German Mixes and Packaged Food
Jan. 31st, 2020 06:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroBackground: My sister and her husband are living in Germany for two years. When they flew in for Thanksgiving, they brought me an assortment of German food packets. Also cookies and sausages, but I didn’t think to take pictures of those before we ate them all.
Mohren-Erbsen Hahnchen mit Reis
An interesting facet of German packaged food: They assume you’ll have different things in your house than American mixes will. Every American mix calls for milk and butter, and generally that’s all. These mixes have called for sour cream, light cream, emmental cheese, and cream cheese…but neither milk nor butter! I suspect there’s an economics paper in here about the local availability of various dairy goods 50 years ago.
Anyway, this is chicken and veggies with rice in an herbed sour cream sauce, and it’s tasty.
Puten-Pasta mit Frischkase
Chicken, peppers, corn and pasta in a cream cheese sauce that you wouldn’t necessarily think would work, but it does. It’s a thick savory cream sauce with a texture kinda like mac ‘n cheese but without the cheddary flavor.
Salat-Fix Kuchenkrauter
Interestingly, while Germans are expected to have light cream and emmental on hand, they aren’t expected to have vinegar. This salad dressing mix only calls for oil and water. (This is not terribly useful as a time-saver for me; I have six different bottles of vinegar in my cabinet.)
Rahm-Champignons
Mushroom gravy that I cheated on: I cooked my pork chops in my cast iron pan, then used the pan drippings to make this. Which I think made it better than it really had any right to be; and at the end of the day it was still what Jethrien call “glop gravy.”
Semmelknodel
Potato dumplings are a thing in Germany, and I quite enjoyed them when we visited. These are the “instant potato flakes” version of them, and they’re “okay” at best, something to sop up gravy or sauce with. By themselves they’re mostly just salty. They’re a clever invention (it’s dried ingredients in a perforated plastic bubble that you book like minute rice) but I wouldn’t buy them again.
Schwabische Spatzle
Italian pasta tends to be “smooth”, whereas spatzle is “rough”, making it much easier for sauces or gravies to cling to; and that’s what its intended for. We had this as a side dish to several of the gravy-based mixes and, while not as good as fresh spatzle (which we made years ago and it’s a goddamn pain), it’s perfectly fine for that purpose.
Kartoffel-Gratin
Potatoes au gratin, requiring you add your own cream and cheese. I suspect that making it from scratch would only take slightly longer, in that I’d need to make my own roux to thicken the sauce. Came out tasty, though.
Nudel-Schinken-Gratin
It’s still not clear to me whether I was supposed to cook the noodles before combining and baking them (I did; the sauce was a little loose and the noodles very soft), but the flavor was good. I think this is as close to American mac ‘n cheese as German food gets.
Paprika-Rahm Schnitzel
Another one I’m not certain I did correctly, as the sauce kinda curdled, with cheesy chunks instead of being smooth. That said, it tasted really good regardless.
Hahnchen mit Gemuse & Kartoffeln
Spice mix for tossing on baked chicken and veggies. Fine, nothing special.
Puten-schnitzel mit Karotten & Kartoffeln
Spice mix for tossing on baked chicken and potatoes. Again, tasty but nothing special.
Gulash
I made this in my slow cooker, so I think it ended up less thick than intended, but it was tasty. (I also used all beef, instead of half-beef, half-pork.) Very carroty; ARR liked it.
Apfel Torte
This was the sort of mix that doesn’t seem to understand that mixes are supposed to be easier than doing the full recipe from scratch. It took an entire evening and a dozen dishes for Jethrien to put the whole thing together, and while it came out looking just like the box and it was tasty, it definite wasn’t worth the work for how tasty it was. The apples ended up too crunchy given the texture of the rest of the cake, which would be easy to fix if you were just doing the full recipe yourself.
We still have two more gratin packets, another meat-with-gravy packet and another herbs-for-baked-veggies packet, but this was a pretty good overview of what we’ve tried.
