What surprised me was excellent pizza in Bavaria/southern Germany. And the sauerkraut sucked. At least to this Americans taste and surprise. sauerkraut should have some zip to it, and texture. What I kept getting was a sort of sweet mush. Can any German dopers/travelers comment?
I can’t comment on sauerkraut because I hate it and never have it, but pizza being mostly excellent in Germany is due to the fact that most pizza places are run by Italians or Italian-Germans, and of course they make the best pizza.
What’s the way out of this for the cheetah?
Is there a way to “induce” genetic variation growth in cheetahs?
If the population was high enough I could imagine purposefully splitting them off into separate reproductive groups and then shuffling a few members around every couple of generations, to encourage each subgroup to undergo genetic drift separately? But there probably aren’t enough cheetahs for that…
The first step is to just have a lot of cheetahs.
Once you have that, I guess you could expose small subsets of them to radiation or other mutagens, to speed things up?
And maybe geographically-separated populations as insurance against that hypothetical killer disease would be good, too.
Most random mutations are harmful, so inducing them does not seem like a good idea to me. They happen anyway, give them time. Protect the subspecies, create natural parks or reserves, breed them in zoos, hope for the best. I don’t see much more to do.
The situation for the Iberian Lynx can’t be much better, having just passed through a genetic bottleneck of 94 individuals 20 years ago. That will carry a price too, I am afraid, even if the population has increased to 1,668 in May of 2023
I’m pretty sure that revolving around the sun does NOT involve a vector of rotation. The stars remain in the same position, it’s the sun that appears to move relative to the stars (hence in astrology the sun was a “planet” that moved through the zodiac). So only the planet’s rotation imparts a sidereal movement relative to an observer on the surface.
That’s what we figured.
It was interesting. We stayed at local places. Breakfast was good breads, coldcuts and cheese. All very good. A little odd having a sandwich for breakfast. At one place the owner announced that she would make eggs if someone wanted it. One person chimed in “Really? You’ll make eggs?” She replied, looking at him “Maybe” Interesting sense of humor, and very straight forward and no nonsense.
I think I figured out the sandwich for breakfast though. Many people travel by train, and it’s a convenient food to eat on a train. Why not? It’s food, makes sense really.
The trains where great. Pack light.
I can confirm what Einsteinshund wrote: pizzas are excellent in Germany (there are bad pizzas too, of course, but you have that even in Italy). It can be argued that zum Italiener gehen (eating out at the next Italian ristorante) is the real German cuisine. Italian migrants in the '50s and '60s have positively shaped Germany’s taste.
What surprises me is your experience with sauerkraut. Sweet mush? Very strange.
That is funny! And you did not get any eggs and missed them much? Merkwürdig… usually you get hard boiled eggs for breakfast (which they call soft boiled eggs, despite the hard evidence of excessively long boiling). But what you probably craved were fried eggs with bacon, right?
Congratulations! You must be a very lucky person.
I stopped ordering it after a couple of times. Or just ignored it.
We tried to eat in local places, and a couple of times where seated with a German family. There where two chairs open after all. Pro-tip - don’t order Peppermint schnapps in Germany (you will be laughed at).
What’s wrong with a salami? You don’t even need a can openet.
We were in the Italian Dolomites about 9 miles from the Austrian border. Imagine lunch being authentic Italian pasta washed down with a good Austrian beer.
Yup, just a knife if you want to be civil about it.
Well, the Bergen-Belsen Express may not be the one you want to take.
We always camped with ice chests (we never fished) and prepared mostly real cooked meals. I didn’t like Vienna sausages even when I was a kid with unformed taste buds.
Speaking of pastries, I was told that croissants were invented in Budapest as a token of something or other to the Turkish overlords. Not a Hungarian pastry chef – can’t remember what nationality he was supposed to be though.
The Wikipedia article mentions this among the (false) urban legends about the origin of the croissant. According to the article, the actual origin was that it was an adaptation of the kipferl, a yeast-leavened bread with a similar shape, and was created around 1839.
Fawlty? Basil Fawlty? I thought we had agreed not to mention the war…
+1
(come to think of it - if you don’t eat cooked Sauerkraut on a regular basis, you might be surprised that the cooked SK (as a side-dish) is obv. less sour/zingy/crisp/crunchy than the raw/fresh cabbage that is fermented …and that you might eat snacking with a piece of bread
by any means, Sauerkraut is by no means what it was (in terms of relevancy) - say - 50+ years ago.
As kid i recall that most stores that sold foodstuff still had a “kid-sized” barrel full of that stuff standing around and you would get 1kg of that stuff for pretty much next to nothing …
… whereas the similar dish kimchi in South Korea is still somewhat crunchy, and can be quite spicy. What we didn’t know until we went there recently included:
- it ain’t just cabbage - can be almost any vegetable
- it comes free with every restaurant meal, as do numerous other side dishes
- every family has their own secret recipe handed down through the female line, or so they claim
- every household has a dedicated kimchi fridge, specially build for just that one foodstuff
I need to try some other kimchi varieties sometime. When I was living in Bozeman, the best restaurant in town was a Korean place, but their kimchi was all cabbage, and I found it to be too, well, cabbagey (and surprisingly, not at all like sauerkraut, despite the very similar preparation of the same vegetable).
I’m sure that Iho knew how to make plenty of others, but she was a good enough businesswoman to know that a restaurant needs a short menu, and the cabbage one was what people expected, so…
Though she also offered a very nice (non-fermented) cucumber salad as an alternative to the kimchi, too.
And (still about kimchi):
- it was a big deal when a Korean astronaut went to space in 2008. Ko San (that is his name) had to carry some kimchi, specially prepared, with 90% of the taste (however they measured that percentage), but sterilized, so it would not bubble and keep on fermenting and contaminatng experiments. But it was impossible to travel to space without it.
- In 2013, UNESCO declared kimchi and its traditional assotiated practices as Korea’s intangible cultural heritage.