ROB SCHMITZ, HOST:
As an international correspondent, you get a front row seat to a country's cuisine. Here in Germany, where I'm based, that meant I got to meet Luisa Weiss. Her mom's Italian, her dad's American, but she was born and now lives in Berlin. Her third book, out later this month, shines a light on delicious German food. And no, that is not an oxymoron. It's called "Classic German Cooking" and follows her previous cookbook on German baking. I met up with Weiss in her kitchen here in Berlin.
All right, what are we going to make today?
LUISA WEISS: So today we're going to make maultaschen, which are a Swabian specialty. They're dumplings about, I don't know, 3 by 3 inches square, filled with a mixture of meat and spinach. And they are just, like, I think, the average Swabian's favorite food and also the favorite food of many other Germans as well.
SCHMITZ: This dish also, like many of the dishes in Weiss' book, comes with a story.
WEISS: Maultaschen were conceived as a vegetarian meal to be eaten on fasting days. And a enterprising priest who had a taste for meat decided that if he slipped a little bit of meat in the filling of the maultaschen, God wouldn't be able to see that he was breaking the fasting laws.
SCHMITZ: Really?
WEISS: Yes.
SCHMITZ: God wasn't able to see that.
WEISS: Right 'cause they're, you know, covered by spinach and the noodle dough and then, you know, poached in this delicious broth.
SCHMITZ: So there's almost like - there's, like, a mischievous undertone to this whole dish.
WEISS: Yes, absolutely. Absolutely.
SCHMITZ: Yeah.
Weiss puts me to work to help make them.
WEISS: OK. So we're going to start by cutting up these stale rolls and soaking them in some water.
(SOUNDBITE OF ROLLS BEING CUT)
SCHMITZ: Now, these are typical German, like, brotchen.
WEISS: Brotchen.
SCHMITZ: Yeah, which is...
WEISS: Exactly.
SCHMITZ: You see these everywhere here.
WEISS: Yes. These are brotchen. The Berlin name for them is schrippe. And they're very, very plain, crusty white rolls that don't have a lot of flavor, but they are used copiously in German cooking. So...
SCHMITZ: We soak some brotchen, prepare some spinach, perform some surgery on a bratwurst - snipping its casing and squeezing out the meat - and then she gives me the easy job of caramelizing onions.
OK.
WEISS: And you want to cook these until they're sort of glassy and fragrant.
SCHMITZ: OK.
If this is the first time you've heard of maultaschen, that's the point. Weiss compiled this cookbook to highlight German dishes that Germans know best - not your stereotypical wiener schnitzel, bratwurst or the like that we Americans typically associate with the country's cuisine. In fact, a portion of her cookbook is devoted to one of the most authentically German dishes there is, which you may have never heard of. It's called quark.
WEISS: Outside of the borders of Germany and Austria, almost nobody knows what quark is. Meanwhile, when the Romans first entered what was then the tribal regions of the Germanen, somebody kept a diary about what these strange German tribes were like and what they ate. And they ate berries, game and something that the Romans called lac concretum, which sounds a lot like solid milk...
SCHMITZ: Right.
WEISS: ...Which is quark. Germans eat it for breakfast. They eat it for lunch. They eat it for dinner. They bake with it.
SCHMITZ: And so why is schnitzel getting all the attention and quark gets nothing?
WEISS: Well, I mean, schnitzel's a crowd-pleaser. Who doesn't love a delicious schnitzel? But quark deserves a little love and attention too. I try to give it to it (laughter).
SCHMITZ: Weiss says classic German cooking has recipes for creamy fruit quark, herb quark and quark fritters, known in German as quarkballchen, which German children love because they're, well, deep-fried and rolled in sugar. But the kinder also love maultaschen, the German dumplings we've been cooking and which are nearly ready to serve.
WEISS: So now we're just going to get our hands into this mixture and make...
SCHMITZ: Weiss spreads the spinach, sausage and the soaked bread out onto a thinly spread-out strip of dough before rolling it up and cutting it into dumpling-sized portions.
WEISS: I'm going to drop these maultaschen into the simmering broth.
SCHMITZ: As the steam from the broth fills the kitchen, the aroma puts me at ease, kind of like the smell of chicken noodle soup or baked bread.
You're cooking these maultaschen, and, you know, we were talking about quark, and a lot of this is comfort food.
WEISS: Absolutely, 100%. It's total comfort food. It's food for winter months, for cold months. I mean, this is the kind of food that gives you sustenance, both physical and emotional. Everything you need to get through a German winter, which are bleak.
SCHMITZ: All right. I'm going to just try this. This is really nice. This is just warm. It immediately warms up your body. It's in a nice beef broth, and it's just - it's great.
It's only autumn here in Berlin, but the taste of these dumplings makes me think I need to make more of these as winter approaches.
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