Cuisine · Germany

German cooking

Sausages, potato everything, bread with crust thick enough to matter. Sauerkraut that fermented 3 weeks, schnitzel fried properly.

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Black Forest Cake (Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte) with eggs, morello cherries and Kirschwasser — Germany recipe

🇩🇪GermanyAdvanced

Sweet Dishes

Black Forest Cake (Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte)

Three layers of light chocolate sponge cake brushed with Kirschwasser, filled with thickened sour cherry compote and softly whipped cream, then covered in cream and finished with chocolate shavings and whole cherries. The German legal definition of Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte requires the kirsch flavor to be clearly noticeable — the spirit is not decorative, it is structural to the flavor. The sponge is an egg-separated génoise: egg whites whipped to stiff peaks and folded in last, keeping the crumb light despite the cocoa. The assembled cake should rest overnight in the fridge; it tastes significantly better the next day.

150 min520 kcal10 serves

🌿Vegetarian

Bratwurst with fresh bratwurst, German lager and onion — Germany recipe

🇩🇪GermanyMedium

Meat Dishes

Bratwurst

Fresh pork sausages grilled or pan-fried until the skin is deeply browned and the fat inside sizzles. The classic method: simmer briefly in beer with onions first, then finish on a hot grill or cast-iron pan to build color and crispness. The beer bath cooks the sausages through gently and infuses flavor without the risk of splitting or drying out. Serve with coarse-ground German mustard, sauerkraut, and crusty bread. Bratwurst is street food, tavern food, market food — always eaten immediately, always hot.

25 min420 kcal4 serves

⚡Quick💪High protein

Butterplätzchen (German Cut-Out Christmas Cookies) with flour, butter and egg yolk — Germany recipe

🇩🇪GermanyAdvanced

Flour and Confectionery Products

Butterplätzchen (German Cut-Out Christmas Cookies)

Butterplätzchen, also called Ausstechplätzchen or simply Buttergebäck, are Germany's classic Christmas cut-out cookies: a butter shortcrust dough rolled thin, stamped into stars, bells and trees, and finished with icing, sprinkles or a golden egg-yolk glaze. The dough follows the country's standard Mürbeteig ratio of three parts flour to two parts butter to one part sugar, bound with a single egg yolk and flavored with vanilla and lemon zest. Cold butter is what makes that ratio work: it stays in small, distinct pieces through mixing and rolling instead of melting into the flour, so the baked cookie turns out short and sandy instead of greasy or tough. The dough needs about an hour in the fridge before it rolls cleanly, and the cut shapes get another ten minutes chilled on the tray so their points and curves stay sharp once they hit the oven. This is the cookie German children help stamp out every Advent, and the one that fills half of every Bunter Teller, the mixed Christmas cookie plate. Makes about 45 cookies, five to a serving.

65 min400 kcal9 serves

🌿Vegetarian

Christstollen (German Christmas Stollen) with raisins, candied orange peel and almonds — Germany recipe

🇩🇪GermanyAdvanced

Flour and Confectionery Products

Christstollen (German Christmas Stollen)

Christstollen, also called Weihnachtsstollen or simply Stollen, is a German Christmas yeast loaf: a buttery Hefeteig packed with rum-soaked raisins, candied orange and lemon peel (Orangeat and Zitronat) and almonds, then soaked in melted butter and buried under powdered sugar. You knead the dough, fold it into the traditional ridge and bake it about 50 minutes, 10 at 200°C and the rest at 170°C; the loaf makes 16 slices. It is baked a few weeks before Christmas and left wrapped in foil in a cool place for two to three weeks so the fruit, rum and butter settle into the crumb, and neither the rising nor that maturing is counted in the time. Only loaves from Dresden and about a dozen nearby towns may be sold as Dresdner Stollen, so this is the home version.

110 min420 kcal16 serves

🌿Vegetarian

Currywurst with bratwurst, tomato paste and curry powder — Germany recipe

🇩🇪GermanyMedium

Appetizers and Sandwiches

Currywurst

Currywurst is Berlin street food: a pork sausage cut into rounds, buried under a hot tomato and curry sauce and dusted with curry powder on top. Herta Heuwer sold the first one at her stand in Charlottenburg in September 1949, and she built the sauce from tomato paste, curry powder and Worcestershire sauce rather than from ready-made ketchup. Berlin serves a skinless boiled sausage, pale and soft, while the Ruhr fries a bratwurst in its casing for the bite; both arrive with fries under ketchup and mayonnaise, ordered as Pommes rot-weiß.

