Today on Food on Fridays we focus on a few fabulous fall festival foods, featuring freshly formed flatbreads.

Well, that’s a bit over-the-top, but I had the chance to go for a lot of alliteration, so I took it.

Anyway, at the autumn festivals around here, in addition to the ubiquitous Rotwurst (a type of Bratwurst) on a bun, there are a few stalls that offer variations on freshly baked bread.  When I say freshly baked, I really mean it:  the stalls have ovens on-site, and everything is baked right there. Different options include Dinnele — a type of flatbread with toppings, plus loaves of bread sold plain or stuffed with cheese. Mostly you wait for stuff to come out of the oven after you order. It’s not exactly a quick fast-food approach to festival food, but it is rather tasty.

BTW, a short linguistics note from Chris: the term Dinnele is Swabian, not Standard German.  Chris — who does not speak Swabian — does know a bit about that dialect. He thinks that the name of this flatbread dish is probably related to the Standard German word for “thin”, which is dünn. Regular vowel correspondences between Standard German and Swabian change dünn to dinn. The –ele on the end is the Swabian equivalent to the Standard German diminutive -chen. So, a “small thin thing” in Standard German would be a Dünnchen; in Swabian, that would become a Dinnele. And, after all, that’s what the flatbread essentially is, I guess, a small, thin bread. Thanks, Chris, for this little linguistics digression!

Below you’ll find photos of some examples of the Dinnele and another non-flat food that we tried, both at this past week’s festival, as well as at the fall festival back in September. At that September festival, we stood in a long, long line to get our food (the place that made the Dinnele, cheese-stuffed bread and wurst-wrapped-in-bread was one of the most popular food stalls at the festival.

This past week I wound up at a Dinnele stand just at noon, which is a bit early for lunch around here, so there was no line. A line formed, though, while I was waiting for my Dinnele to come out of the oven. I’d say I was a trend setter, except I ordered the Bauer style one, and all the people who came after me ordered the Schwob style one. After tasting the Bauer one, I’d say they all had the right idea — the sour cream and chives mixture that was baked onto the bread under the potatoes wasn’t really something I’d need to try again. The bread base, however, was very, very good.

Anyway, the photos below will give you a ‘flavor” of this type of freshly formed fantastic fare, frequently found at fabled fall festivals far and wide. Well, at least in Tübingen.

Hmm. Remind me to make a note: for next year’s post, I need to go sample foods at fall festivals in Frankfurt. 😉