It’s not a party without kale
The weather was perfect as the group pulled their wagon — decorated with flashing lights and pumping out German pop songs from an industrial speaker — out into the fading winter afternoon light. Warm enough to enjoy a hike through the frost-clad countryside, but cold enough to work up an appetite.
No one in the group, save for the Kale King and Queen, knew the route. But everyone knew the next four hours of meandering down byways lined with pastures and fields, stopping at corners for games and several shots of schnapps, were only the warmup.
“Don’t be afraid when you see it on your plate,” one hiker, Lena Bauer, said of the reward everyone knew was coming — curly kale stewed in pork fat or goose fat, and served up with bacon, sausages and steamed pearl potatoes. “It tastes so much better than it looks.”
“Really,” Bauer, a native of nearby Oldenburg, insisted with a laugh, though she confessed that it had taken her years to warm to the annual ritual.
“Before, I never wanted to go along, but after I did, I understood it,” she said. “It’s not about the kale. Some people like it, some don’t. It’s about togetherness, belonging and good friends.”
In this corner of Germany some 80 kilometres south of the North Sea, kale is more than the ingredient for superfood smoothies or a better-for-you-than-broccoli vitamin bomb. It is a season, an event, a tradition.
Hikes and feasts surrounding the annual harvest of kale in the flat lands around Oldenburg and Bremen are far less known than Bavarians’ annual beer festival, Oktoberfest.
A few years ago, the city of Oldenburg began calling itself the country’s “Kale Hike Capital,” promoting events surrounding the winter walks, held from November through late February.
The hikes are organized by groups of families, friends or colleagues. A royal pair, crowned anew each year are tasked with finding the routes and organizing the next year’s events.
During the season, local restaurants and pubs are packed each weekend with long tables of people coming in from the cold for all-you-can eat feasts of locally grown kale, with all the trimmings. That includes a mildly spiced sausage stuffed with groats, a regional delicacy known as pinkel.
One hiker, Maik Gruel, was candid about what goes into the dish.
“You need lots of onions sautéed in pork schmaltz, then you add the kale and bacon and cover it with water,” revealed Gruel, who left the region 22 years ago to settle in the hills of Hesse, and regularly makes the five-hour drive home for the kale hike.
After that has simmered for about an hour, he said, “you add lots of salt, pepper and some mustard.” Then you cook it another good hour. Another hiker, Jens Warntjes, said he was on his first of three planned hikes this year — “this one, with my friends, then with work, then my wife’s friends.
“After that,” he said, “you don’t need to eat kale for another year.”