Same Food, Different Germany
Updated: 7 days ago
In Bavaria, a pork knuckle goes into the oven until the skin turns brown and crisp. In Berlin, the same cut is first cured in brine, then goes into a pot of water and comes out soft and pale. One is Schweinshaxe, the other is Eisbein, and each side is sure theirs is the right one. In other countries, people have gone to war over less. But this is Germany, where food was never something to fuss about. Or was it?
Roasted in Bavaria: Schäufele in Bayreuth · Boiled in Berlin: Eisbein
That is German regional food in one plate. From north to south, the country cooks with many of the same things: pork, potatoes, cabbage, rye and wheat, and whatever the season brings. What changes from region to region is what people do with them, how they cook, preserve, season, name and serve them. A meatball is a Boulette in Berlin, a Frikadelle in Hamburg and a Fleischpflanzerl in Munich. A jam doughnut has four names. Even the bread roll can't agree with itself.
The quickest way to see it is to order the same three things in five places:
Berlin | Bavaria | Swabia | The north | Hesse | |
Bread roll | Schrippe | Semmel | Weckle | Brötchen | Weck |
Jam doughnut | Pfannkuchen | Krapfen | Berliner | Berliner | Kreppel |
Meatball | Boulette | Fleischpflanzerl | Fleischküchle | Frikadelle | Frikadelle |
These are regional habits, not hard borders. Most Germans know the other names, and a baker in Munich will understand you if you ask for a Brötchen. Ask for a Schrippe, though, and you may get a smile, or a short lecture.
Why the regions are so different
Part of the answer is history. Germany became one country only in 1871, and the 16 federal states (Länder) on today's map are younger still. The Allies drew most of their borders after the Second World War, and Prussia, once the largest state, was dissolved in 1947. In the East, the GDR replaced its states with smaller districts in 1952. They came back only with reunification in 1990.
The kitchen kept older borders. Bavaria alone holds Franconia, Swabia and Old Bavaria, and each of them cooks its own way. When this article says "region", it means the food region, not always the state.
The other part is geography: the sea in the north, lakes and rivers inland, vineyards in the south-west, mountains and pastures in the south. Every region cooked with what it had, and found its own way to keep it through the winter: smoking, curing, pickling, and baking bread that lasts.
Beer: from Kölsch to Rauchbier
Start with what people drink. You can't talk about German beer without the Reinheitsgebot, the purity law of 1516. It started in Bavaria and allowed only water, barley and hops (yeast was added later, once people knew it existed). In 1906 it was applied to all of Germany, and its rules still live on in today's German beer law, with some exceptions for top-fermented beers.
The rules are strict, the beer is not uniform at all. In 2025 Germany had 1,415 breweries, according to the Federal Statistical Office. That is 137 fewer than in 2019, but still about one brewery for every 60,000 people. Every region drinks its own style:
Beer | Where | What it's like | How it's served |
Kölsch | Cologne | Light, crisp, top-fermented | In small 0.2 l glasses, refilled until you put a beer mat on top |
Altbier | Düsseldorf, 40 km away | Dark copper, slightly bitter | Also in small glasses. Never order a Kölsch here |
Rauchbier | Bamberg (Franconia) | Brewed with smoked malt, tastes a bit like smoked ham | Either a warning or a recommendation |
Kellerbier | Franconia, around Nuremberg | Unfiltered and cloudy, straight from the cellar | Often in a stoneware mug, in a beer garden under the trees |
Helles and Weißbier | Bavaria | The beers most visitors picture when they think of Germany | Helles in a 1-litre Maß at the beer garden |
Berliner Weisse | Berlin | Light and sour. The traditional kind, from a few small Berlin brewers, keeps fermenting in the bottle and ages surprisingly well. Berliners call it their champagne | With red or green syrup, or, if you ask a purist, without |
Apfelwein (not a beer) | Hesse | A dry cider | In Frankfurt, from a stoneware jug |
Rauchbier sounds like an oddity, but it's really a taste of the past. For centuries, malt was dried over open wood fires, so a lot of beer tasted at least a little of smoke. When modern kilns took over, the smoke disappeared from almost every beer in the country. Bamberg simply kept it.
