Strasbourg: Self-service tour of Alsatian food

My wife and I have been on many food tours in many cities, but this was a first for us: No human guide, but an excellent little booklet to guide us  to the delights we were to eat, and a passport to be stamped at each of the stores and restaurants taking part.

To join the tour, you pay €10 at the official tourism office opposite the Cathedral. Then you’re on your own to visit the stops and sample the foods. No need to do it all in one day, either. We spread ours over five days, snacking and  sampling whatever was nearby as we wandered the city.

And while it lacked the conversations with a guide and fellow-visitors, it was still a pleasant and rewarding experience. Even if you don’t think of it as a  tour, you can think of it as €10 pre-paid snack card.

We wondered about the tour’s business plan: how could it cost so little. In the end, we concluded the actual cost of the samples was not great, and our tendency to add a coffee to the cake sample, a small meal to the beer sample, and so forth probably made it a  good deal all around.

Nearly everything in Strasbourg is on the Grand Ile, the island nestled between two arms of the Ill River, or just beyond it, and that makes for a fairly compact tour for walking. There’s also an extensive tram system when you don’t feel like walking the longer distances on the tour.

Kougelhopf

Yep, that’s how they spell it in Strasbourg, where German and Elsass (Alsatian) words mix with French spellings at every opportunity. Ours came from Patisserie Bühler, on rue du Döme, near the Cathedral. Larger ones might make it to the table, but ours, and most of the ones we saw, were the single-serving variety above. For parties, they come in sizes up to about 6 kg.

The dough is very much like a yeasty brioche, but infused with raisins and almonds. And, surprisingly, not sweet enough to be too much at breakfast time. It’s a popular Alsatian specialty, and they’d like to claim the credit, but it’s not theirs alone.

Beer and Ale

Alsace may be an important wine region, but it’s also the spiritual home (is that a pun?) of French beer, in all its many varieties. In Alsace, it’s also the heir to German brewing traditions as well. Our tasting spot (on the tour, at least) was Au Brasseur, tucked away the brightest lights, on rue des Veaux. It’s quite popular with students from the University, who are a large part of Strasbourg’s in-term population.

The tour passport got us each an assortment of four beers in different styles, selected from a list of about a dozen. All but a couple are house-made, and all were very enjoyable. Even the ‘amer-biere,’ which is a beer with a small amount of biters. The food also looked very good, but we were on our way to dinner, and limited ourselves to a pretzel. Such virtue!

Pretzels (or Bretzels)

You get to spell it either way, and a few places in Strasbourg did, although I’ve been told that the B is Bavarian. These came from Woerle, a bakery and pastry shop on (take a deep breath) rue de la division Leclerc.

It’s appropriate that they come from a boulangerie, because unlike the thin crisp pretzels we mostly see in the U.S., or even the thick, crunchy ones from Amish country, these are bread. Made from a dough similar to a bagel (the real ones, not the squishy imitators, and like them, they’re boiled before baking, but in an alkaline solution rather than water.

In my New York childhood they were like this. Now they tend to be softer rather than chewy, and to be drowned in a salt crust. Not these: perfection.

Incidentally, in the Strasbourg Cathedral, one of the animated comic figures attached to the organ pipes is a Pretzel Man, surrounded by the ingredients of the treat. In past times, a niche behind it was the hiding place from which pranksters made rude comments to keep the congregants awake.

Bredele

Bredele are not so easy to define. Basically, they are small biscuits, cakes or cookies, and there are endless varieties, as the lower photo shows. Just above, you can see what we got for our tour passport at the Maison Alsacienne de Biscuiterie on rue des Serruriers.

I’ve seen different explanations of the name. The -ele is a diminutive, but whether the long-ago original was a little braid or a little bread is unclear. In Alsatian tradition, they’re especially associated with Christmas, when each family would bake its own favorite, and then give some to all their neighbors and to visitors. Must have helped create the wide assortment!

Cheese

We stopped at L’epicier Grand Cru’s Cheese Bar on the Grande Rue while walking back to our apartment for a break in the day, and after a very tasty flammenkuchen, of which more later. We were taken behind the counter and into cool room to watch our sample being sliced. 

