“I can still remember when doner kebabs were sold for €3.50,” reminisced one teenager amid calls for a price brake to stop rising kebab costs.
The German capital is the birthplace of that ubiquitous European fast food, the doner kebab, and it shows.
Kebab shops line streets of many German cities, particularly in Berlin, and the scent of roasting, skewered meat is never far off.
Some two-million doner kebabs — meat wrapped in bread, topped with sauces and vegetables — are consumed a day in Germany, according to an industry association, quite a lot for a country of 83 million people. And the doner kebab has even supplanted the old stalwart, the currywurst — fried veal sausage topped with ketchup and curry powder — as the most popular fast-food dish in the country, according to a 2022 survey.
In my experience, fried is much more common than grilled, which makes sense - for a tiny fast-food place, a frying station is much more useful and cheaper to operate.
Where do you live? I’ve never seen a fast food place fry sausages in Germany.
I’ve seen it in Cologne and the region around it, in Munich, Hamburg, Berlin and a bunch of small cities. Where do you live that you only ever see them grilled? I’ve only really seen them grilled in outdoors scenarios.
Or could you be confusing frying in fat (“frittieren”) with frying in a pan (“braten”)? I’m talking about a heated metal surface with a thin film of oil.
When talking about fast food, frying usually refers to deep frying. I wanted to throw nasty words at you because obviously Currywurst isn’t deep fried.
What word would you have me use to say not grilling, and not deep frying?
I’d call it grilling to be honest. It kinda looks like a teppanyaki, which is a form of grill.
Teppanyaki literally means “iron pan”. It’s frying, not grilling, the difference is that frying involves contact to a hot surface, while grilling primarily works via infrared radiation, at a distance. Also, air, but that’s not the primary factor otherwise we’d be talking baking: You can absolutely grill something over hot coals on the beach while the wind is carrying all the hot air away. Baking btw works perfectly fine for sausages.
You’ll see that kind of thing being called a Grillplatte in German but that’s because it’s (at least traditionally) an iron plate you put on a grill, not because you’re grilling stuff with it. Culinary and fixture lingo don’t match up in this case.
Languages are weird, to be honest. In German we call a teppanyaki “Teppangrill”.
No frying pans anywhere, either. That would be very impractical in the standard sausage-and-fries shop that sells currywurst.
You do get that you don’t need a literal frying pan for frying, right? You just need an even metal surface with thin oil coating that’s heated. That’s what 90+% of small fast food shops have.
But you can’t seriously try to tell me that every single Imbiss you’ve ever been to has an open flame grill they use for everything.
Who said anything about open flame? I’d assume most of them are going to use electric grills. No oil involved.
But maybe you can link me a picture of the kind of frying device that you have in mind - maybe we just disagree on whether that’s a grill or a fryer.
I’m thinking of something like this:
(taken from https://www.kleinanzeigen.de/s-anzeige/kochblock-mkn-edelstahl-imbisszeile-braeter-bainmarie-grill-11212/1630405258-87-7107)
They call it a “Bräter”/“Bratfläche”, not a grill. Maybe a better word would have been “roasted”, but “grilled” just isn’t something I’ve seen for normal metal-surface-cooking.