckily I've been spared the disappointment. The Greek yogurt (at least at our grocery store) seems more normal by comparison, though (at least according to those in the household who eat it).
Quark is a bit of an enigma. I've mostly only had it as an ingredient in things, where Germans seem to use it similarly to how Midwesterners use sour cream. It's somewhere around the yogurt/sour cream space in my mind, but I don't know enough about exactly how it's different from those things.
We've made quark at home - it's prepared with specific strains of lactobacilli different than those in yogurt. It tastes more buttery and less tart, and has most of the water strained out, so...
We've made quark at home - it's prepared with specific strains of lactobacilli different than those in yogurt. It tastes more buttery and less tart, and has most of the water strained out, so quark is closer to a very soft lower-fat cream cheese. [Strained Greek yogurt makes a tasty spread too, but it's definitely more acidic.]
You just reminded me of the way we ate vegetables in the Midwest when I was growing up, and what I recall of Germany. Anything green was boiled until army-drab color and mushy, with most of the...
You just reminded me of the way we ate vegetables in the Midwest when I was growing up, and what I recall of Germany. Anything green was boiled until army-drab color and mushy, with most of the vitamins dumped out in the pot water. I was constantly craving anything raw and crunchy. If it wasn't for discovering stir fried and steamed vegetables in Asian food, I'd never eat anything but salad ever again.
I like spices because they enhance the flavor of foods without requiring use of sugar, salt, or excess fat. My recollection of German cuisine is that it's very heavy on all those unhealthy things,...
I like spices because they enhance the flavor of foods without requiring use of sugar, salt, or excess fat.
My recollection of German cuisine is that it's very heavy on all those unhealthy things, as the article mentions in passing. Fried Schnitzel, fatty sausages and bacon, salty fermented vegetables (you can't lacto-ferment safely without a high salt brine), potatoes, and noodles, pastry with whipped cream, minimal fiber... In fact, some of the most unhealthy items in the American diet, hamburgers, hot dogs, and fries, arrived via Germany and France, respectively.
It sounds like Germans (and Americans) would benefit from eating more like Eastern Europeans - lots of kale, chard, root vegetables, paprika, and whole grains, than from the described "mild" diet.
to be fair to the Germans, they do love eating lots of high-fiber whole grain bread. They are fanatical about their bread and their preferences definitely tend towards dark, toothsome breads. The...
to be fair to the Germans, they do love eating lots of high-fiber whole grain bread. They are fanatical about their bread and their preferences definitely tend towards dark, toothsome breads. The more down-to-earth at-home cuisine here isn't so different from the Eastern Europeans in my experience (though tbf I live pretty far east within Germany). As with almost any cuisine, eating out gets you more salt, sugar, and fat than making it at home would.
The idea that spiced food is unhealthy pings a little of racism. But maybe we're thinking of "spiced" differently. Like a stir fry might be very spicy with lots of umami flavors, but they also...
The idea that spiced food is unhealthy pings a little of racism. But maybe we're thinking of "spiced" differently. Like a stir fry might be very spicy with lots of umami flavors, but they also tend to be quite healthy. In contrast, a burger can be quite plain but i don't think any of us would call that a healthy meal. At least in the US, a lot of folks like to claim that salsa isn't vegetables, that MSG can kill you, or that a meal that doesn't look like the prototypical meat/veg/grain isn't healthy. I think it ends up being pretty myopic.
It's definitely in the tradition of Graham and Kellogg though with less of a concern about sexual behavior I suppose. I may avoid "spicy tuna" sushi rolls because I feel like it lets them hide...
It's definitely in the tradition of Graham and Kellogg though with less of a concern about sexual behavior I suppose.
I may avoid "spicy tuna" sushi rolls because I feel like it lets them hide fish that's gone off, which could be one example of a time it's "less healthy" but by themselves spices, which are quite different from sugar, salt or fat, are pretty health neutral. (Unless you're either allergies or think that cinnamon will cure your diabetes... It won't.)
