-
Directories
American foodstuff substitutes
Finding product replacements for your favorite foods and snacks is always tough for new expats (and occasionally some of us more experienced expats as well)! Here’s my attempt to help out and I have to admit, I learned quite a bit in my research for this post. As new ideas/suggestions come up, I will update this article. “*” in front of a subject means it is part of the latest additions.
- All-Bran Cereal = Kellogg’s DayVita Sticks (70% Weizenkleie/Bran), there’s also Kellogg’s DayVita Flakes (17% Weizenkleie/Bran).
- Bagels - According to the BagelBrothers.de website, they deliver bagels throughout Germany. I’m no bagel-afficianado, but I’ve heard from several people that Bagel Brothers are the real deal. They’ve also got restaurants in Bonn, Bremen, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Halle, Hannover, Leipzig, München and Oldenburg. You can get fresh home or business deliver in some of those cities.
- Baking Soda = Natron or Haushaltsnatron, available in the baking aisle in small packets or boxes. Unfortunately, the Kaiser Natron box (pictured to the right) is not filled with baking soda, it is filled with the little packets. Major packaging waste in my opinion.
- Brown sugar - can be found in large Asian shops, Latin American shops, Reformhäuser, Kaufhof (thanks Mausi) or make your own by mixing 1 cup of white sugar with 1-2 T molasses (I’m going to have to try this, because the recipes say that once you make your own, you’ll never go back to using store bought).
- *Cheddar cheese - Gouda will generally substitute well for cheddar. If you need aged Cheddar, use alt Gouda, for mild Cheddar, use jung Gouda. Gouda comes shredded too, just check the cheese section in the dairy aisle.
- Cheerios - try Weetabix Looters. Honey Loops are the closest thing I’ve found to Honey Nut Cheerios.
- Cheez-Its - it’s not quite the same, but I find Käsestangen (cheese twists in the snack aisle) satisfy my Cheez-It cravings.
- Chocolate bars - why on Earth would you miss American chocolate??? Switch to German, or even better, Swiss or Belgian chocolate already!& Caotina">
& Caotina" /> - Chocolate drink mix (warm/cold) - try Caotina surfin. A little pricier than other brands, but this is super yummy added to warm milk. It doesn’t have that overly sweet or artificially chocolate taste that some of the other brands do.
- Clams = Venusmuscheln. Ed says, “You can get clams in glass jars. They’re very salty (not necessarily a bad thing) and very expensive: about 5 Euros for a tiny jar that’ll make one recipe of spaghetti and clam sauce. Seeing as how better clams (packed with more juice, which is necessary for the flavor of the sauce) are 79 cents in the States from Durkee or Snow’s, I ask for them as an import.” He adds to look for them, in Italian delis. I’ll add that you might also be able to get frozen clams in a large Asian market, but I’ve never looked for them.
- Cornmeal = Maisgrieß = Polenta (but Ed says neither Maisgrieß or Polenta are the right consistency for making cornbread, for that you gotta import your cornmeal - but check in the Asian market first, it’s often there).
- Cornstarch = Speisestärke (brands: Mondamin or Maizena).
- Cranberry Juice Cocktail = Cranberry Classic or Preiselbeerengetränk (Vailian says 100% cranberry juice is available in the Reformhäuser - but it’s expensive).
- *Cream, heavy - American heavy cream contains at least 36% milk fat, while Schlagsahne extra contains at least 35% fat. You can also try Teesahne (at least 35% fat) or Crème double (40-45% fat) if you need something really heavy.
- *Cream, whipping - In the US, whipping cream contains 30-36% fat. You would most likely want to substitute this with Schlagsahne, which contains 30-33% milk fat.
- Cream of Tartar = Weinstein-Backpulver (in small packets in the baking aisle Mausi says this is not pure cream of tartar though). If you want this only for making meringue, it’s not necessary. Meringue = Baiser in German and all you need to do is look on google.de for “Baiser rezept,” to see that the Germans don’t use cream of tartar in making meringue (here’s one recipe).
- Crisco – try Palmin Soft, near the butter.
- Dark corn syrup – substitute Zuckersirup (e.g., Grafschafter Heller Sirup), Zuckerrübensirup (e.g., Graftschafter Goldsaft), honey or molasses, or make your own by combining 3/4 cup light corn syrup and 1/4 molasses.
- French onion dip - try Mirée Frischkäse mit französischen Kräutern. That’s my favorite, but you might also prefer a different brand.
