Stiegl Radler

Yesterday we jumped ahead to spring, so today we’re going to keep rolling into summer.  You and your buddy have left his deck and find yourselves hiking a mountain in Bavaria.  It’s absolutely gorgeous.  The grass covered hill sides, the blue sky, a view of the Chiemsee in the distance, the Austrian Alps to the south...

After hours of walking uphill, you finally reach the summit.  In Colorado, this is where you sit down to eat the granola and drink the water you brought with you.  But these aren’t the Rockies.  There’s an entire restaurant at the top serving dishes many Americans have never heard of.  This sets the stage for today’s review.  We’ve been cooking up some kaiserschmarrn and its time to enjoy it with a bottle of Stiegl radler.

Radler is a mix of beer, usually a light pilsner, and lemon soda.  The product of this marriage is an incredibly refreshing beverage that is perfect for lunch.  The flavor is very inviting and sweet with a subtle beery taste that shows up after a few seconds.  The crispness leaves you wanting more after each sip.  It is said to have been invented when a bar built to cater to bicyclers (perhaps the first biker bar?) got too many customers one day.  In order to make his beer stock last through the end of the day, he mixed it with some lemon soda he was having trouble selling.  Being a smooth talker, he was able to play it off by saying he did it on purpose so that the bikers wouldn’t get drunk and fall off their bikes.

Now to that kaiserschmarrn stuff.  When I first heard of kaiserschmarrn, it was described as scrambled eggs with flour.  Huh?  In reality it’s probably closer to scrambled pancakes, but with a lot more eggs, so that initial image is actually pretty close.  To make it, you mix up a batter of flour, eggs, sugar, salt and milk.  You fry it in a skillet just like pancakes, but then tear it up and add more sugar.  It’s common to serve it with apple sauce or various fruit jellies.  There are a number of stories explaining the origin of this dish, so you can pick whichever one you like the best.  Whether it’s the rejected diet food, the pancakes that weren’t good enough for the Emperor or the farmer’s food that was, you can enjoy this food to passively aggressively spite anyone from smug health food nuts to the odious 1%.

Wherever these consumables originated, they are absolutely delicious and I highly recommend getting some.  You’ll feel like it’s June in January.