(And a burger with roasted veggies on the side, which are cooked with some garlic... mmm.... could be a pretty healthy meal)
I think there's merit to the idea. I love spicy food, but they're unhealthier than bland food because of the cooking methods and chemistry needed to achieve spiciness. Capsaicin is water insoluble...
I think there's merit to the idea. I love spicy food, but they're unhealthier than bland food because of the cooking methods and chemistry needed to achieve spiciness.
Capsaicin is water insoluble and kinda weak by itself, so it's always emulsified in some kind of fat, along with spices that may too be concentrated or weak by themselves. It's really hard/impossible to use spices effectively without also using a lot of fat to emulsify them in to create a sauce.
I really enjoy learning about these types of less obvious cultural differences. Though, having encountered a fair number of German travellers back in my travelling days, I did absolutely notice...
I really enjoy learning about these types of less obvious cultural differences. Though, having encountered a fair number of German travellers back in my travelling days, I did absolutely notice the popularity of things like acupuncture (relating to the article's mention of alternative remedies).
On a side note, the article mentions a German dish called mettigel (raw ground pork shaped into a hedgehog), which REALLY tested my cultural aversion to the idea of raw pork. I grew up believing undercooked pork = very dangerous!!!, which I think is a pretty common north american belief. It was educational to read about the food handling practices (sanition, freezing) that make it safe to eat.
Since COVID-19, I feel like it's become more evident that many alternative health practices arise from a xenophobic fear of impurity or contamination. When "chemicals" or vaccines are tied to that...
Since COVID-19, I feel like it's become more evident that many alternative health practices arise from a xenophobic fear of impurity or contamination. When "chemicals" or vaccines are tied to that anxiety, it's easy for seemingly less invasive practices like herbalism (not always ineffective, but still prone to the same side effects and problems as any self-prescribed medicine), acupuncture, and homeopathy to take hold. That fear of contamination has been leveraged very effectively by both far-right and far-left demagogues...
Back to your mention of pork tartare, as you mention, current food handling makes it safe from trichinosis, but I'm still not sanguine about Salmonella and some other bacteria that survive freezing. Europe has generally better animal husbandry and sanitation practices than the U.S. Nonetheless, I'd pass on raw meat.
In addition to inventing things like homeopathy, a lot of untested "natural remedies" are treated as equivalent to real medicine here. Public health insurance covers them even. When I had a bad...
When "chemicals" or vaccines are tied to that anxiety, it's easy for seemingly less invasive practices like herbalism (not always ineffective, but still prone to the same side effects and problems as any self-prescribed medicine), acupuncture, and homeopathy to take hold.
In addition to inventing things like homeopathy, a lot of untested "natural remedies" are treated as equivalent to real medicine here. Public health insurance covers them even. When I had a bad cough and went to the pharmacy, the strongest thing they'd give me without a prescription contained extracts from Icelandic moss and licorice root.
And I bet that licorice root preparation didn't come with any warnings for heart patients. Any effective herbal is going to have side effects in exactly the same way the standard pharmacopeia...
And I bet that licorice root preparation didn't come with any warnings for heart patients. Any effective herbal is going to have side effects in exactly the same way the standard pharmacopeia does. Oh, and Icelandic moss can be contaminated with lead. Give me regulated, purified, tested, and properly labeled drugs, please. Maybe German regulation of herbals provides more margin of safety than the wild-West U.S. supplements market?
Perhaps it provides a margin more safety (I don't know much about the regulations on that front, but I hope they're stronger than US supplement regulations), but it definitely doesn't help with...
Perhaps it provides a margin more safety (I don't know much about the regulations on that front, but I hope they're stronger than US supplement regulations), but it definitely doesn't help with the "I have no idea whether this will interact with my medications" problem. With my non-herbal meds, the pharmacists would warn me if meds had an interaction -- even when the meds were prescribed by the same doctor, as was the case when I was on escitalopram along with my vyvanse.
I bought the herbal cough syrup at the time and took it once -- my cough did start to recede, but whether that was due to the syrup or simply time is anybody's guess.
