Well, folks…I’m sorry but we had to close down our German food trailer, Chef Keem’s Bavarian Bistro.

Due to the planned development of our location at Congress and 3rd, we had to move out without a place to go. Bummer.

Looks like we’ll be shut down until the beginning of 2011. Please stay tuned to this blog for updates on our situation.

Thank you so much for eating all our schnitzels and bratwurst! It’s been a true pleasure serving y’all.

Love & Schnitzels,
your Chef Keem

Like a good neighbor, Emily’s Dive is there…right next to our Bavarian Bistro Austin food trailer!

I’ve eaten their Mesquite Grilled Chicken Taco, the Carne Guisada and the Al Pastor thingy, all with the INCREDIBLE tomatillo salsa and…….wait!….here it comes…FETA GUACAMOLE! And I swear, you can absolutely taste the love that goes into their cooking.

Matter of fact, I love their food so much…if I knew two ladies named Emily, I would exclaim loudly: “Go ahead Emilys dive into some really good Mexican food!” (Never mind the typo and punctuation issue, ok?)

If you’re an Austin mom, you’re probably familiar with LiveMom.com, the Queen of Austin’s mom blogs.

A couple of weeks ago, owner Catherine and food editor Shannon visited our Bavarian Bistro trailer for a schnitzel lunch and an interview. Read all about it here, including a recipe for this marvelous Bavarian cheese spread called Obatzda: LiveMom Oktoberfest Obatzda

Welcome to Austin – ACL Fest visitors!

And a huge Thank You to all our regular customers for your wonderful support over the last 2 months!

We have authentic German sausages for you – right here in the Heart of Texas!

And we have schnitzels: Wiener Schnitzel and Jaeger Schnitzel.

Have a sandwich as big as Texas, with Bohemian Sauerkraut and Red Cabbage, and our super-tasty Bratkartoffeln (German Fries or Griddle Potatoes)!

Come see us for lunch at Congress and 3rd, Mo-Fri, 11-2

Thank you, Christian, for the pretty photos! Visit Christian’s Pizza Review site and follow him on Twitter.

The Edelweiss flower has been depicted in countless graphics (see our Bavarian Bistro trailer), decals, hat pins, souvenirs and other what-have-yous. Remember the show tune “Edelweiss” from the musical “The Sound of Music”? Here are a few real Edelweiss pictures and some basic info on this best-known European mountain flower…

A member of the sunflower family, its name comes from the German words edel (noble) and weiss (white). The Leontopodium alpinum prefers rocky lime stone areas at 6,000 – 8,000 feet altitude. The Edelweiss blooms between July and September.

Each bloom consists of five to six small yellow flower heads surrounded by leaflets in star form. The flower is covered by fine, white hairs for protection against cold, aridity and UV radiation. It is non-toxic and has been traditionally considered as a remedy against abdominal and respiratory diseases.

• The Edelweiss flower is protected in most countries where it grows.
• It’s the unofficial national flower of Switzerland
• Swiss generals wear Edelweiss instead of stars
• During the Third Reich, anti-Nazi youth groups wore Edelweiss badges

For a number of interesting and entertaining tidbits about our beautiful mountain flower, click on this link:

Show me the Edelweiss!

I would like to thank my good German friend, Hans Braxmeier, for his generous permission to use his amazing pictures in this post. If you can read in German, his mountain travel reports may give you great pleasure. The fabulous photographs are definitely worth a visit. Go to Hans on PageWizz!

Bratkartoffel is a traditional German side dish served with almost anything…sausages, burgers, meatloaf, steaks, fried fish, you name it. “Brat” means fried, and “Kartoffel” is German for potato. Most of the time, the plural is used: “Bratkartoffeln”. Notice the ‘n’? It’s one of many ways to express the plural of a German word. But who cares? Let’s talk about the dish instead!

Bratkartoffel Recipe

• Peel (or not), cook and slice as many potatoes as you like. You may use Idahos, Red Potatoes, Yellow Potatoes…they’re all good.
• Mix the slices with chopped onion and seasonings, and then saute them in hot oil in a pan or on a griddle until nicely browned.
• Traditionally, the seasoning includes caraway seeds. But many folks don’t like them, so we leave them out, here at our Bavarian Bistro!
• You may also add chopped garlic, bacon, green peppers, eggs…for a wonderful breakfast or lunch dish by itself.

At the Bavarian Bistro, we keep our griddle potatoes simple yet flavorful. We add only the chopped onions and a special seasoning mix to our bratkartoffeln.

Don’t they look yummy? By the way, my wife just told me…when she worked for a German restaurant in Fredericksburg, the li’l old German ladies there used to call them German fries. Works too.

