I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving! They don’t celebrate Thanksgiving here in Germany, but I figured in the spirit of the holiday, I’d give you the run-down on German cuisine! German dishes often feature a lot of dairy, fat, and meat (think schnitzel). However, when Germans tell me something is ‘traditional’, it’s almost always plant based. For insance, red cabbage is very common here, and you can even buy it ready-made. Instead of apple pie, they have Apfelkuchen, or apple cake, which looks very unique compared to our cakes! However, today I want to tell you about an especially important food to the German culture: bread.
Brot, the German word for bread! Does it sound a bit boring? You might be surprised to learn that bread is so important that German bread baking has been awarded a UNESCO designation! UNESCO is a label that protects and celebrates heritage, so basically, it’s a long way of saying bread is incredibly important to being German. There are so many kinds of bread here, pretzels and rolls and big loaves of bread. You can eat bread with any meal and they celebrate holidays with bread too. It’s such a big part of their culture that they even have a cartoon character, “Bernd das Brot”! He’s monotone and has a dry sense of humor, just like the traditional German bread!
