Quarkkeulchen: the Saxon quark-and-potato cakes

Overview

Quarkkeulchen are not a Dresden invention, and it is worth being clear about that before you order them as a local speciality: they belong to the wider Saxon kitchen and, beyond it, to the Erzgebirge — the Ore Mountains along the Czech border — and to neighbouring Thuringia. Dresden cooks them and serves them proudly, but this is a regional dish the city shares, not one it owns.

What they are is small, round, pan-fried cakes, a little larger than a biscuit and a little thicker, golden and crisp at the edge, soft inside. The dough is a mix of Quark — the fresh, mild curd cheese that runs through eastern German baking — and mashed, boiled potato, bound with egg and flour, sweetened, and usually studded with raisins and a little lemon. They are fried in fat until browned, and served warm and sweet: dusted with sugar and cinnamon, and almost always with a pool of Apfelmus, unsweetened stewed apple, on the side.

The honest origin is a thrift one, and it is the most useful thing to know about the dish. Quarkkeulchen are traditionally made with leftover boiled potatoes from the day before, which is why a home cook makes them the morning after a potato dinner and why they turn up as an everyday, unpretentious plate rather than a fine one. The mashed potato is what keeps them tender; the quark is what keeps them light and gives the faint tang under the sugar.

What to order

Ask for Quarkkeulchen — you may also see the dialect spelling Quarkkäulchen, and the ending -keulchen or -käulchen simply means “little ones”. They arrive as a plate of several, three or four being a normal serving, with the sugar-and-cinnamon dusting and the stewed apple already on the plate or brought alongside.

A few things worth knowing as you order:

• The classic accompaniment is Apfelmus. Some kitchens offer instead a spoon of fresh quark, or a fruit compote — cherry or plum — and any of these is traditional. It is a fair question to ask which they serve.
• They are usually eaten as a sweet main course, not only a pudding. Having a sweet dish as the whole meal is ordinary in eastern Germany, so finding Quarkkeulchen among the mains rather than the desserts is normal and not a menu error.
• Raisins are standard. If you would rather do without them, say so when ordering, because they are folded through the dough and cannot be picked out afterwards.

What to avoid

The single most common confusion is with Kartoffelpuffer — also called Reibekuchen — the flat, savoury fritters made from raw grated potato, fried crisp and eaten with apple sauce or something salty. They look superficially similar on a plate and are also served with stewed apple, which is exactly what causes the mix-up, but they are a different dish: no quark, raw not cooked potato, savoury not sweet. A stall selling Kartoffelpuffer is not selling you Quarkkeulchen.

Beyond that, the thing to avoid is the version that has sat too long. Quarkkeulchen are a pan dish and want to be eaten straight from the heat, when the outside is crisp and the inside soft. Kept warm for an hour under a lamp at a busy stall, they go leathery and heavy, and the crisp edge turns to a tough skin. The tell is simple: whether they are being fried to order or ladled from a tray that has been standing.

Watch too for a plate that is greasy rather than crisp — a sign the fat was not hot enough — and for cakes that are dense and gluey inside, which usually means too much potato and too little quark, or that they were made from potato alone with the curd left out to cut cost.

Practicalities

You will meet Quarkkeulchen in two settings, and they behave differently. Sat down in a traditional Saxon restaurant or a café they are a menu regular all year, cooked to order as that sweet main course, and this is where they are at their best. At the Christmas markets in December they appear as street food, fried in the open on a flat griddle — good when handed over hot from the pan, disappointing when scooped from a holding tray, so choose the stall where a cook is actively frying rather than the one plating from a heap.

As a sit-down plate they run to roughly €7 to €11 as a main course with the apple sauce included; a market portion in a paper tray is less, around €4 to €7. A price at the very bottom of that range from a market stall is often the standing-tray version rather than the freshly fried one.

The market stalls and small cafés where you will most want to eat them are just the sort of place the city guide above notes as fondest of cash, so keep some small notes and coins for a griddle stall that may not take a card at all.