Döner kebab becomes Germany’s favorite fast food

First brought to Berlin by Turkish immigrants in the 1970s, the grilled meat snack that comes wrapped in a pita bread with shredded lettuce, tomatoes, onions and different dressings, is now being sold everywhere in Germany from the Baltic Sea to the Bavarian Alps.

Students and late night revelers relish it as much as construction workers, children and foreign backpackers on a tight budget. “We assume that döner kebab is the Germans’ favorite fast food by now,” said Yunus Ulusoy, an expert from the Center for Turkish Studies in Essen, who has done extensive research on how the ethnic specialty conquered Germany’s culinary mainstream.

The secret behind the döner’s success story is not only its satisfying grilled taste, Ulusoy said, but also the big portions and its affordability -- a regular döner in a pita costs only between 2.50 euros and 5 euros ($3.30 to $6.70). The veal and chicken sandwiches are more popular than pizza, hamburgers, French fries and even classic German sausages, according to a poll by German Men’s Health magazine from 2008. “We can actually no longer speak of Turkish food, because the Germans like it even better than the Turks,” said Ulusoy.

Some 15,500 döner places in Germany sell about 400 tons of döner meat every day, according to ATDID, the Association of Turkish Döner Producers in Europe. About 60,000 workers produce, cut and process the hearty delicacy with annual sales of 2.5 billion euros ($3.3 billion).

The word döner comes from the Turkish verb “dönmek,” or to turn, because it is grilled for hours on a spit and cut off in razor-thin slices when the meat is crisp and brown. In Turkey, the dish was originally made of lamb and sold only on a plate. According to the legend, it was Mahmut Aygün, a Turkish guest worker, who invented the first döner sandwich in 1971, when he sold the meat in a piece of pita bread with yoghurt dressing at City-Imbiss stand near West Berlin’s main Zoo train station. Since then, the snack has been exported around the globe and even countries as far away as Vietnam now sell döner pita as “typical German students’ food,” as papers in Germany have repeatedly reported. Germany is home to 2.7 million people of Turkish origin; an estimated 500,000 are German citizens.

While the dish was first mainly sold in Berlin, outlets sprang up across the nation in the 1990s, when the second generation of immigrants came of age and set up their own family-run döner shops. Wholesale dealers who are offering meat already on the spit -- between 22 to 175 pounds (10 to 80 kilograms) -- have also mushroomed. In the last 40 years, döner vendors have refined the taste and assimilated it to the gusto of German palates. Razor-thin slices of crispy chicken or veal are usually accompanied by chopped lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, cabbage and red onions. Customers can choose between garlic, yoghurt and spicy dressing. “In Turkey, the dish is served without dressing, but Germans just can’t eat any meat without sauce,” said Ulusoy, adding that the meat itself is also much more seasoned in Germany than in its country of origin.

The recipes for the seasoning vary and are a well-kept secret. Often the meat is marinated in yogurt and flavored with bell pepper flakes, salt and black pepper, cumin and pimento. Arabic shops who sell the so-called shawarma variety, sometimes add cinnamon, coriander seeds and pomegranate juice. Different from gyros, the Greek pork spit that contains a lot of oregano and is served in bigger chunks, döner has to be cut very thinly. “You need to have a real feel for the meat when you slice it,” said İsmet Dönmez, who runs Rosenthaler Grill- und Schlemmerbuffet in Berlin. “The art is to cut thinly, but to avoid pressing the knife against the spit, otherwise all the fat will run out and the meat becomes dry.”

Dönmez, who emigrated from Turkey 20 years ago, sells chicken and veal döner 24 hours a day on a busy square in the city’s Mitte neighborhood.

“I’ve come here every day for lunch since I arrived in Berlin,” said Ofir Steinberg, an Israeli tourist, who was visiting the city for a week. “It’s the best I’ve ever had. It tastes even better than at home.”