Oh, and special thanks to Google Translate, without which I wouldn’t have been able to successfully make any of these.
Mohren-Erbsen Hahnchen mit Reis
An interesting facet of German packaged food: They assume you’ll have different things in your house than American mixes will. Every American mix calls for milk and butter, and generally that’s all. These mixes have called for sour cream, light cream, emmental cheese, and cream cheese…but neither milk nor butter! I suspect there’s an economics paper in here about the local availability of various dairy goods 50 years ago.
Anyway, this is chicken and veggies with rice in an herbed sour cream sauce, and it’s tasty.
Puten-Pasta mit Frischkase
Chicken, peppers, corn and pasta in a cream cheese sauce that you wouldn’t necessarily think would work, but it does. It’s a thick savory cream sauce with a texture kinda like mac ‘n cheese but without the cheddary flavor.
Salat-Fix Kuchenkrauter
Interestingly, while Germans are expected to have light cream and emmental on hand, they aren’t expected to have vinegar. This salad dressing mix only calls for oil and water. (This is not terribly useful as a time-saver for me; I have six different bottles of vinegar in my cabinet.)
Rahm-Champignons
Mushroom gravy that I cheated on: I cooked my pork chops in my cast iron pan, then used the pan drippings to make this. Which I think made it better than it really had any right to be; and at the end of the day it was still what Jethrien call “glop gravy.”
Semmelknodel
Potato dumplings are a thing in Germany, and I quite enjoyed them when we visited. These are the “instant potato flakes” version of them, and they’re “okay” at best, something to sop up gravy or sauce with. By themselves they’re mostly just salty. They’re a clever invention (it’s dried ingredients in a perforated plastic bubble that you book like minute rice) but I wouldn’t buy them again.
Schwabische Spatzle
Italian pasta tends to be “smooth”, whereas spatzle is “rough”, making it much easier for sauces or gravies to cling to; and that’s what its intended for. We had this as a side dish to several of the gravy-based mixes and, while not as good as fresh spatzle (which we made years ago and it’s a goddamn pain), it’s perfectly fine for that purpose.
Kartoffel-Gratin
Potatoes au gratin, requiring you add your own cream and cheese. I suspect that making it from scratch would only take slightly longer, in that I’d need to make my own roux to thicken the sauce. Came out tasty, though.
Nudel-Schinken-Gratin
It’s still not clear to me whether I was supposed to cook the noodles before combining and baking them (I did; the sauce was a little loose and the noodles very soft), but the flavor was good. I think this is as close to American mac ‘n cheese as German food gets.
Paprika-Rahm Schnitzel
Another one I’m not certain I did correctly, as the sauce kinda curdled, with cheesy chunks instead of being smooth. That said, it tasted really good regardless.
Hahnchen mit Gemuse & Kartoffeln
Spice mix for tossing on baked chicken and veggies. Fine, nothing special.
Puten-schnitzel mit Karotten & Kartoffeln
Spice mix for tossing on baked chicken and potatoes. Again, tasty but nothing special.
Gulash
I made this in my slow cooker, so I think it ended up less thick than intended, but it was tasty. (I also used all beef, instead of half-beef, half-pork.) Very carroty; ARR liked it.
Apfel Torte
This was the sort of mix that doesn’t seem to understand that mixes are supposed to be easier than doing the full recipe from scratch. It took an entire evening and a dozen dishes for Jethrien to put the whole thing together, and while it came out looking just like the box and it was tasty, it definite wasn’t worth the work for how tasty it was. The apples ended up too crunchy given the texture of the rest of the cake, which would be easy to fix if you were just doing the full recipe yourself.
We still have two more gratin packets, another meat-with-gravy packet and another herbs-for-baked-veggies packet, but this was a pretty good overview of what we’ve tried.
Oh, and special thanks to Google Translate, without which I wouldn’t have been able to successfully make any of these.
