Map at end of post

German street food

Generally speaking I am skeptical of street food markets in Germany. I see too many burgers, hot dogs and other American style food which certainly does not match the original. Often it demonstrates the lack of innovation in food, but I am also aware that it is an economic risk to focus on dishes outside the mainstream. Bratwurst still rules. Saying so, I also had the chance to eat good street food in Germany as well.

A great place

So I had mixed feelings when checking out the Thursday evening market – 4pm to 9pm – at the Rudolfplatz in Cologne (see map below). The first thing which stroke me at this sunny evening: a very relaxed crowd. Under the large trees people were sitting on the typical German beer garden benches, enjoying each other with drinks & food – no Pokémons apparently. It was easy to have conversations with strangers. Great way to turn a public place into an enjoyable one.

Tasty food

So what kind of food was available? First there are also a few food stall as well. Cookit my favorite from Bonn is there, then a cheese monger who offers also great wine by the glass, and a butcher. All in good quality. But I guess most of the visitors were more into “meet & eat” as the management company of this market calls it – I think they forgot the drinking part in their tag line.

My list of foods available is not comprehensive, I’ll give it a try: empanadas, burgers, bratwurst, cakes, handmade potato chips, ice cream, Lebanese, Peruvian, Thai, Reibekuchen (German potato pancake, a must eat for foreigners), wraps, steaks, currywurst (true German culinary invention), pizza and more which remains to be discovered. I guess in total there should be 15 to 20 stalls.

Peruvian cuisine

I could not eat my way through all the stalls, but I got great support by Nicola – Thanks!. The journey started with a glass of Italian white wine (Lugana) from the cheese monger, best choice amongst all the others we drank afterwards. Then I could not resist the Peruvian stall.

I am aware that there is a certain hype around the Peruvian cuisine since some years, so I had to see the light by myself. The stall was selling ceviche, a fish dish were the cooking is replaced by curing the fish with lemon juices. It was accompanied with some little salad, roasted corn all beautifully spiced. Great stuff to be honest. Just to make sure: it is completely different to sushi! A young couple standing at the same table, having traveled to Peru several times, told us that it was the best ceviche in town.

Then I saw a strange juice being sold, so we had to go for it. I forgot the name, but it was corn based, fruits and spices were added. At the end it tasted like a mix of sangria and mulled wine, but cold and without alcohol. Great stuff I have to say.

Next dish: a beef heart skewer. Oh my god, really really delicious. The marinade was so great, and the heart just provided a nice firm but not chewy background. I had to share this with the people on the table who were first scared by the beef heart, but then surprised by the good taste. As my portion got smaller this way, I had more space for other goodies. By the way I have only pictures of these dishes on Instagram.

More for the stomach

We went on and I saw this VW bus mounted pizza wood fire oven. The pizza was thin, with the right texture and a good tomato sauce. Nice. We had to queue for a while to get our share. The young couple from Bonn making the pizza were under high stress, as the day brought in more customers than they expected. But they love their job: an honest product with instant customer feedback (mostly positive obviously), and when the job is done they go home without having to think to much about the day.

Time for dessert: ice cream. The guy just started his business this year, but he really understands it. He warned me that his grapefruit sorbet might be a bit bitter, but this slight bitterness was exactly what gave the right kick. At the end I tried pistachio. Wow, I cannot even remember that I had an ice cream with such a real and intense pistachio taste, nothing artificial or superficial, a must buy, no regrets.

The pistachio ice cream was the last course as two city workers rang the bell walking through the aisles of the market to end this wonderful evening. As we are in Cologne, authority is one thing, time another one, so it still took a little while for the traders to stop selling and people stop drinking.

It was really a wonderful evening with good food, good company and nice encounters with strangers – joy & happiness.

A bit of background

The market itself is operated by Agrarkonzept a company which manages a few markets – mainly organic – in Cologne & Bonn. What I understood is that they are very strict in the selection of the vendors, the waiting list is long. Still they do not run the market at full capacity, as they cannot find the right quality for this market. Assuming that this story is correct, I only can appreciate this vigor, especially since it helps me to gain trust in German street food Furthermore the opening hours until 9pm help to get new people into markets, the crowd was different to the one which usually visits markets, a nice mix of generations and languages as well.

All in all: This street food market is certainly a role model with its’ quality offering. Great ambiance, worth to be revisited more than one time

A little link list:

• Agrarkonzept, the company managing the market
• The official website
• Street food markets in Cologne
• My other posts on Cologne markets: Rodenkirchen, Porz, Aposteln

The post Very tasty – Street food market at Rudolfplatz, Cologne / Germany appeared first on Food & Farmers' Markets.

After my post on the Porz market in Cologne, a friend told me to better visit the Rodenkirchen Saturday outdoor market as it offered better food quality. He was right.

Rodenkirchen is the most Southern neighborhood of Cologne, directly on the Western banks of the Rhine river. The market with a couple dozen or so stalls is at the centre of the shopping area (scroll down for map).

Carnival time

Currently the Cologne area is dominated by the last days of the carnival season. Carnival music everywhere, basically all songs celebrating the city of Cologne as the best place to be, including the soccer club 1.FC Köln, girls and at times the local public transportation company KVB. Nice mix.

Due to carnival the number of stalls was reduced, as there was a need to have space for the live music, marching bands and people drinking and dancing. So the market was full of loud music enjoyed by everybody. Ladies in fur coats were dancing while waiting to be served, vendors wore costumes and sang along. Great ambiance.

Upmarket offering

For German standards the offering is rather upmarket: a good artisan cheese selection, a good choice of meat, e.g. quails from France, rabbit, German patés, oysters and even real truffles!