To be clear, uncooked ground meat (pork or beef or anything) is indeed generally a huge health hazard! You can get very sick from it, that's not just a cultural belief. In Germany there are a lot...
To be clear, uncooked ground meat (pork or beef or anything) is indeed generally a huge health hazard! You can get very sick from it, that's not just a cultural belief. In Germany there are a lot of very strict regulations around preparing and selling mett for exactly that reason -- they need to have incredibly strict food handling practices around it to make it safer. Even then there's probably not zero risk, but it's safe enough for most of the population.
I still won't eat mett though, it just kinda squicks me out. That part is probably cultural.
Oh yes, I totally understand that. But my immediate reaction was a taboo-esque emotional revulsion. Reading that, aside from sanitation, strict freezing kills trichinella worms (commonly...
Oh yes, I totally understand that. But my immediate reaction was a taboo-esque emotional revulsion.
Reading that, aside from sanitation, strict freezing kills trichinella worms (commonly associated with pork) was news to me, and helped me contextualize it into more of a rational mindset. :)
I eat fish sashimi, I've tried beef tartare. So, knowing this, I miiiiight now venture to try mett if I knew it had been handled safely (though, it would definitely require my curiosity to overcome my cultural reluctance).
I don't know that you're missing much, taste-wise. Most meat flavors benefit from Maillard reaction products in cooking. There's a primal carnivore craving satisfaction in eating raw meat, and...
I don't know that you're missing much, taste-wise. Most meat flavors benefit from Maillard reaction products in cooking. There's a primal carnivore craving satisfaction in eating raw meat, and tartare preparations don't trigger my dislike of gritty cooked ground meat, but tartare mainly tastes like condiments it's served with.
Raw meat is generally pretty pleasant to eat. The raw meat people choose to eat is analogous to sushi - it's selected cuts and treatments of raw flesh, rather than random bits hacked off a...
Raw meat is generally pretty pleasant to eat.
The raw meat people choose to eat is analogous to sushi - it's selected cuts and treatments of raw flesh, rather than random bits hacked off a carcass.
It's mild and sweet, and usually quite tender due to the way it is cut and treated (large cuts of raw meat can be tough, as is anything at all to do with sinew or fascia, but raw meat is cut thinly and scraped or minced, and the initial piece of meat is selected with care.
Too many condiments, or the wrong ones, can overpower the taste of raw meat, but if a dish 'mainly tastes like condiments' someone is doing something wrong.
Still called a pseudoscientific treatment even on wikipedia, so I'm going to need some pretty overwhelming evidence that it's "proven now". (unless your original comment was a sarcasm thing that...
Still called a pseudoscientific treatment even on wikipedia, so I'm going to need some pretty overwhelming evidence that it's "proven now".
(unless your original comment was a sarcasm thing that went over my head. In which case, sorry for ruining the joke.)
Given the context and content of the comment, I would suspect that it is sarcasm about certain German beliefs, though I never heard them talk about acupuncture. To me it seems similar to this:...
Given the context and content of the comment, I would suspect that it is sarcasm about certain German beliefs, though I never heard them talk about acupuncture. To me it seems similar to this:
It seems that air conditioning causing diseases is actually proven now. I was surprised myself. I asked around. AC is bad now.
That said, acupuncture does work. But it's not, like, magic or anything. It just works in exactly the way you'd expect shoving a needle into something to work.
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Following /u/sparksbet's request for tasty snacks in Germany, I've idly wondered if German cuisine is as generally bland as I recalled from a visit many years ago and subsequent restaurant meals. It seems they've leaned hard into that reputation... and I've learned some idiomatic German slang today, for better or worse.
The idea that spices or strong flavors are associated with uneducated tastes or poor health is certainly novel to me.
That reminded me of a mild family altercation.
