Brot and Wurst

This family-run bakery and café looks like a surprise find in the suburbs, but there’s no shortage of locals queuing at the counter for snags or stopping in for coffee and cake. The display cabinet at the back is packed with a dizzying array of kransky, weisswurst, bockwurst, chorizo and up to nine kinds of bratwurst, including a tasty roast pork version with pear cider.

Then there are the deli meats. German ex-pat Dean Stockburger has been a master butcher for 25 years, starting up Brot & Wurst in 2009. They make all their small goods onsite with no gluten, wheat, dairy or soy added. Much of the meat is free-range too. There are smoked hams, salamis and an offal-lover’s paradise of black pudding, liverwurst, tongue wurst and suelze, made from pig's head. They even have tubs of grieben schmalz: clarified chicken fat with bits of caramelised chicken skin.

Behind all that is a wall of breads – everything from organic dark sourdough ryes to German pretzels to wheels of organic carrot bread. There's also an aisle of European groceries running the length of the bakery/butchery/café with more variaties of mustard than you can poke a hot dog at.

If you can’t wait to go home to cook up your snags, pull up a chair and have them eat-in instead. There’s a small dining area within the shop or sit on the shaded balcony outside. Choose from a giant German hot dog, smoked chorizo or smoked kransky or go for gold and get the chilli kransky stuffed with globs of melted cheese. They’re served on a house-made roll with sauerkraut and mustard for $7.50.

The hot leberkase roll is a surprise winner. It’s a baked sausage loaf made from corned beef, pork, bacon and onions. Here it’s sliced in thick slabs, pan-fried and jammed into a Kaiser roll with a slick of mustard. It tastes like an awesome version of devon – no tomato sauce required. The smoked currywurst sausage is served Berlin-style. That means it’s cut into slices, drizzled with tomato sauce, a few shakes of curry powder and a set of fondue forks for easy stabbing. They’ve got a Swiss fondue too, all boozed up and bubbly.

For dessert there are fat fluffy jam donuts and German bee stings with vanilla cream custard, but our pick is the impossibly flaky country cherry strudel.