Beyond hot cocoa & gluhwein: Eater's guide to the 2023 Carmel Christkindlmarkt

In just a couple of hours at the Carmel Christkindlmarkt, you can fill a tote bag with artisanal trinkets, sip genuine Belgian hot chocolate or go for a nervous waddle around the outdoor ice rink. More importantly, you can also feast on an intestinally compromising volume of smoked meat and cultured dairy.

The nearly 30 food and drink options may feel overwhelming at first, but don’t worry. After consuming several thousand distinctly German calories across two visits in one week, I am prepared to share all the wisdom I acquired.

Don’t skip the sausage

Between mouth-wateringly salty rinds of pit-smoked Prague ham, crispy hunks of donër lamb doused in garlic sauce and oblong discs of schnitzel as big as your face, Christkindlmarkt has no shortage of excellent meat options. Call me an uncultured American, but few of those can match the joy of walking around an outdoor festival with a comically large sausage in a too-small bun.

Behind the counter at Wurst Haus, little stacks of hefty beef and pork links ($12-15) sizzle on a Schwenkgrill suspended over an open flame. The sausage snaps between your teeth with a burst of smoke, grease and satisfaction. By the time you reach the chewy bread and heaping condiments, all bets are off on tidiness.

You’ll likely emerge from each bite with a few tufts of pucker-inducing sauerkraut and a smattering of spicy brown mustard adhered to your nose. I say wear it like a badge of honor and get right back in there.

Not a meat eater? Try the potatoes

Admittedly, Christkindlmarkt doesn’t cater much to plant-based diets. Nearly every shade of Pantone’s brown palette is represented at the festival; green, not so much.

Enter the humble potato. Find spuds skewered in crispy spirals at Schnitzel and Sauerkraut ($9) or boiled and doused in melted cheese at Alpenlodge ($15).

However, if you want something more substantial than the skewers but not quite heavy enough to give a small horse a heart attack, I’d suggest the potato pancakes at Kartöffelpuffer Küche ($8). A golden-brown crust gives way to al dente edges and a fluffy interior of interwoven shreds. Served with a side of applesauce ($1), kartöffelpuffer basically has all the fruits and vegetables you need.

You can’t go wrong with noodles and cheese

I’m not bolstering my case as a worldly gourmand by first recommending an upscale hot dog and now fancy macaroni and cheese, but the käsespätzle at Four Day Ray’s Käsespatzle ($14) was arguably the best thing I ate at Christkindlmarkt.

The pleasantly al dente spätzle offer plenty of uneven curves for luxuriant cheese sauce to fill. The cheese has more bite than your standard Kraft fare, but goes down very smoothly. A salty scattering of fried onions on top cut through the fat and add some welcome crunch.

The best pairing for this soul-warming comfort food is arguably a large, cushiony recliner. Melatonin has nothing on these narcotic levels of creaminess.

Explore raclette at your own peril

Speaking of cheese, as someone who once regularly used a boys’ locker room, the smell of a raclette stand hits a little close to home. The aggressively funky aroma of semi-hard Swiss cheese bubbling under a heater follows you through the night, haunting you like a vengeful, creamy phantom. Multiple times I overheard someone say, “I can smell the cheese,” or, “You still smell like cheese,” even at the opposite end of the market from the raclette stand.

Nevertheless, that cheese tastes pretty good on potatoes.

At Alpenlodge ($15), a server scrapes the partially melted surface of two cheese wheels onto a cluster of boiled new potatoes. The spuds are hearty yet fluffy and warm your body like a bear hug.

The pungent, curiously briny cheese tastes far less overpowering than it smells, and the crispy browned bits provide a nice textural counter to the rest of the molten cascade. Still, if you’re so-so on cheese, you might want to steer clear.

I suspect many people get raclette primarily for the spectacle of the cheese scraping, but who am I to judge? Let he who has never smashed an order of cheese fries cast the first stone.

Treat yourself

My best advice for dessert is to simply wander around until you smell something sweet that makes you whip your head around like a dog that saw a squirrel. However, if you have 10 minutes to spare, you might want to wait for a chimney cake at the Baumstriezel ($14) booth.

A ribbon of yeast dough is wrapped around a stout conical cylinder, coated with your choice of toppings and cooked golden-brown while rotating. Granulated sugar rustles off in a miniature snowfall as you unspool the baumstriezel, tearing off hunks clinging to the chimney by wisps of dough.

The cake is shatteringly crisp on the outside, pillowy on the inside and full of distinctly malty notes. My eating partner compared it to an evolved version of a cinnamon sugar pretzel from the mall. Swap out a dimly lit, cologne-soaked American Eagle store for a charming cuckoo clock stand and the parallel is complete.

Drink and be merry

Hot chocolate is made for holiday markets, but nothing will warm you up like glühwein, available at five different stands for around $8. Between the steaming liquid, pungent mulling spices and bristling 9.5% ABV, a cup of sugar plum glühwein from the central Glühwein Pyramid booth should restore feeling to your fingertips in no time.

Vapors of peppery allspice and sweet alcohol coat your mouth, making your tongue briefly feel like the wick of a lit candle. The wine is plenty strong, but tart and sweet like the grape juice I took for communion as a kid. It’s spicy, cozy and, speaking purely for myself, vaguely Presbyterian.

You may or may not heed my recommendations, and that’s perfectly fine — I realize not everyone spends 16 hours per day thinking about food. Christkindlmarkt has so much to offer beyond what you can eat, from comfy wool hats to elegant handmade candles. In truth, there’s no wrong path to take.

But I've charted the tastiest one.

Christkindlmarkt, 10 Carter Green, Carmel, runs through Dec. 24th. Open Wednesdays and Thursdays 4 to 9 p.m.; Fridays and Saturdays noon to 9 p.m.; and Sundays noon to 8 p.m.

Contact dining reporter Bradley Hohulin at bhohulin@gannett.com. You can follow him on Twitter/X @bradleyhohulin.

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Eater's guide to 2023 Carmel Christkindlmarkt