“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.

  • rumschlumpel@feddit.org
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    2 months ago

    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.

      • Evotech@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        Common to write a paragraph and some keywords yourself and have an LLMfill out the rest I’m afraid

    • bob_lemon@feddit.org
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      2 months ago

      Beef sausage is the norm for currywurst in the Frankfurt area, but pork is much more common everywhere else.

    • FooBarrington@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      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.

        • FooBarrington@lemmy.world
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          2 months ago

          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.

          • Ibuthyr@discuss.tchncs.de
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            2 months ago

            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.

                  • Ibuthyr@discuss.tchncs.de
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                    2 months ago

                    It’s usually a teppan style grill. A stainless steel plate over gas burners.

                    I guess you’re technically correct, as you never said deep-fry. But for some reason I immediately thought you meant people would submerge the sausages into boiling fat.

          • rumschlumpel@feddit.org
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            2 months ago

            No frying pans anywhere, either. That would be very impractical in the standard sausage-and-fries shop that sells currywurst.

            • FooBarrington@lemmy.world
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              2 months ago

              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.

      • barsoap@lemm.ee
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        2 months ago

        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.

        • FooBarrington@lemmy.world
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          2 months ago

          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.