Schwenker Schwenken

Taking the train through Germany is a beautiful thing to do – watching the landscape change with the faces of people entering the train, and the dialects mutate along with the city names. You can even smell some transitions between states: Saarland is one of these that you can identify blindly – in summer, the border is marked by a smell of grilled meat. Sorry, SCHWENKED SCHWENKER. It's not simply a grill. And it's not simply meat. And it is not just a simple smell you're encountering either.

Schwenken is more than a pastime, it is a tradition, a culture and way to show hospitality. The correct ways of marinating, or where to buy Schwenker (the meat), how to construct the Schwenker (the grill), which wood to use (beech), and who is the better Schwenker (the grill master) are all serious topics that are often discussed at family gatherings and flow best with some Karlsberg Urpils, the local Pilsen style beer, sharp and hoppy and very tasty.

Here's my parents Schwenker, with a fire pit built from a washing machine's drum, and the classical tripod construction with ball-joint to have the roast rotating above the fire. The ball-joing is held on a chain that is used to lower the grill grid, for you need to start the grilling closer to the fire, and end a little higher to finish.

A recipe for Schwenker I find very nice is partially from the book "Das Kochbuch aus dem Saarland", Wofgang Hoelker Verlag, which has many great recipes, including one for Boudin/Budeng, which is really tempting for an Saarland-expatriate...

Schwenker recipe
The ingredients are these:
- 10 pork cutlets,
- 1kg onions
- salt,
- pepper
- 1 tablespoons thyme
- 1 tablespoons oregano
- 1 table spoon clove powder
- 1 tablespoon allspice powder
- 4 garlic cloves
- 2 crushed bay leaves
- 15 juniper berries

The meat should be neck pieces without bones and mostly lean. Rub it with the salt, and then layer it in a bowl with the spices: first a layer of onion rings, then a layer of a mix of salt, pepper, thyme, oregano, garlic, bay leaves, cloves, juniper berries, and allspice. Then a layer of meat, and repeating the onion-spice-meat sequence, finishing with onions. This should stay cool for a night, optimally, for next day's dinner.
I personally like adding a little bit olive oil to the spice mix, and sometimes I add a little Paprika powder.


Eat it with Dandelion salad if it's early in the year (no idea where to get that in Nashville though..), have a nice little beer with it (in my dad's case as shown above, a Bitburger) and enjoy.

Of course, you can do this on whichever grill you have; I have even pan-fried the marinated meat, after scraping most of the spice mix off, on the stove.. It will taste great, even though beech wood fire and the Schwenker-technology definitely add more than just atmosphere to the experience :-)