Bread, Cheese, and Wine

Yep, the jeans are a little tighter after spending a month in Strasbourg. The bread. The cheese. The wine. Oh my…. While we’ve had some good food over the past year, we’ve been in countries that aren’t exactly known for their gastronomy. Portugal, the UK, Hungary. That all changed with our stay in Strasbourg. Daily fresh bread? Yes please. Delicious pastries? Of course. Sausage and cheese? All day every day. From restaurants, to grocery stores and beyond, we definitely enjoyed the food in the Alsace!

Alsatian Specialties

We enjoyed eating the local specialties while out on our day trips in the region.

Meat, Meat, and More Meat…with some Sauerkraut

The food in the Alsace definitely has a German influence. This is charcroute. Basically a pile of different types of smoked meat on top of a pile of sauerkraut with some boiled potatoes. There are huge fields of cabbage in the area, which reflects their love of sauerkraut!

Pizza Anyone?

Tarte Flambée, also called Flammekueche is everywhere and makes for a tasty lunch! It is the Alsatian version of pizza, with a cracker thin crust and melty cheese. Here, I had chevre and miel (goat cheese and honey) with ham. You can find tarte flambees with mushrooms, the traditional style with ham and crème fraîche , or even sweet version with fruit. They are wood fired and traditionally served on a wooden board.

Potato Pankcakes

Potato galettes with goat cheese, jam, and salad. A perfect lunch!

Grocery Store Finds

We were lucky to have a large supermarket to shop from in our Strasbourg suburb. They had a decent amount of international foods where we found ingredients to make our go to meals like greek bowls, indian curry, and pastas. We continued our approach of shopping daily, which allows us to get the freshest breads and produce and not waste food.

We bought a baguette every day! And while a boulangerie or the local farmers market had better quality, the grocery store bread was baked onsite and was still very good! We were surprised to find commercially produced loves of bread (like we’d have in the US). The biggest difference was that most of the white bread had the crusts cut off! We thought that was very interesting!

You’d be amazed at the amount of yogurt, cheese, and wine. There are 2 massive aisles of yogurt! Rows and rows of cheese which we haven’t quite figured out how to buy. And 8 aisles of wine!

One other big difference here in France is that you weigh and tag your own produce. There are scales at the end of each produce section with a touch screen where you select your product and it prints a sticker for your bag. There is a clear focus on reducing single use plastics. The produce bags are made from kraft paper, not the plastic bags we were used to in the US. Generally speaking, the produce reflects the season. You won’t find a lot of berries in the store in the fall. It is dominated by squashes, apples, and root vegetables. And every produce product tells you where it comes from! We’re eating green beans and sweet potatoes from Egypt!

We also found some other surprising things in the store. Who knew the French drink boxed wine? In a country where you’ll never find a screw top wine bottle, we were shocked to find boxed wine! And escargot anyone? For €19 a can?

Wine and Beer

There is a strong influence of Belgian and German beer in the Alsace, which we loved! In addition to several craft breweries, there are a lot of imported beers in the grocery store. We also had a small craft beer store in our neighborhood! There is even a Delirium bar, which is one of our favorite Belgian brewers. Would you believe they even had Boulevard’s Tank 7 on tap! A KC beer in Strasbourg!

We definitely enjoyed the white wines in the Alsace! They serve local white wine in special glasses with green stems and a small goblet. We had them in our Airbnb and were served wine in them in some of the restaurants we visited! For our tastes, we could find a really decent bottle of wine from the grocery store for €4-5, but you could find them as low as €2! We learned that we like Reisling! I had always been under the assumption that it was very sweet, but we found many that were very dry.

Serving sizes of wine varies from restaurant to restaurant. But they always offer multiple sizes. Most commonly we found 12CL, 25CL, or 50CL servings. 12CL (pictured below) was typically €5-6 for local wines. Bottles were €25-35 for good quality wines.

Specialty Stores

One of the things that we love about Europe are all the local specialty food stores. When walking through a city center you’ll find numerous stores with local delicacies. Cheese, sausage, bread, wine, nuts, and jams. All the best things in life in cozy stores and helpful staff, often handing out samples! Sometimes it pays to be a tourist. We love popping in and browsing. Mouth watering displays of goodies in patisseries. Pretzels (bretzel in French) hanging from racks. Giant wheels of cheese. Endless types of dried sausages (sauscissons). It is the stuff dreams are made of.

With one more month to go in France, who knows if any of our pants will fit by the time we go back to the US for the holidays. And while we are looking forward to chips and salsa and tex-mex from the US, we’ll miss our daily baguette tradition, fresh croissant au beurre, and pastries from France!