I’ve had a love of German food since I first visited the country many years ago.  While the French might win on exquisite taste, the Germans win on cooking up succulent huge pieces of quadruped, wrapping it in cabbage or breadcrumbs and washing it down with a enough beer to sink a footy team.  I had some brilliant feeds in Germany, so when I heard there was a food challenge to be had at the Hofbrauhaus German restaurant in Melbourne I simply couldn’t resist.

The challenge: To eat a 1.5kg pork schnitzel, a bowl of chips and a liter of German Bier in 45 minutes.  If you do it, your meal is free and you get a t-shirt.  If not, it costs you 75 big ones!

Now I was pretty confident going into this challenge.  It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve eaten that much pork in one sitting.  When in Germany my girlfriend and I visited an old monastery where the only food you could order was Pork Knuckle with Sauerkraut and you ordered it by weight.  I ordered a 1.5kg portion with a stein of Bock beer to go with it.  We sat down with a bunch of Bavarian’s who told me in no uncertain terms that I should not have ordered the Bock beir, as with it being so heavy there would be no way I could finish that much meat.

Half an hour later they gave me a round of applause for out-eating them in their own country!

 

So yeah, I was pretty confident going into this.  No-one that I had talked to doubted my ability to meet this challenge, though some thought the bowl of chips might trip me up.  So on a Monday night myself and my good friend Matt went to Hofbrauhaus to show them how it’s done.

We were seated by our waitress who may have had the Bavarian Beer Maid costume with the requisite, and possibly mandatory, pushed-up cleavage but came across as a young, timid Aussie lass who probably has had one too many customers try to pinch her butt in her short career. The manager, again, not German, definitely Indian and still had a decent accent going, came and explained the challenge to me.  He also had us move tables as the one we had been seated at was not big enough to accommodate my coming plate, which we thought was pretty cool.

Soon after, the manager comes back out ringing a big cow bell, followed by a man carrying my huge plate!  My mouth watered at the sight of so much meat!  He set the timer, told me I had 45 minutes and wished me luck.

I never saw him again.

With only 45 minutes to eat a kilo and a half of pork, a ton of chips and a litre of bier, I hoed straight in.  First pitfall – this meal was at about a thousand degrees!  I didn’t have time to wait for it to cool so I cut half of it into large mouthful sized pieces so it could cool somewhat and started shoveling the overly hot meat into my mouth.  I could feel it burning the roof of my mouth when the rough schnitzel coating was scraping against it but I persevered.

About 400gm and 10 minutes in into the 1.5kg the food had cooled enough that I could now actually taste it and here is where the trouble began.  This was a BAD schnitzel.  I mean, it tasted TERRIBLE!  The hard coating of it genuinely tasted like bad KFC (is there truly any other kind?) and upon examination it was not grade-A pork within but rather this really fatty, low quality meat.  Matt hypothesized that maybe you can’t get a piece of pork that big without it being fatty but I’m assured by my friend Margie – who like me grew up on a farm – that you can have non fat-ridden pieces of pig meat that large.

Now up until now I had NEVER had bad German food.  All the food in Germany itself was brilliant and the few times I’ve visited German restaurants in Australia the food has been pretty good.  I also don’t think I’ve ever had a particularly bad schnitzel either.  So for this giant one to taste as bad as it did was a massive surprise and the one eventuality I did not prepare for.   Since the waitress was Aussie and the manager Indian, I’m guessing there were no Germans in the actual kitchen because I guarantee that no German chef worth his salt would have served up this monstrosity.

I continued to eat but with every mouthful I felt queasy.  At about 600gm and 25 minutes in I realize that if I manage to eat the whole thing I am going to be seriously ill.  Matt and I had tickets to see Henry Rollins at the Arts Centre for about 90 minutes hence and all I could imagine was me missing half the show because I’m in the toilet vomiting.  That’s when, to my shame, I realize I am not going to meet this challenge.  None of the staff have come back to check on my progress, which I found a bit suss considering the big deal they made of it.  Since I am not going to eat it I offer Matt a bite to gauge his opinion on the quality of the food.  Matt takes one bite of the Schnitzel meat, screws up his face and says “No, that is seriously disgusting.  Don’t eat it man, you’ll be sick”. 

 

And that’s it.  That was the end of the challenge – I didn’t even finish half!  Once again, even when the 45 minutes expired (we had timers on our phones) no staff had come back to check progress which leads me to believe that between the heat of the food and the low quality they really didn’t expect me to finish it.  If I’d had a bag with me I could have just tipped the boards contents into it and claimed I’d eaten it all – would have saved me $75.

Afterwards I was shaming myself for not having eaten it all, and seriously examining my own perceived self-image and who I was as a person if I could not eat a 1.5kg pork schnitzel. But then I realized, it’s like someone saying “Here, have sex with this person whom you find to have an offensive, horrible personality and a body to match” and you can’t get an erection.  It’s not that you are suddenly impotent – you just can’t bring yourself to have sex with that train wreck.  And that is what this food challenge was.  It wasn’t that I couldn’t eat a kilo and a half of pork, it’s that I couldn’t bring myself to eat a kilo and a half of that foul shit.  I did drink all the beer though.

Pretty poor fare from Hofbrauhaus.  I’d been there once before about 8 years ago and while the food was not fantastic it hadn’t been bad either.  Oh there could be excuses for why this schnitzel was so bad.  Maybe their usual supplier of top quality huge pork pieces had nothing this week so they were forced to go with a dodgy guy.  Maybe they treat their chefs like Men’s Clubs treat their strippers – they use their top quality ones on Friday and Saturday nights when business is busy and then use their rough ones (the chefs that couldn’t make toast and the strippers with acne and cesarean scars) on slow nights like a Monday.  But I don’t think there is any excuse for a German-styled Pork Schnitzel to taste like bloody Kentucky Fried Chicken, especially when you are paying $75 damn dollars for the meal!

So overall quite a disappointing experience.  But just in case I am giving myself an excuse I don’t deserve, I think I’m going to cook up a kilo and a half of good pork soon and chow down, just to prove to myself I still have what it takes.  Will keep you crazy kids updated and post proof that my gastronomic prowess is still alive and kicking!