Typical German Dinner ! (Abendbrot Culture)

what's up everybody we are diana and phil. Diana is from the united states i am from germany and in this video we're going to show you the traditional and the typical way how germans eat their dinner. abendbrot. yeah let's eat. when people think of german dinner there's one word that always comes up abendbrot meaning evening bread. in germany that is cold bread cheese and cold cuts. no cooking no fuss. but here's the thing that idea of german dinner is not dead it is just no longer the only option out there and it became way more international over time. in this video we are breaking popular and traditional german dinners down by age and life stage because that is where the big differences lie. starting out with college students moving through working adults and families and ending with the generation that put the fear into foreigners visiting germany and made abendbrot famous in the first place. option number one cheap cooked meals. starting off with the youngest self-sufficient age group students. the university student age is currently gen z who typically end up with cheaper cooked or prepared meals like instant noodles or simple pasta with tomato sauce. and then there's frozen pizza and the two most popular brands are dr oetker and wagner. these pizzas are a serious deal here in germany and every dude basically lived off of them at some point in his life. when i was a student i probably ate thousands of these. and this is the beauty and the curse of it. it's so easy dudes. 10 minutes in i have to do nothing. it's mainly single men who consume this student age like 18 to 29. and how do they consume it you asked? well gaming of course. just picture yourself 21 years old fresh university student single male and just lived in a shared apartment in a tiny room like this. nobody stops you from gaming in the evening and just eating your frozen pizza. i think most of these are probably eaten in like some shared apartment rooms. and to be honest the main one is probably the pepperoni one. but we call this salami. so in germany it's a salami pizza and not pepperoni what you call pepperoni. what we call pepperoni is actually also on here. it's these well peppers. the spicy peppers. and surprisingly good. i think the better ones of these are better than some of the worst pizzas that you can get from a takeout. it's just a very good bang for your buck and such a convenience. this is why so many dudes probably live off this at one time in their life. man i miss i miss my single life. or not my single life but you know parts of it like these kind of parts. but yeah off to the next one. option number two eating out on a budget. as a student the number one classic cheap food to eat out in germany is a döner kebab. now it's not as cheap as the three euro döner i knew back in my day but it's still a decent preisleistungsverhältnis and often around eight euros here in germany. for anyone who doesn't know döner is the number one fast food staple in germany that typically includes this thin shaved meat fresh vegetables like onions lettuce cabbage tomatoes and cucumbers. and we can't forget your choice of yogurt garlic or spicy sauces all stuffed into a beautiful warm flat bread. it's delicious hearty mouth-watering and oh so good. yeah anyways some döner shops in student towns even offer student priced döner. this is the most popular eating out food not only for students but most of germany overall. the döner unifies ages genders social classes vegetarians and carnivores. it's the perfect dish. this is my absolute favorite food in germany. it never disappoints. check it out here you have this nice like bread then you have the layer of chicken meat you can choose between chicken and veal and beef i have chicken you have lettuce cucumbers tomatoes in there different types of sauces a little bit of spicy sauce they always ask you typical standard sentence is your mit schaf bitte. overall i ate a lot of kebabs in my life. the next popular eating out or grab to go options are pizza and asian food like chinese. and at this point you might notice a pattern when germans do not cook they do not eat german food. i wonder why. but to be honest cheap eat out or takeaway foods are kind of getting pushed out by inflation and higher priced items which leads us to more proper or premium eat out options. eating out in germany the proper way. and i have to say eating out for dinner in germany is not nearly as common as eating out is in the usa. but yeah there are restaurants for different budgets like ranging from cheap currywurst and pommes shops to michelin star expensive restaurants. but that is not a typical dinner. for diana and me personally when we eat out we also like to eat international food that we don't typically make at home like japanese ramen american southern barbecue greek gyros or even ethiopian platters or some spicy indian food. although i think the average german most of the time goes for one thing and that is italian food. and chadgbt agrees with me. italian restaurants are everywhere in germany from big cities to small villages. you will find an italian restaurant at the end of the world or at the end of germany. it's a nice sit-down choice and who doesn't love pizza and pasta. bellissimo. option number three food delivery. and for those of you who are not only too lazy to cook for themselves but still want to have something hearty within the comfort of their home the age of food delivery is here. this is the way you never have to leave your house and food magically appears at your door. this one isn't specific to a certain generation but more so about individual preferences and income and also location. but the trend is definitely going up. in germany we have a few main delivery platforms like Lieferando, Uber Eats and Volt. you will see these people biking around cities and driving around towns delivering food. and in the bigger cities they are everywhere. all right so it's time to order some delivery food and we all do it with our phones obviously. i'm gonna use the app Lieferando which is i think the most popular one in germany. and i think we're gonna go for some burgers. and there's this new place called Burgermeister. it's apparently a very famous hyped burger place from berlin that came over to düsseldorf where we live. burgers are one thing that got very hyped and that are very growing in germany. it was traditionally not such a big takeaway or delivery food but lately these individual burger places are popping up everywhere. let's do the biggest one Meister a la Klassen. 