Biergarten food: Obatzda revisited

Some how we ended up with a lot of cheese in our fridge. I think I wanted to make a cheese cake but all of a sudden it got too hot to bring the oven temperature above ambient. We also make weekly buys of Camembert by the mini-wheel and wait a month until they reach their ripe date. Lately I’ve been playing a kind of Tetris game with the fridge contents in order to find room for cold drinks and other whatnots. Stuff had to start disappearing.

That’s when I revisited the Obatzter recipe I posted almost four years ago. At the time I had never seen nor tasted this Bavarian cheese spread and I certainly wasn’t in the metric mode yet. To my surprise the old recipe calls for a tummy roll of butter. I needed the butter for another use so I looked into using the cream cheese I no longer needed. This is what I came up with and the group at the Biergarten was pleasantly gaga over the results.

Ingredients:

* 200 g young camembert
* 30 g very ripe camembert
* 300 g cream cheese
* 2 Tbs sweet paprika powder
 
optional:
* 1/2 tsp caraway seed powder
* 1 small red onion finely chopped
 
This is very simple to make with lots of wiggle room to be creative.

Scope out the cream cheese also known as frischer Käse into a medium sized bowl. I used two different kinds of cream cheese: about 250 g of plain, reduced calorie Philadelphia and 50 g of an Aldi brand with herbs.

Remove the rind from the Camembert (if you aren’t squeamish about the rind, do like me and chop it up finely and spoon it in after the soft cheeses are mixed). We had some very, very ripe Camembert Le Rustique and a small wedge added a lot of flavor to the Obatzda. Although the cheese stench can be overwhelming upon opening the fridge door, it really is worth waiting to use the Camembert until the date on the package.

So add the rind-less Camembert with the paprika to the cream cheese and combine throughly. You can stop there. I didn’t have any caraway seeds (called Kümmel) but it tasted fine without any. Once you’re ready to eat, sprinkle some chopped red onions over the Obatzda and serve it with a basket of soft pretzels (Brezel) and a Maß of Helles.

With so many Biergarten visits in the summer you can easily treat yourself to an extra liter of beer by bringing this appetite pleaser with you.

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