A note on Berliner Weisse: what's described above is the traditional beer, not everything sold under that name. No one did more to bring it back than Ulrike Genz of the Schneeeule brewery. She closed her brewery at the end of September 2025, but the style lives on: Brauerei Lemke, one of the few Berlin breweries that brew it the old way, has made Berliner Weisse together with her. And in a few places in the city you can still find ageing bottles of Schneeeule. Want to know where? You'll have to join me on a tour.
Rauchbier from Bamberg and a traditional Berliner Weisse
Wine: the Riesling story
When people think of wine countries, Germany is rarely the first name. It should be on the list. Germany has some of the northernmost wine regions in the world, around the 50th parallel, and the cool climate shapes everything in the glass.
That's why most German wine is white, about two thirds of it, and why Riesling is the grape to know. It's also the best way to see how much German wine has changed. In the 1980s, Germany was known abroad for cheap, half-sweet white wine, and not for good reasons. Today German Riesling is, in my opinion, one of the best white wines in the world: high acidity, often moderate alcohol, wines that can age for many years, and for that quality often surprisingly cheap.
Riesling is also this article's idea in a glass. Same grape, same area, sometimes the same year, and two different vineyards can give you two completely different wines. I don't mean dry against half-dry: even two dry Rieslings from neighbouring vineyards can taste as if they came from different places.
Riesling: same grape, different vineyard, different wine
Germany has 13 wine regions. In the best known of them, especially the Mosel and parts of the Rhine valley, many of the top vineyards sit on steep slopes above the rivers. Machines can hardly work there, so much of the work is still done by hand, and that amount of labour is something very particular to German wine. Red is harder in this climate, but what doesn't work in the north is possible where it's warmer: in Baden, in the far south-west, and in the small Ahr valley, Spätburgunder (Pinot Noir) makes reds I once refused to believe were German.
Wine has its own long history in Germany. The Romans brought the vine to the Mosel, where Trier was one of the empire's capitals, and the Rhine was their border with the Germanic tribes. Most of Germany's classic wine regions still lie roughly within those old Roman lines. Much later, Frederick the Great had vineyard terraces built at Sanssouci in Potsdam. The king grew grapes there, but they were meant for his table, not his wine cellar. The wine he drank came from elsewhere. That story, and the story of Sekt, Germany's sparkling wine (at its best, I think, as good as Champagne, and much cheaper), will get a post of their own.
Fish: sea or lake, smoked or fresh
From wine to water. German fish comes in two pairs of opposites: sea or fresh water, smoked or fresh.
The north lives from the sea. On the North Sea and the Baltic you eat herring in every form: Matjes (young, mild, salted), Bismarck herring and Rollmops (pickled in vinegar). Then there are Kieler Sprotten, small smoked sprats, many of them smoked not in Kiel but in nearby Eckernförde. Locals say they got the name because they were shipped through Kiel, though the name may be older. In a bread roll, from a kiosk by the harbour, fish is the north's answer to the Bratwurst.
Inland, the fish comes from rivers and lakes. Brandenburg, the region around Berlin, has hundreds of lakes, and with them a long tradition of smoked eel and Saibling (char). Smoking was once the way to keep fish for more than a day; today it's simply the way people like it. (The European eel is now a critically endangered species, so it's worth asking where yours comes from.) In Franconia, carp is a classic, traditionally eaten only from September to April, the months with an "r" in their name.
Pork: one animal, many answers
If one ingredient shows the whole idea of this article, it's pork. Same animal, at least six different answers:
Roasted: in Bavaria, the pork knuckle (Schweinshaxe) goes into the oven until the skin cracks.
Boiled: in Berlin, the same cut becomes Eisbein, cured in brine and then cooked slowly in water, soft and pale, usually with sauerkraut and pea purée.
Cured and smoked: Kassler, salted and lightly smoked pork. It can be loin, neck, shoulder or belly. Berlin likes to say a 19th-century Berlin butcher named Cassel invented it. No record of him has ever been found, and the city of Kassel can't prove its claim either.