- Graham crackers – try Leibnitz Vollkornkekse or Landkeks (in the cookie aisle) - I find them great for making cheesecake crust. Eurotrippen suggests Lotus Original Karamelgebäck as an alternative. The Lotus are sweeter and have more of a crunchy cookie consistency. You can also make your own graham crackers with this recipe I found. Michael uses the Leibniz Landkeks for making Smores (“Perfect size and tasted very good. I highly recommend them for that. We go to Strauss for the marshmallows, though Edeka sometimes carries them. And we only buy Belgian dark chocolate (preferably over 80%, our daughter loves it too).”)
- Hamburger/Tuna Helper - I like to take the Knorr Spaghetteria pastas and add meat to make them into more of a meal. There are recipe suggestions on the bags, but I find ground beef and the Spaghetteria Funghi go great together and I add peas and tuna to the Spaghetteria Spinaci. I’ve tried with the regular and Activ Knorr products and with the Maggi ones as well, but the Spaghetteria fit my taste best.
- Honey-roasted peanuts - try Ültje Cashew-Erdnuss-Mix Honig & Salz in the snack aisle (In our Real, it’s next to the Studentenfutter). They have a honey peanut mix as well, but I find that the salt is necessary.
- Light corn syrup – try substituting Zuckersirup (e.g., Grafschafter Heller Sirup, near honey) or honey, or make your own by combining 1-1/4 cups sugar with 1/3 cup water and boiling in a saucepan until sugar is dissolved.
- Maple syrup = Ahornsirup (near honey or in Bio-aisle)
- Mayonnaise - if you don’t like the sugary German mayo, try Maille Dijon Mayonnaise. Ed calls it “a more than acceptable substitute, with the extra slight tang of mustard being a nice addition.”
- Molasses = Melasse (available in Reformhäuser) or try using Zuckerrübensirup (e.g., Graftschafter Goldsaft, near honey) or dark honey
- *Monterey Jack Cheese - Monterey Jack can be substituted with Fontina or Bel Päse (Italian cheeses). If you can’t find either of these, Gruyère, Emmantaler or Edamer will do.
- Peanut butter - miss American peanut butter? Try adding a squeeze of honey to the German peanut butter.
- Saltines - try Wasa Crack & Taste Salted (can be either in the chips aisle or with the regular Wasa crackers). There is also a brand, Sky Flakes, available in nice reusable tins in Asian shops (thanks for checking the ingredients Martina!).
- *Sour cream - In the US, sour cream contains at least 18% milk fat. In Germany, Saure Sahne contains 10-15% milk fat, Crème légère contains 15%, Saure Sahne extra contains 18%, Schmand contains 20-29% and Crème fraîche contains 30-40%. So, you will most likely be happiest with the Saure Sahne extra or Schmand.
- Sweetened condensed milk – Nestlé Milchmädchen (in supermarket near the evaporated milk) or make your own by heating 1-1/4 cup sugar with 1 cup Kondensmilch (evaporated milk) together in a saucepan until sugar is fully dissolved (yep, it’s really that much sugar). Michael says you can also find it in the Russian/Turkish section in Real.
- Vanilla extract – can be bought in gourmet and American shops (expensive) and in some Latin American shops (cheap), or make your own like I do (it’s easy!).
- Wheat germ = Weizenkeime, found in Reformhäuser
- Wraps/Tortillas - There are a couple of options here. First, avoid the flour tortillas in the supermakets (Fuego is one brand), they are bland and tasteless. A tastier supermarket option is the Indian Fladen aus Weisenvollkornmehl. It is usually in the bread aisle, not by the flour tortillas. They’re much tastier. LaTortilla.de also ships fresh flour and corn tortillas, and they are delicious. Or make your own, Ed says it’s easy, and here’s a flour tortilla recipe I found, and one for corn tortillas.
& Caotina" />
And then there are those products that there are just no substitutes for. Below are some websites. If I’ve ordered (and been happy) once, it gets one *, twice means ** and three or more times gets ***.
- Food from Home* - has a pretty large selection of American and British items. They also have a mobile van that makes stops in various cities in NRW, Luxembourg and the Netherlands (see schedule). You can browse the items on the van, or make an order and pick it up, to save on shipping.
- Hello Food*- Site selling items from the US and Canada.
- World of Sweets*** has some American chocolates and candies.
- USA Kulinarisch has a huge list of sites for ordering American products, including some USA-based shops that deliver to Germany.
- Tacoweb.de has a great list of sites for ordering Mexican products
- *LaTortilla.de in Munich has great Mexican products. I’ve never ordered from there, but I know people who have and I can attest that their tortillas and sauces are tasty.
- My-Asia-Shop.de has a large selection of Asian products and light and dark brown sugar, corn meal, all kinds of dried beans, etc. It also appears that they ship fresh produce as well – but probably not a good idea in summer.