We all traveled as a large family group to a beach destination. There was maybe 20 of us. We had our main meals together at different restaurants. And every single time everyone at the table would comment on the fact that they didn't like salt. "Oh I like it here because there wasn't much salt on the food", or the inverse when there was much salt. Every single meal with the fucking salt. I started to think that was a way to repeatedly demonstrate to each other just how sophisticated and ethereal they all were. Of course, it is good to control your salt intake, but. I could go without the endless salt chronicles. So I called them out. I said something along the lines of "we get it: you don't like salt. Can we move on?". They never mentioned the salt again. They also wanted to eat from my plate, which is just not how I like to do things. Dinner was a little tense. I probably shouldn't have said anything.
I was a greedy child and didn't want to share my dishes at the Chinese restaurant, so I put chili oil on everything and learned to love it. I'm now apparently a menace if I actually do want to share...
This past week, I was out at a brewpub in Maine (Cushnoc Brewery, awesome food and beer) that offered a pizza with the lightest drizzle of hot honey, that I thought was mild and great... My very Midwestern coworker was gulping water after trying it, making hurt noises as if I'd tried to poison him.
The way I see it, my plate is a work of art. I don't wanna watch 90% of a movie, I must watch the whole thing. Same thing. It's not selfishness, everyone at the table has their own plate. They're not gonna go hungry without eating from mine. My meal is an aesthetic experience and I should be allowed to have it in full.
I'm just a picky eater and compulsive optimizer - when I choose a dish, it's because I really did not want any of the other inferior/distasteful/revolting options. If offered, I'll try a taste of something else, but it usually only confirms my preference.
Oh, absolutely. I'm not a picky eater but I'm a very good "restaurant orderer". I have a set of rules that exist to minimize disappointment and they work great. Some people order in a more adventurous fashion, and when their food is crap, they wanna eat mine! Lol
I mean, is it really my fault if someone thinks it's a good idea to get sushi at a barbecue joint or steak at a seafood restaurant? 🤷🏾♂️
Hey sometimes they surprise you. I've been to a sushi place inside a burrito restaurant. The chef had trained as a sushi chef, and was Mexican I believe and wanted to make sushi so he did. (He's opened his own standalone sushi place now.)
It's not my favorite because they do a lot of fusion rolls and cooked fish/spicy tuna where I prefer raw fish and less fusion in my sushi, but it's above supermarket and quite good for not a major city in the Midwest.
Had excellent Indian food in a gas station restaurant too. They owned the gas station too and had a small grocery there.
If the restaurant has another restaurant inside it that is clearly active the odds are much better. In regular non-recursive restaurants the issue is that if you ask for something that is not the main cuisine of the place, you are likely not getting fresh ingredients. If not enough people order steak at a restaurant, they won't keep a good amount of fresh meat. And if you're getting pasta at a non-Italian restaurant, your sauce is coming from a can. You're also ordering something that is probably not the chef's strong suit. So while it can be surprisingly good, my rules are not meant to maximize good surprises but rather to minimize disappointment. I'm okay avoiding a few good surprises to avoid a lot of disappointment.
I just want to say that the phrase "regular non-recursive restaurants" has put a big smile on my face, so thank you for that!
I understand, not attempting to change your rules, just share a few times my default "rules" wouldn't have held true.
It was more that the sushi line and the burrito line were separate but you paid at the same register so idk how they managed the actual business part.
I actually do get all kinds of foods at Brazilian churrascarias (which around here we just call "churrascaria"), but that is because it's a buffet so why not? I've had decent sushi at churrascarias. Not stellar, but perfectly fine and made to order.
It seems so obvious. I do sometimes have to remind people that no, you shouldn't order fish in a landlocked country and no, don't eat beef at an Indian restaurant. Or something along those lines. It served me well.
That's a really outdated rule of thumb, IMO. Almost all seafood is flash frozen directly on the fishing boats themselves these days... and in most Western countries (like here in Canada) it's even required by law for seafood to have been frozen for at least 7 days (at -20C) or 15 hours (at -35C) before it can be prepared, if it's intended to be marinated or served raw/partially cooked, since the freezing process kills parasites.
So unless you're eating at a restaurant near a pier that specializes in cooking fresh caught seafood, and buys directly from local fishermen who don't flash freeze their catches, even in a country bordering the ocean the fish being served at the vast majority of restaurants will have been flash frozen at some point between being caught and being served... especially (depending on local regulations) those being served as sushi, ceviche, or poke (which, ironically, most people assume are dishes that use only the "freshest" fish ;).
