German-Style Pot Roast {Sauerbraten} (2024)

Often marinated for days in vinegar and wine, German-Style Pot Roast is tangy, sweet and full of rich, beef flavor. In this recipe, the marinating process is replaced by the slow cooking process in a crock pot. Whether you call it German Pot Roast, Bavarian pot roast, or Sauerbratan, dinner is done in hours instead of days.

I have a hobby. Well, actually, it is more than a hobby; it is an addiction. I LOVE genealogy, aka Family History. I love finding out about my family and their past, where they came from, what their lives were like and what may have brought them to America.

The earliest ancestors I can find came from England to the American colonies in the early 1600’s, you know – on the Mayflower – and went on to settle in Massachusettes and Connecticut.I do have a copy of a plat map of Hartford, Connecticut from when it was first settled and I can find family names on the map. THAT’S exciting (to me). Yep, my roots go very deep in American soil.

My roots not only go deep into American and British soil, they also go wildly deep into German soil as well. Many of my ancestors, on both sides of my family, came from Germany. My dad’s German ancestors settled in Canada and Wisconsin. My mom’s German ancestors settled in South Carolina.

I feel really sorry for those poor Germans who came to the low country of South Carolina. They left the beauty of Germany and came into the wild, sweaty, bug biting, steaming hot summers of South Carolina. They traded the Rhineland for the swamp land.

In honor of my German heritage, I decided to make something a bit German-ish: a German-Style Pot Roast, aka Bavarian Pot Roast or Saurbraten. When I first encountered a recipe for this style of pot roast, I was skeptical about its authenticity. Was there really such a thing as “Bavarian” pot roast? Or was it a made-up name for a food item, sort of like “Hawaiian Haystacks“?

With a little research and some lucky hits on You Tube, I found that the typical German-style pot roast, sauerbraten, is customarily brined for several days in vinegar, wine and a few common spices. Just like pot roast in America, recipes vary regionally and of course from family to family.

Following my foray into research on German pot roast, I feel relatively comfortable with the recipe I have provided here. I chose not to marinate the meat, but instead slow cooked it in a crock pot. The roast gets tender and the flavors are well infused throughout the meat.

Flavor Profile and Ingredients

A German pot roast has a sweet and sour combination – lighter on the sweet, heavier on the sour. In keeping with a German flavor profile, I chose to use red wine vinegar. I think that balsamic vinegar would be outrageously good, but it wasn’t quite right for this meal. Sometimes beer is used as the liquid, but wine or vinegar seemed to be more common.

Apples are also a common ingredient in pot roast in some parts of Germany. Instead of the apples, I decided to go with apple cider, which I saw used in several recipes.

In all of the recipes that I reviewed, and there were many, the typical spices used in this style of pot roast remained constant. Essentially, they are pickling spices—bay leaves, peppercorns, ginger, cinnamon, cloves and allspice. Some recipes called for these spices to be added whole, as in a bouquet garni, while other recipes used the spices ground. The bay leaves were typically used whole.

The most interesting ingredient that I found in quite a few recipes was gingersnap cookies. They are added as a thickening and flavoring agent for the gravy. Sometimes the cookies are placed whole in the liquid and dissolve as the roast cooks. In other recipes the gingersnaps were crushed and added to the gravy to thicken it after the roast had been removed. At the last minute, I opted out on the gingersnaps. Call me a chicken, I don’t care.

As for the cut of beef, there were differing opinions. Frequently a chuck roast was used. Eye of round was another choice I saw periodically. A chuck roast will become “fall apart tender” as it cooks, whereas an eye of round roast will become tender, but can still be sliced…if it doesn’t get too obliterated by the sloooooooow cooking.

After Thoughts

Thinking about beef reminds me of one of my German ancestors, living in South Carolina in the mid to late 1700’s. I found an index ofpeople who helped support the cause of the American Revolution. My fifth great grandfather, John Henry Croft (Johann Heinrich Graff) was recorded as having given “2 beeves” to the army.

When I first read “beeves”, it took me a moment to figure out that the word was in reference to cows – beef. John Henry had given two cows up for slaughter so that the soldiers would have something to eat. That’s a lot of beef. I wonder how it was prepared. 🙂

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