30 min460 kcal4 serves

⚡Quick

Elisenlebkuchen (Nuremberg Gingerbread Cookies on Wafers) with ground almonds, honey and candied orange peel — Germany recipe

🇩🇪GermanyAdvanced

Flour and Confectionery Products

Elisenlebkuchen (Nuremberg Gingerbread Cookies on Wafers)

Elisenlebkuchen are Nuremberg's finest gingerbread, also written Elisen-Lebkuchen or simply called Nürnberger Lebkuchen when made in that city. Under German food-code standards they must be at least 25% ground almonds, hazelnuts or walnuts and no more than 10% flour, and this version leaves flour out entirely, so the whole cookie is nuts, candied citrus peel, honey and spice held together by whipped egg instead of dough. Baked on round wafers so the sticky mixture never touches the tray, they come out chewy rather than crisp, closer to a soft nut macaroon than to a firm, bready spiced biscuit. The 55 minutes cover whipping the eggs, mixing, baking two trays and glazing half in sugar icing and half in chocolate; the raw mixture also rests an hour in the fridge, and the glaze needs a night to set hard. Makes about 20 pieces, two to a serving.

55 min445 kcal10 serves

🌿Vegetarian

Flammkuchen (German Tarte Flambée) with flour, sour cream and onion — Germany recipe

🇩🇪GermanyMedium

Flour and Confectionery Products

Flammkuchen (German Tarte Flambée)

Flammkuchen, tarte flambée in French, is a paper-thin flatbread of flour, water and oil, spread with soured cream and scattered with raw onion rings and cubes of smoked pork belly. It comes from Alsace, and Baden and the Palatinate on the German bank of the Rhine pour it at their September wine festivals with equal conviction that it belongs to them. There is no yeast in the dough, so it bakes into a cracker rather than a pizza base: ten to twelve minutes at 250°C on a sheet that has been heating along with the oven. The half hour the dough spends resting before it is rolled is the only slow part of the evening.

40 min610 kcal4 serves

Frikadellen (German Pan-Fried Meat Patties) with minced pork and beef, bread roll and onion — Germany recipe

🇩🇪GermanyMedium

Meat Dishes

Frikadellen (German Pan-Fried Meat Patties)

Germany's everyday meat patty: minced pork and beef bound with a soaked bread roll, seasoned with mustard, marjoram, and plenty of onion, then fried flat in a pan rather than grilled. The soaked roll is what keeps them tender, and they're eaten as often cold from the fridge with mustard as hot with potatoes.

40 min390 kcal4 serves

💪High protein

German Potato Salad with potatoes, vegetable stock and mustard — Germany recipe

🇩🇪GermanyMedium

Salads

German Potato Salad

Schwäbischer Kartoffelsalat is the potato salad of southern Germany: thin slices of warm waxy potato soaked in hot vegetable stock sharpened with mustard and cider vinegar, without a spoonful of mayonnaise anywhere. Germans judge it by one word, schlotzig, meaning loose and glossy, with starch from the potatoes themselves binding the stock into something between a dressing and a sauce. That takes two things the recipe below insists on: the stock goes on in two pourings, and the bowl needs a full hour standing before the salad stops tasting watery. It sits on every summer table in the south and turns up again on Christmas Eve next to a plate of boiled sausages.

45 min220 kcal6 serves

🌿Vegetarian🌱Vegan🌾Gluten-free

Kartoffelsuppe (German Potato Soup) with potato, leek and carrot — Germany recipe

🇩🇪GermanyAdvanced

Soups

Kartoffelsuppe (German Potato Soup)

Kartoffelsuppe is the everyday German potato soup: floury potatoes cooked down with Suppengrün, the standard bundle of carrot, celery root, leek and parsley sold in every German supermarket, and seasoned with marjoram rather than thyme. Sliced Bockwurst or Wiener sausages go in at the end. The potatoes do the thickening themselves, so there is no flour and no roux; mashing a third of them against the pot gives a body that flour would only make pasty. Thuringia blends the whole pot smooth, Saxony leaves the cubes whole, and this version sits between the two.

50 min520 kcal4 serves

🌾Gluten-free

Käsespätzle with flour, eggs and Emmental cheese — Germany recipe

🇩🇪GermanyMedium

Cereal and Pasta Dishes

Käsespätzle

Swabia's answer to macaroni cheese: fresh egg noodles layered hot with two kinds of grated cheese and buried under slowly caramelised onions. There is no sauce and no oven required — the cheese melts on the residual heat of the noodles, which is exactly why the layering has to happen fast.

50 min680 kcal4 serves

🌿Vegetarian

Kokosmakronen (German Coconut Macaroons) with egg whites and desiccated coconut — Germany recipe

🇩🇪GermanyMedium

Flour and Confectionery Products

Kokosmakronen (German Coconut Macaroons)

Kokosmakronen are small German coconut macaroons made from whipped egg white, sugar and desiccated coconut, baked in golden-tipped mounds on thin wafer discs called Oblaten. English recipes often just call them German coconut macaroons, and despite the name they have nothing to do with the French macaron. The egg white is beaten into a stiff meringue before the coconut goes in, and the mass is then warmed briefly over a water bath, which thickens it enough to hold a tall dome instead of spreading flat in the oven. Baked low and slow, the tips turn crisp and golden while the centre stays soft and chewy, closer to a coconut meringue than a biscuit.

45 min200 kcal10 serves

🌿Vegetarian

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