And My Next Adventure Is....: Bavarian Breakfast!

5.31.12

Bret fell in love with the traditional Bavarian breakfast when he was at Oktoberfest last fall. Unfortunately, few meat shops sell the primary ingredient, weisswurst. He was also finding that German restaurant's weisswurst wasn't as authentic as the real thing. Last Friday, we stumbled across a meat market in Saint Paul that actually sold weisswurst, a white sausage made of veal, cream, and eggs. Seeing the opportunity we bought eight sausages and planned a German brunch extravaganza.

The Bavarian breakfast consists of a special German sausage (weisswurst), sweet mustard, pretzel - and the best part - a wheat beer. The weisswurst breakfast was traditionally eaten before noon, to ensure that the sausages, which were made without preservatives, were fresh. Today, if one were to travel to Munich over Oktoberfest, weisswurst is available all day. We decided to stick to tradition and enjoy the breakfast before the noon hour.

Grocery store pretzels just wouldn't do. The super pretzel you can get at a ball game wasn't right either. Weisswurst breakfast needs the perfect pretzel - soft on the inside and crunchy on the outside. Because nothing was meeting our expectations, I thought I would take a stab at making pretzels. A quick Google search produced the perfect recipe (http://www.theoktoberfest.com/HTML/pretzel/index.html).

So, the night before our planned breakfast, I pulled out the flour, yeast, brown sugar, and salt and set out to make the pretzels. Surprisingly, making homemade pretzels is incredibly easy. Much easier and quicker than bagels, because the dough doesn't need to rise. After kneading the dough, simply cut and shape the dough into pretzel form. Let sit for a few minutes, dunk in boiling water, season, and bake. Five simple steps that produced golden brown, soft - yet crunchy- pretzels. Yum!

Kneaded dough ready to be formed.

Formed pretzels. The dough recipe made about eight pretzels.

Pretzel dunked into the soda bath.

Browned pretzel, straight from the oven.

We had some friends over (who actually went to Oktoberfest with Bret last year) to share the experience. Everyone really enjoyed the weisswurst, pretzel, mustard... and of course, beer! It was the perfect breakfast for the long weekend.