What do you think? Have I missed anything? Do you have any hot tips or substitution suggestions to pass along?
If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
I’m back
We made it back yesterday evening. Rainer’s mom spent the whole weekend working on getting my weight-gain up there towards the average.
I am working on getting that German-American products list together - there’s a rather hefty rough draft, but there’s still a few things I’m researching.
Our next project is buying a stationwagon, or Combi, as they’re known here. After much reading and internet searching, I think my top picks would be the Renault Laguna or Toyota Avensis. Rainer also wants to check out the Skoda Octavia. Any advice folks? Just so you know, our priorities are safety, reliability, and environmental friendliness. We are looking for a used, but fairly new, car that has an automatic transmission, so we’ll probably have to see what’s available and may not get any of our choices. We’re going to need a big Combi so that Charlie and the baby carriage (Kinderwagen) can both fit in the back. If we have a choice, does it make better sense to get leather seats when you’ve got kids, so spills can be wiped up, or is it better to just get some kind of seat protector? Leather does heat up well in the sun and can result in scalded thighs! I suppose buying a new Skoda would also be a possibility, but I hate that whole driving-off-the-lot-depreciation of buying a new car. Any advice, thoughts???
Quickie Update
I’m feeling pretty lousy today, so I’m going to keep this brief. The last two days were a blast. Wednesday I met up with Sarah in town and we headed over to Kaminski (Hinter der Grieb 6) - hopefully I didn’t talk her ear off! Kaminski comes highly recommended by the Regensburg expats I’ve gotten to know. Since I only had coffee and a croissant, I can’t really gush about it, but I will be heading back to try out the food. After a two and a half hour coffee break, I rushed through the supermarket (luckily I had a well-organized shopping list and everything was easy to find), in order to make it home in time for my dinner guests. As I was speeding my way home on the Autobahn (probably at times driving like I should be in a black BMW - yeah, bad, bad me), Maria called to say that they were close. So close, in fact, that I had just gotten the groceries in the house and made the obligatory pregnant lady run to the bathroom when they rang the bell.
It was really great seeing Maria and meeting Kevin and The Boy. I swear The Boy is the smiliest baby I’ve ever met. It also ends up that Rainer once saw Kevin play back in the States. We had fun making and eating Thai barbecue and Rainer enjoyed it so much that he says we need to have grill parties more often. We also have no place to walk in our guest room anymore, they left us with loads of great baby stuff that The Boy has outgrown.
Yesterday, we celebrated our anniversary by having our traditional breakfast out. We shopped, had huge ice cream sundaes, and got to see Oliver at the latest ultrasound screening as well (sorry, no pic, we didn’t get a printout this time). The radiologist says he’s gonna be a big boy - at least in the top 1/3 percentile in size (yippee for me).
After all this excitement though, I was nearing collapse. But I couldn’t sleep yet! I had to stay up to see my favorite, Barbara, win Germany’s Next Top Model. Woohoo! (Although I thought Hana should have finished second).
Today has been torture. I seriously thought about calling a doctor or hospital at one point I’ve been so uncomfortable. My back is in knots, my hips ache and I’ve got seriously painful sciatica going down my right leg. So most of today has been spent laying in bed or on the sofa with my legs elevated, except for the long Rheumabad I just took which has allowed me to make this post. I don’t want to lose all the relaxation I gained in my warm bath, so that’ll be it for now. We’re headed to the in-laws for the long holiday weekend (and meeting up with J. in Koblenz), so have a great weekend and see you next week!
NyQuil = Medinait? The results are in!
It comes up regularly on blogs and message boards, Wick Medinait, the German version of Vicks NyQuil, just doesn’t stack up with the original. I always wrote that talk off to psychology, we’re just more comfortable with what we’re used to. Personally, the couple times I used the German version, I didn’t really noticed a difference in the reduction of my symptoms, but I brought NyQuil from the US simply because you can buy it in a much bigger bottle!
So what is the truth? Are they the same? Are they different? I finally decided to put it to the test.
Wick Medinait Active Ingredients in each 30 ml dose:
- 8,0 mg Ephedrinhemisulfat (Decongestant)
- 7,5 mg Doxylaminhydrogensuccinat (Antihistamine/sedative)
- 15,0 mg Dextromethorphanhydrobromid (Cough suppressant)
- 600,0 mg Paracetamol (Pain reliever/fever reducer)
Also:
- 4,3 g Alcohol (18%)Vicks NyQuil Active Ingredients in each 30 ml dose:
- Acetaminophen 1000 mg
- Dextromethorphan HBr 30 mg
- Doxylamine succinate 12.5 mg
Also:
- Alcohol content is never declared, but several pharmacy websites claim it is 10%
And what do you know? They are actually different! NyQuil does not contain a decongestant and has a lower alcohol content. Apparently, Vicks stopped including pseudoephedrine in Nyquil after the passage of the Combat Methamphetamine Epidemic Act, because it can by used in the manufacture of crystal meth, much to the chagrin of the blogger who posted back in 2005 when the change occurred that The New Dayquil (and NyQuil) Blows … A Lot.