Consider that the infrastructure to get fish from sea to plate in a meaningful timeframe isn't always in place. Nevertheless the example never was about the freshness of the fish, it's about the expertise of the people preparing the fish. Considering there's now two people questioning my statement I was probably wrong in saying "it seems so obvious".
Skills are transferable, and people move. If your rule of thumb was "don't eat seafood at a restaurant where none of the chefs know how to cook seafood properly" I would agree, since that's obviously true. But it's not always easy to judge that without knowing who the chefs at that restaurant are, where they have lived, or who they trained under.
Don't eat seafood at a mall food court or a big chain restaurant where the chefs are just cogs in the machine and turnover is high? Yeah sure, I can agree with that too.
Don't eat seafood at any restaurant in a landlocked country? Nah, that's a really dumb rule, IMO. And I say that as someone who was born in Vancouver, lived in Boston and Miami, and so knows and loves good seafood. But even in Austria (a landlocked country) I have had some pretty amazing seafood dishes.
Austria has some good sized lakes though and they weren't always landlocked.
Really though, it's a rule of thumb, not law. If it looks like the restaurant specializes in fish then by all means go for it. But in general, while the skills are transferable they often aren't actually transferred. A fish or seafood culture really does prepare better fish dishes than a meat n potatoes country.
If you're counting lakes and whether or not a country ever bordered the ocean in its history, is there even any countries in the world that can be eliminated by the rule? The list of landlocked countries is already pretty damn small to begin with. :P
I do get what you're saying, but I still think it's wrong to take outdated food restriction rules like that seriously in these modern times. I've eaten at an amazing, authentic Korean restaurant in the US. I've eaten at an amazing, authentic Eritrean restaurant here in Canada. I've eaten at an amazing, authentic Malay restaurant in the UK. People move, and they bring their food culture and cooking skills with them, and often train others along the way who aren't from the same birthplace.
I could admittedly also be biased though, since I have been privileged enough to eat at some truly fantastic restaurants. But in my experience, even cheap, hole-in-the-wall, foreign food places can usually surprise you too. E.g. The Eritrean restaurant I used to regularly eat at when I lived downtown Toronto was a super cheap, take-out-only place that mostly served the local cab drivers who were from Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Somalia.
p.s. If you're ever looking for authentic food from another country, ask the local cabbies who originate from that country what restaurants they go to when they're craving a taste from home. They usually know the best, cheap, super authentic places that nobody else outside their in-group knows about. ;)
You do know lakes and freezers both exist?
Although not entirely incorrect because the longer it takes from water to plate the worse it gets, it was an illustrative example. Same with the beef.
An illustrative example that isn't true seems somewhat oxymoronic. As cfabbro points out, this rule of thumb seems rather useless these days, maybe it's worth just dropping it?
Oh, sure, I've got a similar set of heuristics for restaurant ordering, but they also have to include details like "no ground meat", "the fryer oil smells bad, so no fried things", "no sweet sauces", and other fussy gems. Avoiding disappointment can be a complicated endeavor even at the best of places.
Same. You know what's on my plate? Exactly what I what I want to eat. No more, no less.
Oh my god if this place exists I will be so excited, the Mexican food options here make Ohio look like SoCal.
As for the rest, I've often complained that I can't tell whether an Asian restaurant labels a given dish "scharf" because it actually has chilis or if it's just got garlic or peppercorns. I'm a total white girl in the US but I'm a spice fiend compared to the average German, apparently.
My favorite is the Mexican restaurant run by Americans--with a Mexican chef--that has to offer a burrito smothered in...beef broth...because it's in Germany. Or the place I went in northern France where I could hardly taste my food lol
Hmm, I wonder if they were inspired by California style wet burritos. Those look so gross but taste so good....
Nah, they said they were inspired by Germans only eating that kind of slop.
this hurt to read
The worst part is that my friend ordered it when he came to visit from the states. He admitted he had no idea why he got it. It was just calling to him.
tbf, it's probably something he couldn't get back home, so I can see the morbid curiosity...
