Quark is a type of soft cheese that isn’t very common in North America. It’s extremely popular here in Germany, though. It is sold as a soft-spread that is similar in looks to cream cheese, although to me the consistency seems to fall somewhere between yoghurt and cream cheese. It’s more solid than yoghurt, though. People will eat it as a spread on bread for breakfast, for example, or mix it with fruit like you would yoghurt, or eat it other times of the day on its own.

However, there’s a sweet version of it that is used to make a pastry dough. That’s my favorite way to eat quark: i.e.,  in a doughnut, bun, or other dessert. Last year, one of the local bakeries made “Quarkie”: balls of the quark-based dough, deep-fried and rolled in granulated sugar. As a little something sweet, it was perfect – two bites-full of the best part of a doughnut: the sweet dough covered in more sugar. Yum. Sadly, that bakery stopped making them in favor of expanding their Berliner line of doughnuts this year, and those are not as good as the Quarkie, IMHO.

Never fear, though, another bakery has stepped up to offer some quark-based sweets at Christmas time, called Quarkteigmännchen, “Little quarkpastry men”. I guess if we can have gingerbread men at Christmas time in North America, why not little quarkpastry men in Germany, eh? The bakery offers a variety of shapes and sizes of these men, apparently, but so far we’ve only tried the one in the photo below.  Today when we tried to buy another one, they said they were all out, and there was no promise of them having any more before Christmas.

Have no fear, however, we will do our best to track them down and try them all before Christmas. Tough work, but we’re dedicated to the idea of trying as many foods as possible here in Germany. After all, we tried that Griebenschmaltz, did we not?

I’ll look at these little quarkpastry men are our reward. 😉

Little Quarkpastry Man