Raw: Mett, freshly minced raw pork with salt and pepper, spread on a bread roll, often with raw onion on top, and eaten for breakfast. It sounds strange until you try it.
Dry-cured ham: in the Black Forest, the ham is cold-smoked over the region's own wood, fir and beech. Westphalia is best known for hams smoked slowly over beech. Same idea, a different forest.
Minced and fried: the meatball, made of pork and beef, which changes its name every few hundred kilometres. In Berlin it's a Boulette (a word the French Huguenots brought with them, from boule, a ball), in most of the north and west a Frikadelle, in Bavaria a Fleischpflanzerl and in Swabia a Fleischküchle.
Minced and poached: Königsberger Klopse, meatballs with a little anchovy in the mix, poached in broth and served in a white sauce with capers. They come from Königsberg in East Prussia, two places that no longer exist, and are still a classic in Berlin and the east. In the GDR the name Königsberg, now Soviet Kaliningrad, was unwelcome, so cookbooks and restaurant menus called them simply Kochklopse.
Königsberger Klopse in white caper sauce · Pfälzer Saumagen, the Palatinate's stuffed pig's stomach
Mett shows a very German contradiction. Raw minced pork on a bread roll is a normal breakfast at the butcher's, because it has always been there. Ask for a burger pink in the middle, though, and many restaurants will say no, and çiğ köfte, the Turkish dish of raw minced meat, is simply not served here the original way. No law says so; that's just how it is. It's less about safety than about habit: the traditional is accepted, the new is suspicious. (To be fair, the rules for Mett are strict: at the counter it may only be sold on the day it's made, and that's the day you eat it.)
Sausages by region
Germany has more sausages than this post has room for, so here are the ones that show the differences best.
Sausage | Where | How it's cooked | Eaten with |
Weißwurst | Munich | Mostly veal, boiled | Sweet mustard and a pretzel. Tradition says before noon |
Thüringer Rostbratwurst | Thuringia | Long, seasoned with marjoram, grilled over charcoal | A bread roll that's always too short for it |
Nürnberger Rostbratwürstchen | Nuremberg | Small as a finger, grilled | Six or twelve on a plate with sauerkraut, or three in a roll: "Drei im Weggla" |
Rote Wurst | Baden-Württemberg | Smoked, parboiled and red, grilled until the skin splits | A bread roll and mustard |
Frankfurter Würstchen | Frankfurt | Thin, smoked, heated in water | Bread and mustard. Its name travelled the world |
Saure or Blaue Zipfel | Franconia | The same Bratwurst, but cooked gently in vinegar and onions until it turns pale blue-grey | The broth itself, and bread |
Weißwurst with sweet mustard · A Brezel and a beer, the Weißwurst's companions
And Berlin? Berlin took a simple sausage, cut it into pieces and covered it with ketchup and curry. And, God forbid, no mustard. The story of the currywurst is in A Sausage's Tale: A Short History of the Currywurst.
Bread: rye in the north, pretzels in the south
Germans take bread seriously, and here the line runs between north and south. In the north and east, the bread is dark and heavy, mostly rye. Westphalia goes furthest with Pumpernickel, baked very slowly, for at least 16 hours, until it's almost black.
In the south, the symbol is the Brezel (pretzel), dipped in lye before baking, which gives it the brown, shiny crust. Yes, lye: food-grade and diluted, but chemically the same caustic soda that cleans drains. Did we mention that Germans have a strange relationship with food? And then there's the bread roll, the simplest thing in any German bakery, which still can't agree on its own name.
Brezel, the symbol of the south · Goulash with dumplings and red cabbage
Next to the meat there is always something to soak up the sauce, and each region has its own: Spätzle, soft egg noodles, in Swabia, potato or bread dumplings in Bavaria and Thuringia, and plain potatoes in the north.
Cheese: from the coast to the Alps
Germany is not France, but it makes more cheese than people expect. In the north, along the coast, the cows, and an incredible number of sheep, graze behind the dykes, and that's where Deichkäse ("dyke cheese") gets its name: a mild, semi-hard cheese from the North Sea coast. The north also likes its stronger cheeses, like Holsteiner Tilsiter, and the sour-milk Harzer from the Harz mountains.
