It’s amazing how travel can change your viewpoint. I have just spent a few days in a really interesting part of Germany close to the French and Swiss borders. The Black Forest is a year round holiday destination – winter offers great skiing and sledding, hearty food, and crazy carnivals. Summertime is all about hiking, swimming, and boating in the lakes between the mountains. I do not have much experience of Germany outside lots of work visits years ago to big industrial regions. This was entirely different but since this is a website focusing on food I suppose I should get straight to the point.

My impression of Black Forest food? One word – salads, actually two words…amazing salads.

I must admit I make no effort whatsoever to eat salads in winter. They leave me cold, I love winter vegetables roasted, mashed, in gratins, you name it. I love soup in all forms – spicy, chunky, smooth, you name it. Salads though? Rarely. Well now I have to eat my hat as I have eaten the most delicious salads in Germany…in winter. The food in the region is very hearty, and extremely biased towards pork. As is it is meat heavy the salads are a great accompaniment to lighten the meal. The only beef I saw was all Argentinian, lamb non-existant, fish really only imported prawns and another few types that were simple white varieties, and not that much chicken or turkey. It’s pork pork pork all the way…

Schnitzel which I never understood to be all that interesting – was in fact a revelation. Weiner Schnitzel is very common in Austria and is made of veal. In the Black Forest you get Jaeger Schintzel and it is made from pork. The wafer thin slices are not regular dry old boring chops but slices from the leg, breaded in really fine crumbs and cooked very quickly. The breading keeps the pork moist, and also adds a great crispness. Fresh lemon juice is squeezed over and it is served with Spatzle which are hand made noodles eaten without sauce or sometimes with a small amount of Rahmsosse which is cream based. I preferred them plain however.  It’s a really simple meal that everyone from the area lives on.

The most delicious salad is always eaten with this and during the winter it is Batavia lettuce and Lambs Lettuce that is most common. Great big plates of salad were made up of little piles of crisp cucumber, grated carrot, beans, corn, celery, tomatoes, peppers, and shredded white cabbage around the plate, then a really garlicky mustardy dressing drizzled over, and topped off with lettuce leaves.  The vegetables were sort of hidden under the lettuce, and then other ingredients added if wished such as feta, goats cheese, ham, or croutons. It tasted delicious and was so refreshing! The salad being simply presented and not mixed up was also a nice simple technique. So I am officially reformed…winter salads are great.

Bread of course was amazing, but being ill-informed and expecting everyone to live on pumperknickel bread which I loathe – the bakeries were fab. Since I haven’t a word of German to help me out,  it was pot luck at the bakery. Breads that looked exactly like baguette, brioche, pain de campagne, etc had really long unpronounceable names that I couldn’t even try to make a bash at, so pointing was the only way.  The  smells wafting from bakeries on every street corner from 6am was enough to wake the dead…and night after night of revellery during Carnival had everyone looking half dead anyway…a quick snack from the bakery at dawn and they were ready to go again!

Desserts and sweets didn’t make too much of an impression and it seemed unusual enough to see people eating either. Breakfast thingys were these really cute tiny doughnut balls rolled in cinnamon sugar – they were dangerous and I avoided them as much as I could as it is impossible to stop munching them. Boy do the Germans like chocolate though – miles and miles of it in supermarkets and farmers markets. Every imaginable flavour and size – Lindt, Milka, Movenpick, Ritter – everyone eats tons and tons of chocolate.

So in conclusion, if you like pork, ham, bacon, sausages, pates, potatoes, pasta, bread, red cabbage, carmelised onions, salads, apples, light red wine, fruity white wines, and chocolate then the Black Forest is right up your street, and of course the most important thing of all was that it was really really high quality and dirt cheap – a great meal with a couple of glasses of wine or beer will set you back about 15 euro.

One point worth noting is that everyone complains about prices in Ireland – I checked supermarkets out and there wasn’t a whole lot of difference at all. Markets yes – the fruit and veg was cheap, but other everyday items seemed the same price in general.

Freiburg is a beautiful University City with lots to do. We stumbled across an amazing music and food festival on a Saturday with outdoor stalls, brass bands, giant coal fired barbeques, beer and wine stands, as well as a world class market around the hugely impressive Munster Cathedral. Only afterwards we found out that this is a weekly event…year round even in minus 10 which it was last week.

I thought to myself today how if only our politicians would get out of their insular mindset, travel abroad – but properly, on the street, in buses, on trains, not on a pampered junket staying in bland, expensive hotels,eating generic “European food”. If they would just get out of their cars and see and experience everyday life in other places and bring that outlook and experience back here. There is so much that Ireland could offer, so much we could do, if only the leaders had a bit of imagination, vision, and weren’t afraid to try something new…