Have you heard the good news about poutine?
I've had poutine in Montreal and it was divine. There's a place that sells "poutine" here in Berlin and we took a Canadian friend there as a joke.
It's the "smothered in gravy" part that's reminiscent of the German wet burrito described above. Poutine looks revolting, but I agree that it tastes wonderful... with some hot sauce.
Could be there are fusion cooking discoveries to be made by putting beef gravy in places it doesn't seem to belong.
Germans do seem to enjoy gravy on things (and they generally make a great brown gravy here). The failure of our local German poutine place was lacking the all-too-important cheese curds. Reasonably suitable nacho fries though.
I don't feel like burrito in beef broth quite hits the sweet spot though.
They're not entirely wrong. Yes, they are wrong that spiced food is bad for you, but there are specific flavorings that are bad in large quantites, like salt, sugar, and fat. But the idea that overly spiced things are bad for you tends to be a pretty good (if imperfect) barometer for how healthy a dish is, I think. I can't speak with any degree of authority about it because I don't even know any german people that well, but here in the US almost everything people eat has a ton of added salt, sugar, and fat, so people tend to have a poorly developed palate. Most people don't eat enough fiber because they aren't eating enough vegetables, and they're not eating enough vegetables because they can only taste the bitter and not the sweetness.
(If you saw my previous comment about entertaining the idea of starting a restaurant, you can probably guess why I'm not confident my restaurant would succeed.... )
Germans eat plenty of salt, sugar, and fat. The types of spices that this article is talking about have nothing to do with them, and there's no good medical basis to claim that highly spiced foods are more likely to be bad for you (this isn't even a good rule of thumb in America, much less Germany). Is a taco with pico de gallo less healthy than Bratkartoffeln? Is Schnitzel with mushroom sauce healthier than a veggie stir fry because I used chili oil? If your goal is to avoid salt and fat, German cuisine ain't it fam.
The article even cites an example of a deliberately mild diet that used to be served in hospitals and points out that it's no longer used because following it strictly was bad for one's health. I recently stayed in the hospital here, and 2/3 meals a day were sliced bread and butter, accompanied either by a slice of deli meat and slice of mild cheese or by a little yogurt cup (though I don't like yogurt so I can't speak to the "mildness" thereof). Clearly mild/bland does not equal vegetables!
I think you're taking something that's largely orthogonal to the health claims being made and trying to jam it into a mold that it just doesn't fit. Perhaps that's an attempt to be charitable to their claims. But the nutrients you describe, which are indeed unhealthy in excess, are not what Germans are talking about when they discuss mild food. It's a completely different axis to the types of flavors being discussed here.
As for vegetables, the fact that I was often served plain steamed vegetables as a kid honestly probably caused me to develop a negative association with them (kids are more sensitive to bitter tastes than adults, after all) that has only harmed my ability to eat health as an adult. Preparation methods that impart stronger flavors, such as stir frying in a flavorful sauce or dipping them in garlic hummus or use of flavorful fermented vegetables like kimchi or zhacai, have been key to getting a healthy amount of veggies back into my diet as a grown-up.
Oh no, you just reminded me that "Mild" was pretty much the only flavor of yogurt available in German Supermärkte (but let's be real--for the most part, they do not qualify as supermarkets). The only thing that I could get with flavors was quark, but i still don't really know what that is because the descriptions online make it sound more like ricotta or cottage cheese, whereas the stuff I was buying seemed to be basically like yogurt.
Luckily I've been spared the disappointment. The Greek yogurt (at least at our grocery store) seems more normal by comparison, though (at least according to those in the household who eat it).
Quark is a bit of an enigma. I've mostly only had it as an ingredient in things, where Germans seem to use it similarly to how Midwesterners use sour cream. It's somewhere around the yogurt/sour cream space in my mind, but I don't know enough about exactly how it's different from those things.