But how significant are these differences really?
According to the Wikipedia page, the cough suppressant Dextromethorphan is effective in doses between 10mg and 30mg. I looked for dose escalation studies to see if there was a significant anti-tussive difference between a 15mg and a 30mg dose, but was not able to find any online and available to the public (I’m not paying $25 bucks for one day of access to a pharma journal, thank you very much). I did find an abstract of an article that finds that a 30 mg dose is more effective than placebo though.
Without access to studies to read for myself, what was I to do? I contacted one of Rainer’s college buds, Sascha, a German pharmacist. Here’s what he had to say:
my opinion is:
The German version is much worse!
The important ingredients are underdosed. Especially ephedrin is only about 6,2 mg per Single-Dose and thus a kind of homeopathic that you can neglect! (You need about 25 - 50 mg of ephedrin base to realize an effect!)The American version is about double dosed concerning the decisive ingredients - Much better!But generally spoken I do not like combination drugs with more than 2 ingredients. Although is easy for the patient you will never know what component was responsible for side effects!
Surprise, surprise, surprise! It seems my psychology theory has been blown out the window and all those bloggers were right. So keep importing that NyQuil if it’s your favorite cold medicine.
And just to be sure, I’ll ask my American pharmacist reader if she’ll offer an opinion as well. Grafs - any thoughts?
Happy Anniversary to us!
On May 24, 2003, Rainer and I took the plunge…
The day couldn’t have been more beautiful…
Or the memories more wonderful…
Now it’s four years later and we’re still working well together.* Happy Anniversary Honey!
* Update (5/25/2007): I thought I’d move this explanation from the comments into the post - as for the log cutting, it is a traditional German wedding event. The purpose is to prove that the newly married couple can work together to solve any problem. Woe be to the couple who does not manage to saw through their log! By the way, our best man took pity on us and got us a wimpy log, I’ve seen much bigger ones around! - Rainer added to me last night that although we had a wimpy log, they gave us a rusty, very difficult to use saw, so I shouldn’t diss our performance in this event!
Whiney Expat Blogger Meetup
Initial location planning is going on over at Germany Doesn’t Suck for the autumn Whiney Expat Blogger Meetup. Nominations at this point include:
Dresden
3 - 4 hours from Bonn/Cologne
Nürnberg
Regensburg
Munich
Mosel/Eifel
Frankfurt
Darmstadt
Cologne
Wildeshausen
Bremen
With a small infant, I expect I’ll only attend if it’s nearby. Nürnberg has gotten some interest, except that we don’t know of a blogger that could show us around. Are you reading this from Nürnberg???
Wherever you are (it doesn’t need to be in Germany, as long as you’re willing to make the trip over here!), get over there and have your say in where we should meet up!
Weltenburg
Sunday afternoon was spent in the beautiful Altmühltal Nature Park area, with its scenic white cliffs and abundant canoers. Boat tours are available between Kelheim and Weltenburg, but we unfortunately found out about this too late.
The Donaudurchbruch (Danube gorge) near Weltenburg
Baroque church of the Benedictine Abbey Weltenburg
The Abbey brewery, claiming to be the oldest continuously operating brewery in the world
Rainer enjoys a dark beer in the Abbey Biergarten
After parking in the town of Weltenburg, we made another miscalculation. I was starving and wasn’t sure I’d make it to the Benedictine Abbey Weltenburg and back without something to eat, so we grabbed dinner at a place in town. Big mistake. It turns out the Abbey has a restaurant and brewery and the food looked incredible, unlike the formerly frozen deep fried chicken breast I got in town. The Abbey brewery is first mentioned in 1050, making it the oldest continually run brewery in the world. We sat in the large Abbey Biergarten, where Rainer enjoyed a dark beer, which he found to be pretty tasty although perhaps higher in alcohol content than most beers, while I had an Apfelschorle.
It’s definitely a place we’ll go again (in fact, Rainer’s Institute has its Betriebsausflug at the gorge today, so Rainer is enjoying the scenery again as I write this), but next time we’ll take the boat tour from Kelheim and arrive with empty, growling stomachs!
-
Subscribe to AmiExpat
creativecommons License
Blog under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 License.
