O’batz ist! Bavarian-style cheese spread for beginners

Everyone knows Freising is the home of the world’s oldest continually operating brewery, but did you know it is also the birthplace of the popular Bavarian cheese spread formerly known as Obazda or Obazter?

It’s true–Katharina Eisenreich, who ran the Biergarten up on the Holy Mountain of Weihenstephan in the 1920s, had too much Camembert laying around, so her chef mixed it with some onions, butter, paprika powder, and beer. The resulting creamy snack spread around Bavaria like wildfire, and became a fixture in Biergärten everywhere, especially in the regions just north of the Alps where soft cheeses are produced.

(See a Google Maps picture of the sign at the Bräustüberl at this link.)

Then in 2015, the EU decided the words Obazda and Obazter fall under their regulatory purview. If you want to sell soft-cheese spread with paprika under its traditional name, you need to have a registered laboratory analyze it and file a report with the government.

As with everything else, corporations who make the product on an industrial scale have the money for this; the mom-and-pop restaurants not so much. Even up at the Bräustüberl, they balked at first, although their use of the word “Obazdn” leads me to believe they’ve since complied. Lawsuits were filed. Everyone’s got crazy names for it now. Sometimes it’s called Bierkäse, even though it’s nothing at all like beer cheese.

It’s still crazy-delicious.

…and while typically served with bread or Brezn, it tastes great with everything.

To get your EU seal of approval, your commercial spread must be at least 40% Brie or Camembert, and 50% of the product must be cheese. Other required ingredients are butter, paprika powder, and salt. There is room for variations with onion, caraway, parsley, and other herbs.

The product must be manufactured in Bavaria, but the ingredients can come from anywhere.

The current head of the Bräustüberl (who is from Belgium) gave his recipe to the Suddeutsche Zeitung in May, and you know what happened next: I wrote it all down and made it at home. It’s approximately 80% Camembert by weight, although I haven’t sent it to a lab yet: there’s never any left over.

What makes this recipe truly great: the shot of beer at the end to make it creamy is really a shot: 30 mL. That leaves 470mL left in the opened bottle, and as “reducing food waste” is so important these days….*cheesy grin*

It Tastes Better Than It Looks, which I think is the title of the cookbook I should be writing.