Kässpätzle: the cheese noodles Swabia eats as a main

Overview

Spätzle are the everyday pasta of the German south: a soft egg dough, wetter and looser than an Italian one, scraped off a wooden board straight into boiling water so it sets into short irregular noodles. The name means “little sparrows”, which is what the shapes were thought to resemble. Kässpätzle is what happens when they are layered hot with grated cheese until it melts between them, and finished with a heap of fried onions.

It is not a side dish here. Plain Spätzle accompany a roast; Kässpätzle is the meal.

The shape has two names and they are not interchangeable. Spätzle are longer and irregular; Knöpfle — “little buttons” — are shorter and rounder. The pre-Alpine Allgäu, the corner of Bavarian Swabia south of here, makes the round kind and calls its cheese version Kässpatzen; cross into Austria and the same dish answers to Käsknöpfle.

Both are protected: Schwäbische Spätzle and Schwäbische Knöpfle have carried a European protected geographical indication since 2012, and Augsburg sits inside the region it covers. The cheese version has no such protection — it is a preparation, not a product — so what is in the dish is entirely down to the kitchen.

What to order

The dish is simple enough that the decisions are few and they matter.

• Kässpätzle — the whole point. Ask whether the Spätzle are hausgemacht, house-made. Scraped noodles have soft irregular edges that catch the cheese; extruded ones are uniform and smooth and the cheese slides off them.
• mit Röstzwiebeln — with fried onions, which is not optional in practice. If they arrive pale and soft rather than dark and crisp, the kitchen is not paying attention.
• the cheese — an aged mountain cheese, Bergkäse or Emmentaler, sharp enough to stand up to the dough. A mild cheese gives you something gluey and sweetish.
• mit Apfelmus — apple sauce on the side. It sounds wrong and it is traditional: the acidity cuts a dish that is otherwise fat on starch.

A green salad usually comes with it, dressed sharp, for the same reason.

What to avoid

Packet Spätzle are the single biggest difference between a good plate and a dull one, and they are extremely common. Dried noodles from a bag are firm, even and slightly waxy; fresh ones are soft and ragged. A kitchen that makes its own will say so on the menu, because it is the only thing worth saying about this dish.

Be suspicious of cheese laid on top rather than layered through. Done properly, the cheese goes between the noodles in stages so it melts into them; done quickly, it is grated over a mound and browned under a grill, which gives you a lid of cheese and plain noodles beneath. You can see which you have from the first forkful.

Do not order it as a side to something heavy. Portions are built for it to be the whole meal, and pairing it with a roast is a mistake visitors make from the menu layout, where it sometimes sits among the accompaniments.

And do not expect it in summer at its best. It is winter food, and while it is served all year, a beer garden in August is not where it is taken seriously.

Practicalities

Roughly €11 to €15 in an ordinary Gaststätte, and it is one of the better-value meals in the city — it is peasant food, and the price still reflects that.

Portions are large in a way that surprises people. One order between two, with a salad, is a perfectly normal lunch and not considered odd.

It is vegetarian by every menu’s definition, which makes it the default answer in a region where most of the menu is not — though the alpine cheeses are traditionally made with animal rennet, so the strictest vegetarians ask, and the salad dressing may not qualify either.

Kitchens keep southern German hours: lunch until around two, then a gap until six. The gap catches visitors out more than anything else on the menu, and this is not a dish that survives being reheated — cheese that has set once turns to rubber, so it is worth eating where it was cooked and when the kitchen is open.