“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.
the currywurst — fried veal sausage topped with ketchup and curry powder
Who the hell told this person that Currywurst is made with veal? The standard is pork. And it’s grilled, not fried.
Maybe the article was made up with an LLM?
Common to write a paragraph and some keywords yourself and have an LLMfill out the rest I’m afraid
Beef sausage is the norm for currywurst in the Frankfurt area, but pork is much more common everywhere else.
thank you - I came to comment an “ahahahaha” on that. As if anyone would put (expensive) veal into even a beef sausage…
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.
But grilling is over open flame. When I’m frying something in a frying pan, I’m not grilling it.
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.
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:
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.
For a tiny place, that is, a mobile shack barely large enough to house one, a gas grill makes sense. No need for electrical anything as fridges can also run on gas, and grilling sausages gives way better results than frying.
It might be, but it’s not what I’ve seen. IME it’s very rare to have an open grill. Much more common is a metal plate heated by gas, but that’s frying.
I remember 3,50€ from fucking 2007. They make it seem like the prices have gone up from that within the last two years. Meat is way too cheap anyway.
In 2017 I could still find Döner for 4€ in Nürnberg. Now it’s 7,50€.
Which is a clear sign for Döner being consistent with overall rise of prices due to inflationin the last 20 years. Maybe it has been too cheap for too long. Bad working conditions, a lot or family business where family members “help out” to deal with the heavy competition etc.
Lol. This fuckin guy actually believes the spoils are trickling down to workers and small businesses! I have a bridge you might be interested in…
Meat is way too cheap anyway.
This is why I hate that they are focussing on Döner and are even asking for a Dönerpreisbremse. For all I care, discuss falafels, french fries, anything that has no meat in it. I’m not a vegan or vegetarian but it is hilarious to complain that a meat based dish should still be the “easily affordable” fast food for everyone. In 2024. Come on.
I paid between 2,50€ and 4€ around 2016-2018 (depending on the city and place). It’s far more recent than 2007.
Meat is way too cheap anyway.
What do you mean “meat is way too cheap”? Are you a kebab joint owner?
From an ecological point, meat is too cheap as long as the general population can afford to eat it more than once or twice per week. Meat is very ineffective to produce, requiring vast amounts of water and cattle feed to be grown. It was never supposed to be a three times a day staple of every meal, and the fact that we have normalized it to that point is really unhealthy both for ourselves and the planet we are ruining to keep production going.
What do you mean “never supposed to”? The world wasn’t designed.
Anyway, meat can still be cheap without the intensive factory farming practices in the US. Chickens are very cheap to raise on pasture and produce much tastier meat as well! They can be watered with well water and supplemented with minimal grain feed.
Factory farming is the only efficient way to have meat for billions of people. About 95% of bovine meat is factory farmed. Its impossible to turn the entire industry free range, and it can’t be done for cheaper.
It also requires raising about 50 chickens before a person’s economy of scale can compete with the sticker cost at the supermarket.
At least in the US there are a number of subsidies that help to keep meat prices low, which isn’t really great because it increases demand for one of the more environmentally damaging foods to produce.
A pack of dried beef is like 4 euros where i live. The vegan alternative is smoked beets, which basically tastes the same but comes in a smaller packet and is like 8.50. So you’re telling me it’s cheaper to raise a cow, feed it, make sure it doesn’t move too much, drive it somewhere to get killed, get it butchered, and smoked and dried than slice beets and smoke it?
Could it be that the beets are too expensive, by which I really mean that the proletariat is exploited and denied the benefits of the surplus gained by their increasing productivity.
I guess the quality of the meat they’re produced en masse.
2007?
I payed 4€ at my local döner shop before the pandemic. Last year it was 6 and last week i payed 8€ for it.
Doubled the price since 2020!!
2007 I paid 2,50€ as a student. Yes meat is way too cheap but today I even pay at least 7€ for a vegetarian one.
There was one place where i was living where you could get one for 2.90€ as recently as 2018. It wasn’t the best, but it was great value.
I moved around then, so I have no idea what it costs now.
I remember 3.50 around 2010 in some parts of Berlin. In Munich it was over 5. Pre pandemic it was around 7 and now it’s 8 or 9 (haven’t bought one in a while).
Prices for Dürüm, BTW, the clearly superior kebab delivery mechanism.
Yeah this has some real “old me yells at cloud” vibes.
When I was a teenager, every wednesday I went to the movies next town over because they were showing a random movie. I was not allowed to drive, so I took the train. Ticket was 1,30€. Today, the ticket costs 5,90€. “Inflation”.
I was expecting you would say you went to the next town because they had kebab… :(
Thr town I live in has like 10000 souls. Gastronomy looks like this: 1 Italian restaurant, 1 Chinese restaurant, a Chinese take-away and 5 kebap places.
Not even a gasthaus?
Any clues as yo your age or when these two prices took place?
I’m speaking around 2006 compared to now.
I don’t get the quotes, as in it’s not inflation but price gouging?
Cause I thought that was true in North America and less true in Europe cause energy did get very expensive.
Do you remember the döner riots of '24?
The Bell riots are due in a couple months. Maybe this is the real catalyst.
I’m looking forward to seeing Gabriel and fighting with him.
Stranger things have happened. Reminds me of the Bavarian beer riots of 1844.
The local version of this in southern California is the Banh Mi, a Vietnamese sandwich on a baguette. Less than 10 years ago you could get a good banh mi for 3 or 4 bucks, and these days even the cheapest I’ve seen are $6.50 and many places are charging over $10 for this perfect sandwich. At least double in under 10 years :(
Banh Mi is also way better than shitty Döner.
Maybe compare it to a good döner instead of a shitty one.
All fucking Döner taste the same. Anyone who claims to know the best Döner in town is full of shit. It’s garbage meat that is lathered in copious amounts of spices. It all tastes the same.
You sound like me talking about Philly cheese steak. They are dry and bland compared to a proper Italian Beef here in Chicagoland. And yeah, in talking about authentic Philly, not some local knockoff. They’re just super overrated.
Döner is okay. A good falafel and seitan shawarma on the other hand is amazing
I absolutely agree with the latter two options. I’ve also always preferred a Pita over a Döner. Either one of those is only acceptable when drunk however.
You’re mad.
