The Tasting Thing.

The region I live in is the Promised Land if you like bread, pork-based meat dishes, sausages, beer, and baked goods in general. Germany is famous for its wonderful bread varieties, and Franconia has the best breads in Germany. But I'm actually not concerned with bread at all at the moment - my mind is much more seasonally and regionally occupied: with Lebkuchen.

Lebkuchen (which may or may not contain ginger in the spice mix, and thus may or may not be translatable as gingerbread) is especially famous if coming from Nuremberg (or the area), and the best kind are Elisen-Lebkuchen, which contain little or no flour. I have my own recipe for them, and I like the result a lot, but this year, we'll get our supply again from our favourite Lebküchnerei (which is a bakery, but making only - or almost only - Lebkuchen. Welcome to Nuremberg.)

We (and quite a few of our friends) are quite sure that those are the world's best ones. But of course, tastes differ, and there's always the (albeit small) chance that there might be something even better around. So what do you do, obviously?

You team up with like-minded Lebkuchen-loving curious people and get a variety of individual ones from individual small bakeries. All hand-made. All of the "Elisen" variety. All covered with dark chocolate (because, really, there IS only that kind, if you ask me). Several of them claiming of being the best ones in town.



And then you get together and cut them all into parts and taste them all to see which ones are best. Like a wine-tasting, only with tea instead of water to accompany the wine, and Lebkuchen instead of wine. (Friends of ours, by the way, did something similar with Bratwurst - there are so many good ones that it's really hard to find out which ones are best. They had a barbecue event and tried sausages from about a dozen different places. That's dedication!)

I'm really, really looking forward to finding out which one will be the best of the lot - and how they compare to our benchmark Lebkuchen.