Talk:Obatzda

I removed a broken link:

• Bavarian Food Guide

and added a new link instead:

• A Bavarian beer garden classic: "Obatzda"

CSchoenberger (talk) 10:26, 27 November 2007 (UTC)

Butter

Sorry for my bad english, I am from Bavaria. There is no need for butter. The main thing is mashed cheese (it works even with blue cheese!) and sweet paprika powder. Of course you need something to give the cheese a spreadable consistency -- butter, for example. But you can also use yogurt. It is important to use sweet paprika powder and not hot paprika powder! The main reason for "inventing" Obatzda was to make old camembert more durable and to make it taste more tasty, because it gets bitter, if old. 83.97.72.14 (talk) 21:03, 8 November 2011 (UTC)

Etymology

I have looked at many sources, and many of them agree that "Obatzda" is the Bavarian dialect version of the verb "anbatzen" (perfect participle: angebatzt), which means "to mash" (as in mashed potatoes); anbatzen in turn comes from "Batzen", meaning a "lump, glob, clump". (There is even a common joke about girls from northern Germany who go to Bavaria looking for "angebatzt" and who don't realize that Obatzda is the local name for the dish that they're seeking.)

However, I have found no dictionary or other authoritative source that states that the above folk etymology is correct. (Even German Wikipedia's article on Obatzda doesn't provide a source for the word's etymology, which is presented in the German article.) I'll continue to search. Cwkmail (talk) 17:02, 6 February 2013 (UTC)

Your explananation is correct. the verb anbatzen is not part and parcel of standard German but rather a translation of Bavarian children´s language. batzen can e.g. mean forming figures out of wet mud in children´s play. That is exactly what you are doing when mixing the ingredients for Obatzda which is most easily done by hand. The standard German prefix an- sounds o- in Bavarian (and Austrian, Swabian and South Tyrolean BTW), and the past participle of batzen is gepatzt or gebatzt in Standard German, and is represented as batzd or batzt in Bavarian, since the standard German past participle prefix ge- is frequently dropped in Bavarian. Since there is no standardised orthography of German dialects people use approximations when spelling dialect words, so there is no standardised spelling of Obatzda. Obatzder is possible too and sound slightly more correct as far as standard German goes. Obatzda can be found on menues of most southern German restaurants as long as they are not Italian, Chinese or ethnic, and is a standard dish in beergardens. Many German supermarkets store ready made and packed Obatzda.

My personal recipe is simple: chop onions finely and mix with a roughly equal amount of camembert cheese. Add some spicy olive oil and a little beer, and season with paprika powder (mild or hot to taste), salt and pepper. Butter can be added. Kneading the mass with hands and fingers is easier than using forks. Ontologix (talk) 00:00, 20 May 2023 (UTC)