The vendors explained me that the purchasing power of the population is quite high in comparison to other Cologne markets. As one butcher who serves 18 markets with 4 trailers told me, he has to adapt to each location with his meat and sausages offering, as taste and wallets vary across the city. In less wealthy locations, he does not even start displaying quails for example.

Of course good vegetables were available as well. The lamb’s lettuce was definitely better than the ones in the supermarkets. All the cabbages looked great as well. There was even local Jerusalem artichoke available and much more. But I still have to get used to the fact that fresh tomatoes are also available in winter time.

Truffles in Germany

There was something which really caught my eye: it shined like a gold nugget in a river bed or so: at the corner of a fruit & vegetable stall, there was a lady selling truffles. This was a first for me on a German outdoor market. The lady, Sabine Hörnicke, who just occupied that little spot had a few tubers from Italy to sell – really tempting.

She owns a business called Tuber Germania, trades in truffles, trains truffle dogs and helps to re-introduce this fungi into Germany. I did not even know that it was possible here, but apparently there was a significant production in Germany in the 19th century until World War I. I am curious about when this production will pick up again. It seems to be a hard task to build on those forgotten traditions.

The view of an Italian family

An Italian couple with a child did extensive purchases at the market, so I felt the urge to ask them about this market in comparison to those they experience in Italy. Well, they like the Rodenkirchen market and considered the quality to be good but the prices higher than in Italy. Rodenkirchen market seemed a bit small to them as they were used to much bigger markets with a wider choice in Italy, lets say 20 vegetable stalls instead of a few as here. A wider choice of vendors results into some headache at the beginning when one does not know the market to be sure to get the freshest product, but once having a vendor of choice, shopping becomes a quick thing to do.

With all their experience they liked to do the groceries here at the market, their heavy bags were certainly the proof.

A little marketing activity on the market

From my experience German farmers’ markets do not invest a lot in marketing as in comparison to the UK or US counterparts. In the UK initiatives like Love your local market or in the US the Farmers Market Coalition try to promote awareness and more. In contrast to this, there is little social media activity and not a lot of promotional activities in Germany. At least they do not seem to be very organized and consistent.

So I was surprised to see a customer with a shopping bag printed with “Mein Wochenmarkt” (my farmer’s market). He told me that from time to time they are being distributed for free, unfortunately not on this day. I am not sure if they are the best tool to promote visits at the market, but for sure I would love to have one. Creates a sense of belonging to a community, probably.

All in all: A really good market for quality food purchases, worth a little detour

A little link list:

• Wiki with all the Cologne markets
• Hope to find more

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Prologue

Me: “May I take a picture of your stall?”

Vendor: “What is it for?”

Me: “I love markets so I take pictures”

Vendor: “Ok, but don’t publish them on the Internet”

Me: “I want to publish them on my blog”

Vendor with a smile: “Ok, but only if you write nicely about us”

So do I write nicely in this post? Well, I like food markets and I try to rather understand why they are as they are. Some are exciting, some are probably just deeply rooted in their community. And so is the Saturday market in Porz.

The setting

Porz, is a city district of Cologne, latter being  famous for its cathedral, Kölsch beer and of course carnival. It is an industrial city, neat, but not a tourist attraction. I found quite many vegetable and fruits shops in the city centre mainly managed by people of Turkish background. The Saturday market seems to find its niche despite similar offerings.

There are about a dozen stalls, some selling clothes, but the majority selling produce. It is a little bit squeezed in between rails, a pedestrian zone and a parking garage. Not the nicest surroundings, but the humor of the vendors and some of the clientele made up for it.

So why are people coming?

Well, it really looked like that the customers and the vendors knew each other.

A customer got a credit from his vendor as he would come back as usual in 2 to 3 weeks and pay without being reminded.

One lady is coming every week since 1985 at the very large fruit and vegetable stall. Her and the vendor were joking the whole time about silly things, a joy to watch. The reason why the lady comes every week is the good relationship to the vendor but also his merchandise which offers superior quality to a supermarket. The produce just stays fresh much longer she claimed. Even though the source was the wholesale market, the market vendor has then the role to chose the best produce there.

What about the young generation?

As on most open markets I visited, the customers are rather middle aged or older. Not too many twenty-something around. A vendor claimed that the young generation does not know how to cook anymore, therefore not having the urge to buy fresh produce. Another one stated that in today’s families both parents have to work to make a living, therefore making it difficult to visit the open market, especially during the week. I don’t know if those are realistic explanations… Probably it would be interesting to experiment a bit more on how to attract a younger customer base.

This leads to the question:

What to find on this market?

Lots of eggs, really lots of eggs. At least 3 stall had a large selection of chicken eggs: small, large, jumbo, brown, white, you name it.

One butcher (the friendly one in the picture gallery) had a stall which was really shiny, pretty and modern, thus making all the sausages, meats and so on very appetizing. He does not own an own shop, but serves several markets. Another butcher had rabbit legs, something I do not see everywhere. The lady selling knew very much about the Mediterranean and German style of cooking them, so must be the clientele then.

The vegetable & fruit stall mentioned above had an incredible variety of produce spread over probably 10 meter or so. I have no idea how somebody can manage that many produce from a business perspective. Well he does the job since decades in second generation, that might explain it.

Only one farmer was present a the market, a fairly old guy selling organic produce more adapted to the season: potatoes, beets, carrots and the like.

Besides this offering: honey, vodka-honey-liquor, flowers and baking good where available as well.

The cheese selection was noteworthy, with fairly high quality of French cheeses and a nice selection of German ones. Something not be found easily even in supermarkets.

All in all: A small market with vendors and clients who know each other and have humor, giving a sense of community.

A little link list:

• Porz on Wikipedia

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