We've made quark at home - it's prepared with specific strains of lactobacilli different than those in yogurt. It tastes more buttery and less tart, and has most of the water strained out, so quark is closer to a very soft lower-fat cream cheese. [Strained Greek yogurt makes a tasty spread too, but it's definitely more acidic.]
But then it's also sold as a snack like yogurt??
You just reminded me of the way we ate vegetables in the Midwest when I was growing up, and what I recall of Germany. Anything green was boiled until army-drab color and mushy, with most of the vitamins dumped out in the pot water. I was constantly craving anything raw and crunchy. If it wasn't for discovering stir fried and steamed vegetables in Asian food, I'd never eat anything but salad ever again.
Banh mi has been my most recent veggie discovery. The crunch!!! Luckily Berlin has a ton of great Vietnamese places.
I like spices because they enhance the flavor of foods without requiring use of sugar, salt, or excess fat.
My recollection of German cuisine is that it's very heavy on all those unhealthy things, as the article mentions in passing. Fried Schnitzel, fatty sausages and bacon, salty fermented vegetables (you can't lacto-ferment safely without a high salt brine), potatoes, and noodles, pastry with whipped cream, minimal fiber... In fact, some of the most unhealthy items in the American diet, hamburgers, hot dogs, and fries, arrived via Germany and France, respectively.
It sounds like Germans (and Americans) would benefit from eating more like Eastern Europeans - lots of kale, chard, root vegetables, paprika, and whole grains, than from the described "mild" diet.
to be fair to the Germans, they do love eating lots of high-fiber whole grain bread. They are fanatical about their bread and their preferences definitely tend towards dark, toothsome breads. The more down-to-earth at-home cuisine here isn't so different from the Eastern Europeans in my experience (though tbf I live pretty far east within Germany). As with almost any cuisine, eating out gets you more salt, sugar, and fat than making it at home would.
Out of that entire list, potatoes definitely do not belong. Potatoes are great.
The idea that spiced food is unhealthy pings a little of racism. But maybe we're thinking of "spiced" differently. Like a stir fry might be very spicy with lots of umami flavors, but they also tend to be quite healthy. In contrast, a burger can be quite plain but i don't think any of us would call that a healthy meal. At least in the US, a lot of folks like to claim that salsa isn't vegetables, that MSG can kill you, or that a meal that doesn't look like the prototypical meat/veg/grain isn't healthy. I think it ends up being pretty myopic.
It's definitely in the tradition of Graham and Kellogg though with less of a concern about sexual behavior I suppose.
I may avoid "spicy tuna" sushi rolls because I feel like it lets them hide fish that's gone off, which could be one example of a time it's "less healthy" but by themselves spices, which are quite different from sugar, salt or fat, are pretty health neutral. (Unless you're either allergies or think that cinnamon will cure your diabetes... It won't.)
(And a burger with roasted veggies on the side, which are cooked with some garlic... mmm.... could be a pretty healthy meal)
I think there's merit to the idea. I love spicy food, but they're unhealthier than bland food because of the cooking methods and chemistry needed to achieve spiciness.
Capsaicin is water insoluble and kinda weak by itself, so it's always emulsified in some kind of fat, along with spices that may too be concentrated or weak by themselves. It's really hard/impossible to use spices effectively without also using a lot of fat to emulsify them in to create a sauce.
I really enjoy learning about these types of less obvious cultural differences. Though, having encountered a fair number of German travellers back in my travelling days, I did absolutely notice the popularity of things like acupuncture (relating to the article's mention of alternative remedies).
On a side note, the article mentions a German dish called mettigel (raw ground pork shaped into a hedgehog), which REALLY tested my cultural aversion to the idea of raw pork. I grew up believing undercooked pork = very dangerous!!!, which I think is a pretty common north american belief. It was educational to read about the food handling practices (sanition, freezing) that make it safe to eat.
Since COVID-19, I feel like it's become more evident that many alternative health practices arise from a xenophobic fear of impurity or contamination. When "chemicals" or vaccines are tied to that anxiety, it's easy for seemingly less invasive practices like herbalism (not always ineffective, but still prone to the same side effects and problems as any self-prescribed medicine), acupuncture, and homeopathy to take hold. That fear of contamination has been leveraged very effectively by both far-right and far-left demagogues...