19 euros. okay extra bacon. no thanks. jalapenos. add. and one thing i want to put on the screen here. i'm looking at these prices and the place actually not too far from us. and i took a clip of the actual prices. i just want to show how much these delivery apps add to the price before delivery fees and everything. so my basket also just went up from 19 to 21.59. let's see. portion mayo. yes please. let's add that. so they add not just a delivery fee of 1.49. it's also a service fee of 99 cents. and the overall thing comes out to 22.43. and that is before tipping. tip your courier. also tipping beforehand. something that's very common in america. and it's making their way over to germany. i think it's one of the worst ideas ever. let me know what you think about this. the tipping before ordering. but if i don't do it i'm afraid they're gonna, i don't know, spit in my meal or deliver last and it arrives cold. let's be generous for the video. 250. maybe comes quicker. so we're at 25 euros for one meal. and it says delivery takes 35 to 50 minutes. i'm gonna see you when it's here. danke. ciao. that was way quicker than we thought. 15 minutes but for 25 euros. maybe it was the tip. let's see how good it is. so this is the delivery options right here. you saw me getting the burger. we also got a pizza. but not any kind of pizza. this is a nice tonno ecipolla, which is tuna fish and onions. and this is the second most eaten pizza in germany. it was so strange to me at first that coming from the u.s. we don't have tuna fish on our pizza. but it's very very common here in germany. and it's awesome. the pizza actually was 13 euros, which is on the expensive side. we have the burger, we have some fries and it came with a coke. and we already checked out the burger. we took it out of the box and we cut it open. it feels very heavy. it feels like a heavy burger. it definitely looks pretty good. very oily bun. there's two layers of meat in there. jalapenos and then tomato, lettuce and all the good stuff below. pickles as well. cheese, bacon. that looks hefty. and the little mayonnaise was extra. guess how much? no way. 50 cents? 80 cents. 80 euro cents for this little bit of mayonnaise blob. in germany your sauces are not free. yeah. let's see if the fries are good. i feel like delivery fries are a problem. so let's see how they are. they're not very seasoned. pretty bland the fries. but they're good. and because the guy was here so quickly, it was like 15 minutes. it was so fast. i think they're pretty good for delivery fries because they always get so soggy. yeah i feel like fries are always questionable with ordering like you said. but they're still kind of warm. not bad. i feel like pizza is always a safe bet to order as a delivery because if it's warm, if it's cold, it's still good. so italian pizza like this. the number one delivery food of the germans obviously. but i think we should try this burger. this very expensive burger. this is good. you take that half. oh i'm getting half of this. okay i thought that was your meal. this is mine. oh we don't have to. no no no. so here's the burger. it's juicy. it's thick and it's pretty heavy. i looked it up. this has 1300 calories. stop. don't tell me that. let's see. cheers. wow it's not bad. dude it's heavy. it's messy. it's very oily. it's also spicy. i can taste the jalapeno. it's not one of these pickled ones but a fresh one. i do like the freshness of the jalapeno, the lettuce, the tomato. it is a little bit oilier than i prefer but it's honestly not too bad. i think though, kind of surprised, this is one of the better burgers in germany definitely. this is a big step above like mcdonald's burger king i would say. yeah. but is it worth 25 euros? yeah that's crazy. i feel like 25 euros for a delivery burger, fast food burger, wow. i feel like these deliveries, and again now i have to be a little german, are a big scam. i paid one euro service fee, one euro 49 delivery fee, and then 250 tip. and on top of that the initial base price was already kind of like 10 to 20 percent more than it is at the place. yeah. so we're gonna check it out and put the price of this meal down here, what it would have been if we would have just eaten it there. but it's good man. if you don't want to leave your house you have to weigh is this worth the price for you and how much does this mean. honestly i think that's a little too steep for us. we rarely ever get food delivery unless it's like we really really need it because going out is kind of an exciting thing right. we also live in a kind of bigger european city right in the center so it's very easy for us to quickly get something. yeah that's true. the handful of times we delivered it took hours sometimes and it was pretty bad so just hopping out getting a pizza cheaper as you can see it's kind of easier. but that being said pizza the number one thing germans order in asian food and duna is above the burger but the burgers american style burgers are very up and coming and getting more and more popular. yeah there's a lot of new burger places popping up all the time. and to be honest i'm a little excited about it now. yeah honestly not not too bad. very international again we're gonna have the big big german tradition coming up. option number four home cooked meals. now we're getting into the real dinner territory and moving on to older and higher income individuals. let's say the current gen x and millennial generations like working couples or small families with children. the average german family cooks a majority of dinners at home. and the number one homemade meal again is italian pasta. kind of followed by some rice dishes or potatoes salads and meats like chicken pork or schnitzel. hey there's something of course meals will vary from family to family but growing up in my family we often cooked a lot of meat and potatoes some typical german soups like bohnenzuppe or different kinds of stews. so this right here is our version of the spaghetti bolognese the most cooked food in germany and obviously a staple of italian cuisine. we use some protein pasta some minced meat and very common. this is actually across all price ranges all