German cuisine: It's not just pork and sausages

At a media tasting lunch, when we were invited to try a German pizza it was difficult to know what to expect, but any expectations I did have were low, given the pictures on the menu, whose contents looked anything but appetizing. What a surprise, then, when the "Flammkuchen pizza" proved to be much more delicious than regular pizza fare, which can sometimes be bland.

Instead we were served pizza with a paper-thin, crisp, and blistered crust topped with a layer of homemade sour cream and then bacon, onion and chive. The sour cream created a mildly tart, creamy contrast to the crust's crispness.

Paingt gives the dish another name, Schwarzwald (Black Forest) pizza, because it comes from that region of southern Germany adjacent to the Alsace region of France.

Venison goulash with poached pear, cranberry sauce and Spaetzle (handmade noodles), is another regional dish that Bodensee Kitchen serves. The venison did not quite cut it for me, but the hearty accompaniment of bouncy, soft egg noodles, which I had never eaten before, won me over.

Bodensee Kitchen does a good job in presenting a wide choice of traditional German fare, and it would be failing in its duty if it did not serve sausages and pork knuckle.

"To many Germans, sausages represent a taste of home," Paingt says.

"Walk into a butchery in Germany and you'll see 50-100 different sausages. Raw, boiled, air-dried, smoked, and so on, and with different spices. Every butcher has his own little secret recipe."

Bodensee Kitchen's sausage platter includes Nuernberger, Frankfurter, cheesekrainer, and engadin sausages, meatloaf, homemade sauerkraut, potato salad, pretzel dumpling and gravy.

Paingt talks about the meticulous process of making a classic roast pork knuckle. From start to finish, he says, this dish takes more than 36 hours to prepare, including brining for one day, then boiling for about five to six hours, until the meat is tender, and roasting until the skin is so crisp that it breaks into pieces at the cut of a knife with a little force. Inside, the flavorsome and tender meat simply falls off the bone.