Browning meat properly…is an essential flavor-building technique for authentic Hungarian goulash or other stew recipes, as well as for roasts or braised meats. The following easy goulash method will demonstrate how to create a good fond, and how to deglaze it for optimum flavor.

Ingredients And Prep List For Authentic Hungarian Goulash

• 5 pounds lean beef cubes (top round or eye round)
• 1 large yellow onion; diced
• 2 medium green bell peppers; diced
• 3 cloves fresh garlic; minced
• 1 small can tomato paste
• 1/2 cup vegetable oil
• 1 tablespoon caraway seeds
• 1/4 cup Hungarian paprika
• 2 cups red wine
• 2 quarts beef stock
• juice of 1 lemon
• cornstarch slurry or flour/butter roux for thickening
• potato and carrot dice (optional)

Browning The Meat

• use some of the oil to cover the bottom of a sauce pan; bring to medium-high heat
• brown the meat cubes in single batch layers until they have a good crust
• transfer the finished beef to a bowl to make room for the next batch
• do not crowd the pan, this would cause a drop in temperature; the meat would draw too much water and not brown properly anymore
• when all the cubes are deeply browned and moved to the holding bowl, you should see the sediment (fond) on the pan bottom, the corners, and a couple of inches up the sides

Let me say this again, because it is the most important part of your flavor-building process: the meat should be dark brown and lightly crusty…not burned, of course! If you simply cook the beef until it has changed colors from pink to light brown, you will not have enough caramelized meat juice for the fond layer left in the pan. Use high heat and be bold!

More Flavor Building For A Rich Goulash Sauce

• heat a little more oil in the pan and add the chopped onion, bell pepper, garlic, tomato paste, and caraway seeds
• cook the vegetables, stirring frequently, until the tomato paste leaves a reddish-brown substance on the bottom; the caramelized sugars from the tomato and onion are an important part of the sauce flavor
• you should have a somewhat scary-looking mess in your pan (“Help! I burned it!”); don’t worry, as long as it is not black, you now have a beautiful base (fond) for fantastic flavor development!
• add the meat cubes to the vegetable mix; stir and cook for 30 seconds

Deglazing The Pan

Add the red wine to your pot and bring everything to a light boil. With a spatula, scrape the pan bottom and the sides until all of the fond is released and incorporated into the liquid. Now add the beef stock, paprika, and lemon juice.

Cover the pot and simmer your goulash on low heat for about 90 minutes, or until the meat is fork-tender.

15 minutes before the end of the cooking time, you may add diced potatoes and carrots to your stew. Thicken it as you prefer, and adjust the seasoning with salt and pepper to taste.

A more liquid stew can be served as goulash soup on a chilly day. Crusty bread or a pretzel make wonderful accompaniments.

The thicker, authentic Hungarian goulash is often served with rice, pasta (spaetzle!), dumplings or boiled potatoes.

One last thing: the properly browned meat provides—aside from a rich flavor—the beautiful, appetizing color of a stew cooked right.
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Jaeger Sauce Recipe is one of the most frequent search terms bringing visitors to this blog. Although I’ve written about authentic German Jaeger Schnitzel before, I’ve never described the actual recipe for the matching sauce.

A quick recap: Wiener Schnitzel is a breaded and fried veal or pork cutlet. An authentic Jaeger Schnitzel is the same cutlet without breading, sauteed and served with a brown mushroom sauce.

Texans seem to love their Jaeger Schnitzel breaded, so we serve it that way at our Austin, TX food trailer, Chef Keem’s Bavarian Bistro. I love a breaded Jaeger Schnitzel myself!

Jaeger Sauce Recipe

A simple way to make a tasty Jaeger Sauce is to use a packaged brown gravy (or mushroom sauce) mix and refine it according to your taste, time, and budget. For the purpose of this recipe, let’s assume we make 4 packages (4 cups) of sauce.

• whisk the sauce powder into 4 cups of cold water, transfer the pot to your stove and bring to a simmer; set aside
• here comes the good part: in a frying pan, saute 8 ounces of sliced mushrooms, 1/2 cup of chopped onion and 1 Tablespoon of minced fresh garlic in 2-3 Tablespoons of olive oil until lightly browned; season with salt and pepper to taste
• add 1/4 cup of red wine and a splash of brandy, if you like, and cook for about 30 seconds until the fond on the pan bottom comes loose and incorporates into the liquid
• combine the mushroom mix with the brown sauce mix and simmer together for a few seconds; add a couple Tablespoons of freshly chopped parsley, and optionally a few pinches of other fresh herbs such as oregano, thyme, or marjoram
• brighten your sauce with a few drops of lemon juice or raspberry vinegar. Ready!