budget ranges but for families also because it's so simple to make and big volumes i guess for the kids and everything everybody loves it. but damn it's good. that's the reason why children love it adults love it old people love it everybody loves it. germany on a plate or italy depending how you look at it. and this is also the group that occasionally does a cold dinner which i don't know might be an age thing. and this leads us to the notorious option number five. okay okay moving on to the most traditional german dinner and probably mostly consumed but not limited to the older generations like the baby boomers or the silent generation. it is the iconic the infamous the meal that makes every foreigner question their sanity. and there we have it this is basically the typical traditional notorious if you're kind of a millennial like i am we grew up on this stuff. it comes from the older generations after the war this kind of became the standard because it's easy to make but i still remember my childhood and there was a lot of times where we ate stuff like this in the evening nothing warm just these cold cuts. yeah so abendbrot literally translates to evening bread and i think the older generation still eats it. phil and i not so much in everyday life. as you can see we were still missing a big bread knife but it looks so good. like look at this we went to the bakery got this bread and sliced it ourselves but just fresh bread. we prepared a couple of those. i want to start with the gray bread because this is so standard. maybe you start with the cheese. good old cheese on a gray bread slice. yes and the most popular cheese that germans put on their bread is gouda. so we got a gouda. the second most popular would be an emmentaler but that's the yes look at how nice this looks. i got another little zwiebelnettbrot. if you want to you can put a little pickle on there it's optional it's fancy not a lot of people did it but there we go i feel like phil and i don't ever eat abendbrot except when we're with your family so either at your mom's house or your sister's house sometimes we'll have that if it's just like a quick easy dinner. obviously we bought this bread straight from the bakery went home and this is so nice it's very fresh the crust is very hard and there's a soft inside it looks a bit like sourdough bread it's a little bit of a mischung it's like half rogan half sourdough and if you're one of these people i think you cannot eat raw pork meat in general you might be right but in germany you can it's all under health regulations it needs to be labeled as met though and this is actually very juicy we put a big chunk of that on there and it has a certain texture not everybody loves the cheese honestly cheese and butter very good i think because we don't eat it so often every time we do which is usually for a video i really like it it's good right i also think in the us we would have toasted this but in germany it's very uncommon to toast the bread for abendbrot so that's the quark the german cheese variation i don't know how to describe this the thing between cream cheese and something else and of course the other staple besides the bread are bread rolls we got a little bit of a selection here maybe you tried this triangle no i want the salami with cheese on that he wants to give me the crap no no i'm taking this one this one is salami with cheese ring around it that's so my childhood and then butter underneath this looks good as a kid you love that stuff dude i don't think i've had like raw pure butter in a while so it's so good and i don't think i had pure quark in a while i always put something on top like you could easily take one of these put that on there brother and that works as well but traditionally and how i also quark was the only topping of a bread and it works it's very nice it's so fresh it's cold on there you put a little thicker and it's like a refreshing and not too heavy thing very nice so you're telling me i couldn't do this bam now that's a sandwich i don't think anybody did that what this is how this is this is a meal now dude salami cheese butter so the most famous cuts are basically cold sausage cuts mostly from pork sausage this salami obviously pork sausage the mad pork and then this right here is traditionally also pork but we get the chicken version we also got this retro here with a t-wurst which is this other type of spreadable pork sausage and it has this taste very every kid of my age is familiar with and a lot of these things are very similar to the breakfast the whole point of the armboard is kind of like to get the leftovers of the day from breakfast and from lunch if you have a piece of schnitzel leftover you could put that on the gray bread as well yeah it's a meal that i feel like a lot of germans don't prepare for it's not like they're like it's just whatever is available the only thing is it's not so many sweet things compared to the breakfast there's no jam there's no honey usually you can do whatever you want but usually not and also funnily that older generation with eggs oh yeah my mom and my grandma they always told me only one egg a week i think because they thought it's not good for you that's been debunked yeah so an egg was a morning thing only once a week yeah that's why in the evening there's no sweet stuff and no eggs no egg i want you to try that team was quickly it's okay it's not that great but i think if you grew up with this i see the nostalgia from it i think a lot of kids like it and then you outgrow it at some point so if you're german or if you're from anywhere and you grew up on this stuff let me know if you still like it as an adult i still think it's good but as a kid i loved it but that's basically the traditional armport that all the foreigners are afraid of when they come to germany not very fancy not very international it's not a warm meal it's the german version of a charcuterie board it is absolutely is so let us know what you think of the different ways that germans eat their dinner does any of this look funny or weird to you and where did you grow up and what did you eat for dinner as always thank you so much for watching and we'll see you next time all right hey you know what i hate that we have to get up in between movies and switch to turn on the new movie yeah it's horrible you know what i hate having to get up to pee it's such a burden