Back to your mention of pork tartare, as you mention, current food handling makes it safe from trichinosis, but I'm still not sanguine about Salmonella and some other bacteria that survive freezing. Europe has generally better animal husbandry and sanitation practices than the U.S. Nonetheless, I'd pass on raw meat.
In addition to inventing things like homeopathy, a lot of untested "natural remedies" are treated as equivalent to real medicine here. Public health insurance covers them even. When I had a bad cough and went to the pharmacy, the strongest thing they'd give me without a prescription contained extracts from Icelandic moss and licorice root.
And I bet that licorice root preparation didn't come with any warnings for heart patients. Any effective herbal is going to have side effects in exactly the same way the standard pharmacopeia does. Oh, and Icelandic moss can be contaminated with lead. Give me regulated, purified, tested, and properly labeled drugs, please. Maybe German regulation of herbals provides more margin of safety than the wild-West U.S. supplements market?
Perhaps it provides a margin more safety (I don't know much about the regulations on that front, but I hope they're stronger than US supplement regulations), but it definitely doesn't help with the "I have no idea whether this will interact with my medications" problem. With my non-herbal meds, the pharmacists would warn me if meds had an interaction -- even when the meds were prescribed by the same doctor, as was the case when I was on escitalopram along with my vyvanse.
I bought the herbal cough syrup at the time and took it once -- my cough did start to recede, but whether that was due to the syrup or simply time is anybody's guess.
To be clear, uncooked ground meat (pork or beef or anything) is indeed generally a huge health hazard! You can get very sick from it, that's not just a cultural belief. In Germany there are a lot of very strict regulations around preparing and selling mett for exactly that reason -- they need to have incredibly strict food handling practices around it to make it safer. Even then there's probably not zero risk, but it's safe enough for most of the population.
I still won't eat mett though, it just kinda squicks me out. That part is probably cultural.
Oh yes, I totally understand that. But my immediate reaction was a taboo-esque emotional revulsion.
Reading that, aside from sanitation, strict freezing kills trichinella worms (commonly associated with pork) was news to me, and helped me contextualize it into more of a rational mindset. :)
I eat fish sashimi, I've tried beef tartare. So, knowing this, I miiiiight now venture to try mett if I knew it had been handled safely (though, it would definitely require my curiosity to overcome my cultural reluctance).
I don't know that you're missing much, taste-wise. Most meat flavors benefit from Maillard reaction products in cooking. There's a primal carnivore craving satisfaction in eating raw meat, and tartare preparations don't trigger my dislike of gritty cooked ground meat, but tartare mainly tastes like condiments it's served with.
Raw meat is generally pretty pleasant to eat.
The raw meat people choose to eat is analogous to sushi - it's selected cuts and treatments of raw flesh, rather than random bits hacked off a carcass.
It's mild and sweet, and usually quite tender due to the way it is cut and treated (large cuts of raw meat can be tough, as is anything at all to do with sinew or fascia, but raw meat is cut thinly and scraped or minced, and the initial piece of meat is selected with care.
Too many condiments, or the wrong ones, can overpower the taste of raw meat, but if a dish 'mainly tastes like condiments' someone is doing something wrong.
It seems that acupuncture is actually proven now. I was surprised myself. I asked around. Acupuncture is legit now.
Still called a pseudoscientific treatment even on wikipedia, so I'm going to need some pretty overwhelming evidence that it's "proven now".
(unless your original comment was a sarcasm thing that went over my head. In which case, sorry for ruining the joke.)
Given the context and content of the comment, I would suspect that it is sarcasm about certain German beliefs, though I never heard them talk about acupuncture. To me it seems similar to this:
That said, acupuncture does work. But it's not, like, magic or anything. It just works in exactly the way you'd expect shoving a needle into something to work.
Not sarcasm at all. Acupuncture is legit now. I even asked about it here on Tildes but I seem to have deleted the post.