Baked Potatoes in Hamburg Are Next-Level

Home can come in many forms: a song, the arms of your mother, the smell of washing powder, the rattle of the tram, the warm side of your lover, the weight of your own duvet.

For me, home comes in the round, brown form of a baked potato. After three months in Berlin, feasting on wurst, sitting on pavements drinking Club Mate, and picking falafel out of my teeth beside the Spree, I ached for a baked potato like a sailor looking for land. Well, it is autumn, after all.

So, I packed up my bag, shook out my last Euros, and got on a bus to Hamburg.

Ah, Hamburg. Standing on the banks of the Elbe, a grey drizzle falling across your face as you look out across the docks of Steinwerder, you could be forgiven for thinking you were in Liverpool. Or Glasgow. Or Belfast.

But the city doesn't feel like home straight away. No, that comes a few minutes later, as I wander through the high, narrow streets of St Pauli, when the familiar-as-family smell of baked potato hits me like the bongs of Big Ben.

My god, but a potato can be a port in a storm.

Just a few streets from where The Beatles juggled preludin and booze with guitar chords and sung harmonies in the clubs of the Reeperbahn, I sit down on a small wooden bench and gaze upon the wonder that is the baked potato, or Kumpir. I had assumed that Hamburg's love affair with the baked potato stemmed from being under the British occupation zone from 1945 to 1949, along with Schleswig-Holstein, Hamburg, Lower Saxony, and North Rhine-Westphalia. With all the myopic arrogance and naval-gazing postcolonial idiocy, that seems to be characterising 21st century Britain, I had imagined that the soldiers marching through Northern Germany had done so on a diet of potatoes. How wrong you can be.

The word "kumpir" actually comes from the Balkan word for "stove potato" or "baked potato." According to my good friend The Internet, kumpir originates from the Palatine or Alemannic word "grumbier" or "krumm berry," which literally translates as "basic bulb." Move over bitches, because I am a very basic bulb. The word and food it describes came to Germany from the Turks who had themselves got it from migrants from the Balkans.

These days, kumpir isn't such big news in Eastern and Southern Germany—you're far more likely to find them in Hamburg, Cologne, and Mannheim. So, being in the former, I take it upon myself to eat—you guessed it—three baked potatoes in less than 24 hours. Partly because the pound is crashing down the currency exchange like a drunk man on a double decker bus, so I can only really afford potatoes, and partly for your entertainment. You are most welcome.

That first potato is so good it very nearly brings me to tears. Standing beside the huge cast iron stove, pumping out heat like an open fire, I order the "Chili Kumpir," which comes covered in chili beans, jalapeños, sweetcorn, sour cream, mushrooms, and olives.

It is, I'll admit, quite a long way from the baked bean, cheese, and tuna ensemble the size of a baby's head I ordered every Thursday in Kirkgate Market as a student in Leeds. But there's a bottle of sriracha sauce on the counter, the soft potato pillow inside has been pre-mashed with butter by the man who serves me, and I've been living without an oven since July.

As I sit surrounded by old men in painted leather jackets, pregnant women toting yoga mats, young punks in combat trousers, a pair of Spanish tourists in those ubiquitous and revolting technicolour woollen cardigans, and a group of young Hamburgers playing on their phones, I realise two rather startling things.

Firstly, we are all eating our potatoes with the long-handled spoons apparently stolen from a nearby ice cream sundae. I can't for the life of me think why the usual armoury of knives and forks had been passed over for these snub-nosed spoons, until I notice the second thing: nobody is eating their skins. Nobody.

In fact, when I ask the two women sitting beside me why, she simply looks into my scraped-clean dish and starts to laugh.

"We don't eat this case," she says, as if that solves everything.

It's like going into a sandwich bar to find the bins full of discarded baguettes, or a coffee shop to find they only drink the foam. Well, more fool them. Baked potato skins are great. Tougher than shoe leather, perhaps, but that's exactly how I like it.

The next day, I have lunch in what I thought my landlady had recommended as the best kumpir in town. It turns out, the shop is simply called The Best Kumpir and is pretty near her office.

Not to worry. I order an "Istambul-style" potato which comes (I can barely type this for fear of carbohydrate backlash) covered in couscous, feta cheese, olives, salad, and a creamy, spicy sauce. Couscous in a potato. Why the fuck not? My boyfriend, being a valiant soul and of Irish descent, orders the "Kumpir Mexico." Of course he does.

This little devil comes with spicy beans, sour cream, salad, and—prepare yourselves—tortilla crisps. Crisps on a potato, my friends. A terrible beauty is born. I, again, eat the entire thing (skins, grain, crisps, beans) until I think I might actually pass out right there beneath the Klimt reproduction prints and bare neon bulbs.

"Is this a Turkish dish?" I venture to the small man in a dark green apron behind the counter.

"This is Istambul-style," he replies, nodding at my wiped-clean plate where a potato had once lain. And that told me.

That evening, after wandering the waterways and parks of Hamburg, I come to the wonderfully named station of Schlump. If ever there was a place to eat potatoes, it's surely in Schlump. It takes bit of finding, but I come across another Kumpir outpost, this time full of white-haired men in tiny round spectacles, bicycle couriers in Steve Zissou hats, and young German couples pausing between mouthfuls for swigs of Rothaus lager out of small brown bottles.

I order the "Obergine," which comes with marinaded aubergine and mushrooms, garlic butter, tzatziki, and fresh salad. I also order a bowl of vomit.

Or, so you might assume from the photo. It is actually a chicken kumpir that comes with a base layer of mozzarella (nice touch), hot peppers, mushrooms, and a spicy sauce. It rises from the bowl covered in strands of melted cheese like something from a Chicago deep pan pizza commercial. It is warm. It is salty. It is wonderful. I am so full, I look four months pregnant.

Some hours later, back in my Airbnb on the outskirts of Friedrichsburg, I come toe-to-toe with another uniquely German tradition—one I like to call "the inspection shelf." Quite why German toilets are built with this raised porcelain platform below the toilet seat is anyone's guess, but I can tell you with some authority that it gives you a perfect opportunity to look upon your deeds, ye mighty, and despair.

And if you've just eaten three enormous baked potatoes in the last 24 hours hours, those deeds are indeed mighty.