Brotsuppe, Bavarian bread soup for the Oktoberfest
Brotsuppe, Bavarian bread soup for the Oktoberfest
Soup is home cooking, comfort food, street food. It is the perfect example of the ingenuity of cucina povera.
To paraphrase an old Barilla advertisement, where there is stale bread, there is home. Any leftover bread – the most precious, common, dignified, widespread, meaningful and revered food in human history – is upcycled into something else in the frugal economy of traditional households. These recipes fight food waste, nourish, surprise with their ingenuity. Stale bread brings to life recipes imbued with family traditions and habits, influenced by climate and local products, dominations, personal stories, and rituals.
Every food culture where bread is a key element of the average diet has created and handed down recipes that turn stale bread into gnocchi, cakes, puddings, stuffings, and, above all, soups. As the saying goes, se non è zuppa, è pan bagnato. If it’s not soup, it’s wet bread.
Soup is home cooking, comfort food, street food. It is the perfect example of the ingenuity of cucina povera.
We could travel from North to South across Italy and find as many bread soups as there are gastronomic cultures, bread-making styles, and towns surrounded by more or less productive countryside. The same principle can be extended to other regions beyond the Alps, and today’s recipe, brotsuppe, the Bavarian bread soup, is another fitting example.
Is there a traditional bread soup in your gastronomic traditions or in your family habits? Let me know in the comments, if you want to share it.
Brotsuppe, the Bavarian bread soup
The key ingredient is day-old dark bread, fried in butter and onion, then simmered with meat stock until soft and mushy. I decided to blend the soup to make it smooth, then I thickened it with egg yolks and fresh cream. Then, I fried some more bread croutons to sprinkle over the soup, along with chopped chives. One taste was enough. I immediately felt transported to another place, with different traditions, during a beer festival. I was holding the soup tightly to warm my hands as I walked between stalls and stands full of people, toasts, music, and folk songs.
This recipe is developed in cooperation with #Oktoberfestallitaliana, an initiative supported by Alp Bayern, the agency for food products from Bavaria.
Get the recipe for the Bavarian bread soup on the blog.
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More Bavarian recipes from the blog archive
Grilled sausages and sauerkraut. To turn the cabbage into proper sauerkraut, you would need a lacto-fermentation process. Today we won’t follow the fermentation route, but we’ll opt instead for a cooking process that gives the cabbage a delicate sweet and sour taste, that naturally marries pork: not only sausages but also steaks, scamerita – the typical Tuscan cut from the neck of the pork, fat and flavourful –, sirloin medallions or roast loin.
Bavarian Beer Roasted Pork. The roasted pork belongs to our festive menus, too. While I was reading the recipe for the Bayerischer Schweinebraten I noticed so many similarities with our roasted pork, so I decided to follow the Bavarian recipe, but I chose a very Tuscan cut, the arista, the pork loin.
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