So, here is your Jaeger Sauce recipe. Now go forth and slather it liberally on Jaeger Schnitzels, Wiener Schnitzels, pork chops, sausages, or even fried fish fillets. Oh, yeah…Jaeger is German for hunter.

And if you want to save time and hassle, these packaged jaeger sauces are actually very good:

A perfect burger is hard to find. It’s usually eaten before you can look. Enter our Austin food trailer Max Parfait…

I discovered Chef Zarghun’s big shiny food truck last Saturday during my weekly stroll through the Barton Creek Mall Farmers Market. It smelled so darn good in the vicinity of Max Parfait — he cooks on a wood-fired grill! — I felt hungry again, 30 minutes after having had a nice big breakfast.

As a fellow Austin food “trucker”, I introduced myself to the Chef and his lovely assistant, Eddy (I probably misspell her name here). They offered me a sample of their famous Belgian fries. My, are those good! I’ve never had Belgian fries before, and I probably will never have any other fries again in the future. I’ll ask about the recipe, next time, but I don’t really care. I just want them to make ‘em…and I’ll eat ‘em. It’s a win/win situation because I don’t have to clean the fryolator.

But what about that perfect burger?, you ask…

As it turned out, Max Parfait encourages you to “bring your hungry” for this:

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Perfect Burger $5
Handcrafted patty made with 100% all-natural beef cooked on a wood-fired grill and served on a homemade bun…add Cheddar Cheese ($1) Grilled onions & grilled jalapenos (each 50 cents)

Portobello Sandwich $5
Sauteed portabella mushroom served with sun-dried tomatoes and feta cheese on a homemade bun

Pulled Chicken Sandwich $5 (COMING SOON!)
All-natural, grilled chicken covered in our homemade BBQ sauce and served with jalapenos and onions on a homemade bun

Sandwich Fixings
Lettuce, tomatoes, onions, pickles, ketchup, mustard, mayonnaise

Belgian Fries $3 / $2 (side)
Fresh, hand-cut potatoes that are crispy on the outside and moist & airy on the inside

Homemade chocolate chip cookies $1.25

Drinks $1 – 2
Richard’s Rainwater, Topo-Chico Mineral Water, Blue Sky Cola

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Can we talk about this perfect burger now, please? OK, then…

So I ordered two perfect burgers and a truckload of Belgian fries to go. (My wife is a burger fan/critic.) I’m thinking, this is great! I’ll sit down in front of the Fox Soccer Channel and have a taste of Max Parfait’s burger. (I always watch soccer while I’m eating. I’ve read it helps your metabolism, or something.) Then I’ll take a good picture of the whole thing and jot down some notes for this blog post. Perfect! (Wrong!)

The first bite filled me with a surprise wave of soothing emotions. I felt instant pride over my perfect food purchase combined with a sense of comfortable security in my upcoming 15 minutes of bliss.

I’ll tell you what really did it for me: the meat juices! Amidst a bold flavor combo of grilled onions, spices, seasonings, and the sandwich fixings…I could still distinguish and savor the pure taste of meat juice you normally only find in a perfectly-cooked steak.

What this means to me is that there are three major factors at play:

• 1. Max Parfait sources the best beef money can buy
• 2. Chef Zerghun knows how to season a burger right
• 3. Chef Zerghun knows how to cook a burger to perfection

So, I started eating this burger and I couldn’t stop. (My wife had finished hers before I was done.)

So, in terms of a picture of my perfect burger from Max Parfait…this is the best I can do for today. Sorry, guys.

Look, how nice! Chef Zerghun brought his beautiful family to the Bavarian Bistro for a quick lunch broiling under the merciless Austin Downtown sun:

So nice. So kind. The first yelp reviews of our Bavarian Bistro are in.

We truly appreciate the thoughtfulness and sophistication of our first reviewers. Thank you, ladies, for your kind words.

I knew that Austin foodies do better than just stuffing their mouths with whatever is hot and handy. You guys understand concepts such as authenticity, originality, and the love that goes into recipe refinement. You rock!

Here are excerpts from our first three yelp reviews:

“Oops I did it again. I had a juicy, thick, delicious, savory sausage. A Bratwurst. I always vowed to myself to never go back. Once in Seattle. Once in Portland. And now here in Austin.

“It might be my German ancestry, but I’m a big fan of Bavarian fare. Bratwurst, schnitzel, etc – it’s all just good. I even like sauerkraut, which scares some people away I think. Thus, I appreciate the attention that Chef Keem has paid to preserving authenticity in his menu rather than Americanizing it for the masses.” –Hadley H.

Read the entire Bavarian Bistro reviews on yelp Austin…

Thank you so much!