The real cheese country, though, is in the south. The Allgäu, at the foot of the Alps, was mostly farmland until the 19th century. Then two things happened. In the 1820s, Swiss cheesemakers brought the Emmentaler method to the Allgäu. And around 1830 a local farmer, Karl Hirnbein, who had learned cheese-making in Switzerland and in Limburg, began making soft cheeses in his village: Limburger and Romadur. Today Allgäuer Bergkäse and Allgäuer Emmentaler are both protected by name. They are hard, nutty cheeses, and the base of Käsespätzle, the Alpine answer to mac and cheese.
Cheese ageing in the cellar · A cheesemaker turning a wheel (Hofgemeinschaft Heggelbach)
Germany has always had very good milk, but not every region turned it into cheese. Around Berlin, cheese was never the strong point, and good Brandenburg cheese is a fairly new story (more on that below).
The one cheese that unites all of Germany is Quark, a fresh, soft cheese somewhere between yoghurt and cream cheese. It goes into cheesecake, onto potatoes with linseed oil, and into almost every dessert.
Sweets: one doughnut, four names
The best example of a German regional difference is a doughnut. A ball of yeast dough, fried, filled with jam. One pastry, four names: Berliner in most of Germany, Pfannkuchen in Berlin and the east, Krapfen in Bavaria and Kreppel in Hesse.
So if you ask for a Berliner in Berlin, you'll get one, along with a look. The same pastry is behind the old joke that John F. Kennedy called himself a doughnut in 1963, when he said "Ich bin ein Berliner". Nobody in Berlin heard it that way: here a Berliner is a person, and the doughnut is a Pfannkuchen.
Marzipan has two homes. Lübeck, on the Baltic, is the famous one, and its marzipan is protected by name. Königsberg marzipan is easy to tell apart: its top is flamed or toasted until the sugar caramelises and turns golden brown. Königsberg is today Kaliningrad, in Russia, and the recipe came west with the refugees after 1945. In Berlin, the Wald family, originally from Königsberg, has been making it in Charlottenburg since 1947.
Königsberg marzipan with its flamed top · Small Königsberg marzipan hearts
Mustard: sweet, hot or Bautz'ner
Every German sausage needs mustard, or at least it did until 1949, when Berlin came up with the currywurst. And every region thinks its own mustard is the right one.
Bavaria: sweet mustard, dark and grainy. Without it, a Weißwurst isn't complete.
Düsseldorf: hot mustard. The city has been making it for a long time and calls it "Mostert".
The east: Bautz'ner, from Bautzen in Saxony. It was the mustard of East Germany, and in the east it is still the best-known mustard.
The mustard map shows something the other maps here don't: not only north against south, but also east against west.
One country, many kitchens
Look back at this list and the same few ingredients keep coming back: pork, rye and wheat, potatoes, cabbage, milk, fish from the sea and from the lakes. Germany's regional food wasn't built from different ingredients so much as from different answers to the same questions. Roast it or boil it? Smoke it over fir or over beech? Sweet mustard or hot? Schrippe or Semmel?
Each answer has a history behind it, from Huguenot refugees in Berlin to the families who brought Königsberg's recipes west after 1945. That's why German food is worth tasting slowly, one region at a time.
Tasting regional German food in Berlin
You don't have to cross the country to taste most of this. Berlin brings in food from every region, and its own region, Brandenburg, follows the seasons:
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Taste regional Germany in Berlin If you'd like to taste Berlin with someone who has been eating his way through it since 2011, our Charlottenburg food tour is the one built around traditional German food. All our tours are on Food tours in Berlin. |
Itay Novik is a chef and culinary guide in Berlin, who founded Elements of Food in 2015.
Sources
Library of Congress: 500 years of the Reinheitsgebot (applied to all of Germany in 1906)
Itay Novik, "יינות גרמניים", Masa Acher, 2018 (basis for the wine section)
University of Potsdam: Boulette, a word brought to Berlin by the Huguenots
Berliner Kurier: Kochklopse, the GDR name for Königsberger Klopse
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