The Daily Adventure: Grocery Shopping in Europe

Choose your own eggs

A trip to the grocery store is something that most of us take for granted. We could do it in our sleep, and probably have -- that late night or early morning run to the store for something urgent. If you travel to another state in the U.S., your grocery shopping experience will be essentially the same as at home. There might be some regional specialties, perhaps drive-thru pick-up (not something we have in Santa Barbara). But it doesn't qualify as an "adventure". 

Grocery shopping abroad is an altogether different experience. Don't worry about being half-asleep, and forget about early morning or late night dashes. Most stores open at 8:00 or 9:00, and close between 6:00 and 8:00 in the evening. The earliest opening time we have seen was 7:15 am in Vienna; the latest closing time was 9:00 pm in a bustling college neighborhood in Zurich.  Do you need something from the market on Sunday? If you're in Austria or Germany, you'd better plan ahead: grocery stores (and just about everything else) are closed on Sundays. (If you're truly desperate, some grocery stores at train stations are open.) We stayed in a small town in Austria, where the only grocery store closed for three hours every day for lunch (um, isn't that a great time for customers to stop by and grab....lunch?) They don't reopen on Wednesday afternoon; plan accordingly.

Remember the number before you get to the scale.

What makes these hours even more confounding is the need to go to the market nearly every day. The food here does not have as many preservatives as in the States, which is awesome. But it means that bread goes stale in about an hour, which is not awesome when you want bread on Sunday, or on Wednesday afternoon in a small town. Speaking of bread, the big grocery store near our apartment in Italy didn't open until 9:00am. So breakfast pastries had to be purchased the day before if you're an early riser. The best breads are gone by noon.  So you either wait for breakfast or settle for stale bread. 

So, what is like when you have navigated the hours and are now shopping at the store?  In many stores, you can buy unrefrigerated milk and eggs. There is always cold milk available, but there is even more shelf-stable milk to be had. Eggs are rarely refrigerated. They are sold in cartons of 4, 6, 10 or 12. You can also buy hardboiled eggs. Often they are colored so you can tell them apart from the uncooked eggs. (In Switzerland, we found eggs that were red with the white square cross of the Swiss flag!)

In almost all markets you must weigh and tag your produce before you get to the check-out. The checkers do not have scales built into their scanners. In Italy, we had to weigh our bread, too. One morning the scale was broken, and it was total chaos. No one could buy bread at that market until the bread scale computer was fixed.

Weighing and tagging fruit

The stores tend to be much smaller here, too. They have lots of food tucked into their compact spaces. You can find most everything you need. What they lack is the sheer breadth of products we find in the states. For example, where US grocery stores have a nearly full row aisle of breakfast cereal, the cereal section here might be five feet wide. Maybe less. The same goes for the chips section and wine selection.

Of course, there are items we have not found at all. Although there are countless sausages here, we have found Spanish chorizo in one large upscale market. I doubt I will find linguicia. Cuts of meat that we are familiar with are also not found -- no tri-tip here. I listened to a podcast about American expats trying to cook familiar foods abroad. One of the speakers said that she prints a picture of a cow, takes it to the butcher, and points to the cut she wants. Apparently, flank steak -- a mainstay for fajitas in the States -- is considered only fit for dogs in Switzerland!

The bread section in Italy, near the end of the day

For fans of Mexican food, living in Europe can be a real challenge. Old El Paso is the only Mexican product line here. I have had to order black beans and masa for tortillas from Amazon.de. Mike is bringing Cholula back from Santa Barbara! Miraculously, Mike can get jalapenos from our market down the street.

Never one to be dismayed by food, I have found some delicious foods that I may not encounter when I return to California.  In Italy I found the most perfect caponata and an amazing pistachio cream (like nutella, but with pistachios and without the chocolate.) I found a coconut-almond spread that probably deserves its own blog -- so good!

When it's time to check out, you must brace yourself. Paying and bagging your groceries at the same time can get hectic. There is no such thing as a bagger here, and you will never hear "can we help you to your car?" 

All in all, we are getting used to the markets here. We know which store is more likely to have avocados, which carries Magnum double-raspberry bars (thank you, Linda Vannier!), who has a better selection of fresh bread, and so much more. At the end of the day, what matters is quality, no quantity.

It's all part of the adventure.