The cheese we sampled (and bought a significant piece to go with us) was a Munster, from local cows’ milk. If you’ve ever had a slice of packaged Munster on a sandwich, as we’ve had, this is an eye-opener. About the only thing it had in common was seven letters of the alphabet. This Munster was softer, and with a much stronger, almost nutty flavor. This is its home region; the town that gave it its name is nearby.

Delicatessen

Alsace’s typical cuisine is rich in meats, and especially in pork. In past times, nearly every family had at least one pig, and in most towns, a municipal official charged with leading the pigs out into the forest to eat acorns and more. And what might just be the national dish—choucroute garnie—is basically a pile of wonderfully scented warm sauerkraut with chunks of five or six kinds of ham and sausage mixed. in.

At Kirn, on rue du 22 Novembre, we were served this plate of Alsatian favorites. Clockwise from the bread, liverwurst (in Alsatian, lewerwurst), pâté en croute (minced pork and beef with wine and spices baked in a crust) and presskopf, or head cheese, made of pork head parts and other scrap with aspic. A nice small lunch, all together!

Gingerbread

Gingerbread, or more broadly, spicebreads, are popular in Alsace, and loaves of all kinds and sizes are a regular in the markets; the picture below gives you a sense of the size and variety. But on our passport, we traveled to a specialist in Pain d’Épices, Mireille Oster on rue des Dentelles. We enjoyed our samples enough that we bought a bag of the tasty treats, whose remains are above.

While there, we also found a variety of candied treats, including one of my favorites, candied ginger.

Cheesecake

Since we’re in the sweet space, let’s move on to the cheesecake from Patisserie Suzanne, back on rue du 22 Novembre. The samples were small squares cut from a sheet-like cake, rich, a little sweet and with a real dairy flavor to it. Much lighter than either the New York-style cream cheese cakes and Italian ricotta cheesecakes we’re used to. Delicious. And yes, we were tempted by the rest but did not succumb.

Wine

We’d had a day-long tour of Alsatian vineyards a couple of days before, but that didn’t dampen our enthusiasm for trying some more at Oenosphere, on rue de Zurich. It’s a small store, run by enthusiasts and featuring—why not?—local wines. Sadly, I enjoyed the samples too much to remember to photograph the labels, so I can’t tell you what to order…but the owners will!

Incidentally, the largest wine cellar in Strasbourg, and possibly France, is located under the Civil Hospital. The hospital dates to the 13th century, and the wine cellar to the 14th. In the middle ages, fees were often paid in wine, and through bequests from the faithful, the hospital also became a large owner of vineyards. When the old hospital was destroyed by fire in 1721, all that remained was the wine cellar!

Schnaps

Schnaps, local brandies or ‘eaux-de-vie,’ were the last item on the passport, and our last stop, at least in part because I’m not a fan of such spirits, and may have been holding us back. But in the end, we arrived at Wolfberger, on rue des Orfevres.

The schnaps are made from various local fruit, including cherries (kirsch), plums, pears, raspberries and more, including the remains of the grapes used in producing Gewurtztraminer wines. We were able to taste two each; let’s say it was more enjoyable than I expected, and Joan enjoyed hers.

Off the Tour

Of course, not every Alsatian delight made it onto the tour menu. As mentioned above, choucroute garnie was not on the list, although we enjoyed it repeatedly. Foie gras is widely available, and another truly big deal locally is flammkuchen, or tarte flambée, depending on your choice of language.

Flammkuchen is often, but inaccurately, compared to pizza. In common, they have a flat base with toppings, but it ends there. The traditional Alsatian variety most often has onions, speck (a bacon-like pork) and creme fraiche, although many other ingredients are added in different places. It’s usually large enough to be shared as an appetizer; individually, it’s the meal by itself.

The best one we had was made outdoors in a wood-fired oven at the daily market outside the Saint-Thomas church. That’s the baker, above. The church, incidentally, once had Albert Schweitzer as its resident organist.

Breads are never far away, or lacking in variety…but one of our favorite market treats, in early September, was fresh fruit, and especially the cherry-sized yellow plums called mirabelles. Delicious to eat out of hand, delicious in tarts, just delicious any way. And they make a great jam. The ones below aren’t ours; I was too busy enjoying them to remember a picture!

Photo (Mirabelles) J-L Carton/Wikimedia