Outside of London: Buhl, Germany: Market Feuerwurst

Feuerwurst from Buhl Market

For the past few days I have been sampling the delights of Baden-Baden; namely of the food, drink and spa variety.  For those not familiar, it is a small town in the Black Forest region famous for its beer and thermal waters.  As with the rest of Germany, it is also the place to go for some seriously good sausages.

A few miles away from Baden-Baden is a small town called Buhl that has a farmers’ market every weekend.  The curse of the hand-luggage holiday always scuppers my plans for shopping in markets as almost everything is over the 100ml limit they allow for liquids on the plane.  Sure, you can buy similar stuff at the airport, but it is three times the price and never as good.  Whilst dragging me away from a stall selling German honey in beautiful glass jars, my husband consoled me with the news that sausages were being cooked up on the other side of the market.

Good sausages are as ubiquitous in Germany as good beer, and you never have to go far to find them.  Markets are a good place to start as, like this one in Buhl, they are where most of the local residents can be found on a weekend morning.  Most of them had congregated around the van where several different types of sausage were being cooked up on a hot plate.  The van looked like one you would find in the fun fairs of days gone by, complete with industrial-sized pump-action bottles of sauce.

I opted for the feuerwurst which, even with my limited grasp of German, I knew translated as ‘fire sausage’.  I could tell by the fact that it was redder in colour than the others that it would be the spiciest.  I actually know very little about the differences between the different types of German sausage, so thought this would be a good place to start.  Once cooked, it was placed in a small, traditional bread roll and handed to me.  “Drei,” she said.  Three euros.  For the biggest sausage I had seen in some time.

The feuer was definitely there; the sausage was spiked heavily with both paprika and chilli – I even found some seeds hidden within the meat.  It was a perfect German sausage with a good bend and a decisive ‘snap’ when you bit into it.  Doused with a generous amount of Dijon mustard, it was delicious, if it had a bit of sauerkraut too it would have been sheer perfection.