Germany's Favorite Fast Food: The Delicious Turkish D�ner Kebab

Sure this is the land of Beethoven and Goethe and Sauerkraut and Bier and those goofy Lederhosen and the Dirndls and all of that, but one more important cliché has yet to be added to the list: When it comes to classic German fast food, nothing tops a good Turkish Döner Kebab. As a matter of fact, it's the most popular fast food in the country today.

When you come to visit Germany, you will quickly realize that not even the smallest backwoods Dorf can do without having at least one Turkish Imbiss (fast food stand) in town. And I will even go out on a limb and predict the name of the place, too: The top five Turkish Imbiss names in Germany at the moment are Ali Baba, Istanbul, City Döner, Sultan and Bosporus. I'll bet on Istanbul.

Once you move on to the bigger German cities, however, all bets are off. There are over 1,500 Döner shops in Berlin alone, for instance. That's more than there are in the real Instanbul (Berlin is one of the most populous "Turkish" cities in the world, believe it or not).

A Döner (from dönmek: to turn) Kebab (grilled or roasted) is basically nothing more than a big pocket of Turkish bread filled with spicy grilled lamb or other delicious meats mixed up with onions, salad and a variety of yogurt-like sauces. A Turkish cook came up with the idea to roast the meat vertically on a spit about two hundred years ago and the spit is keeps turning to this very day - though now the grilling is usually being done with the use of compact, electric heating elements.

Turkish "guest workers" introduced the Döner to Germany in the early 1970s and it soon progressed from exotic specialty to Teutonic fast food par excellence. And its popularity has grown steadily over the years. Today Germans consume some 800 million Döner Kebab a year - of course the millions of Turkish residents living in Germany have also done their fair share in aiding their German friends in establishing this awesome statistic.