Biergartenarbeit

52weeksofcooking 2026 - Week 25 - Gardening

Jun 18, 2026

A wooden table set with a Bavarian-style spread: two large glossy pretzels on a plate, a bowl of orange‑tinted Obatzda topped with thin slices of red onion, a plate of neatly spiralled salted white radish, and a bowl of Wurstsalat made from sliced sausage and pickles. Beside the food are two German beer bottles—Franziskaner Weissbier and Erdinger Dunkel—and a glass filled with pale amber beer.

I’m definitely not a gardener. I can just about manage to keep a couple of cacti alive, but the idea of growing anything sufficiently well to be edible and appetizing is pure fantasy. I’m sure many people will be cooking with beautiful produce and herbs that they nurtured into being, but due to an abject lack of skill, I went in another direction.

What’s my favourite kind of garden? A beer garden. That might not be true, but I’ve been to Bavaria and there’s few things that feel quite as right as sitting in the biergarten of any of the incredible bräuhaus and leisurely enjoying ein oder zwei Maß. Here in the UK, the best you can expect for bar snacks is a packet of ready salted, pork scratchings or if you’re fancy, a bowl of cheesy chips (translation: fries). Let’s ditch the traditional rivalry and speak plainly here: Germany does pub food way better than the British.

So I made myself a selection of Bavarian drinking snacks.

A single freshly baked pretzel with a dark, glossy brown crust and coarse salt crystals sits on a ceramic plate decorated with blue floral patterns. The plate rests on a wooden surface, highlighting the pretzel’s sheen and texture.

Brezeln are soft, bready pretzels. Mine aren’t entirely authentic. Traditionally, brezeln get dipped in a solution of food-grade lye, which gives them their characteristic sheen and flavour. I’m sure I could source and work safely with food-grade lye if I really wanted to, but it sounds like a hassle. I had some sodium carbonate laying around from making alkaline noodles the other week, so I used that instead. An egg wash is also not traditional, but does give a nice appearance.

These are not the best brezeln that I could make, but they were the best brezeln that I could make in an afternoon from ingredients that I already owned. And they were delicious!

A small bowl with a blue‑rimmed edge holds a creamy pale yellow spread topped with thin semicircles of red onion. The bowl sits on a wooden surface, highlighting the contrast between the smooth dip and the crisp onion slices.

To go with my brezeln, I made the best cheese dip in the world: Obatzda. Mostly made from camembert and butter, obatzda is rich and robust. The sliced onions on top just about keep it from being too much of a good thing.

A white bowl filled with a German-style Wurstsalat made of thinly sliced sausage, red onion rings, and sliced pickles, all mixed together. The bowl sits on a wooden surface, showing the salad’s mix of pink, green, and purple tones.

I could hardly do a gardening theme without making a salad, but Bavaria can help with that too. Wurstsalat is a combination of sliced sausage, pickles, onions, plus a vinaigrette.

A neatly spiralled length of white Bavarian radi (beer‑garden radish) sits on an orange plate with a dark rim. The thin, even slices curve in a wave-like shape, showing the radish’s crisp, translucent texture against the wooden surface beneath.

Finally, in desperate need of a vegetable, I made radi, which is a spiral-cut, salted white radish. Since traditional Munich beer radish are in short supply here, I used daikon (Bitte verzeiht mir, meine Lieben!). It’s crisp, refreshing and very moreish.

Armed with a beautifully malty bottle of Erdinger Dunkel and a lighter bottle of Franziskaner Weissbier, my biergarten spread was complete. And not a single plant had to be personally grown. I know exactly where my skills lie: Cooking, eating and drinking mostly!

Niamh's Food Matters

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