DER FEINSCHMECKER celebrates 50 years of enjoyment

HAMBURG.has been inspiring gourmets and amateur chefs for five decades with exclusive insights into the international gourmet world, sophisticated recipes and the latest culinary trends. Its annual Best of Guides, curated by experienced teams of testers, and the celebrated WINE AWARDS offer reliable guidance in the selection of excellent gourmet addresses and wines. To mark its 50th anniversary, Germany's culinary lead magazine is now celebrating not only its own success story, but also the passion for enjoyment that it shares with its readers. With a special anniversary issue, high-calibre guest authors and a look at the culinary highlights of recent decades, the magazine from Hamburg's Jahreszeiten Verlag publishing house is making a tasteful statement in the media landscape.

The magazine impresses with its maximum size alone: on 332 pages, more than in any previous issue, the magazine takes its readers on a journey through 50 years of enjoyment and shows in a wonderful way how the aesthetics of food and the expectation of "good cuisine" have changed over the decades. "Many people ask me these weeks which era is the most exciting for me: Of course, Spanish cuisine with molecular cuisine pioneer Ferran Adrià changed everything we thought about cooking until then. But what is really exciting is the overall view of the major developments - whether nouvelle cuisine, fusion, Nordic cuisine, molecular or home cooking. Tim Raue traces them for us in a wonderful time-travelling menu: From oysters to nitrogen to Königsberger Klopse - the Michelin-starred chef has developed five dishes to mark our anniversary, each of which epitomises one of the style-defining eras," says editor-in-chief Gabriele Heins. Joerg Meyer from the Hamburg bar Le Lion has created the perfect birthday drink, the "Itameshi", an elegant cocktail made from Italian and Japanese ingredients, refined with honey and lemon.

TV legend Günther Jauch also takes stock in the birthday edition. He and his wife took over the Saar wine estate von Othegraven exactly 15 years ago. He plunged headlong into the adventure of winegrowing, Jauch says in the interview. "If I had known everything that was to come, I would probably have shied away. But I was able to immerse myself in a new, fascinating, fun and lively world." The presenter particularly appreciates the solidarity in the industry beyond the boundaries of the vineyards: "There is no solidarity as strong as among winegrowers in television."

What Günther Jauch is to the German television landscape, Eckart Witzigmann is to German gastronomy. He has shaped the German-speaking culinary world like no other. In an exclusive interview with Feinschmecker, Witzigmann, who was the first chef in Germany to receive three Michelin stars in 1979, looks back on the stages of his career and also remembers his "culinary childhood": his mother was able to conjure up something special from the simplest ingredients, for example fried eggs with spinach. "I would still walk miles for that today," he recalls. With a lot of perseverance, courage, a great love of detail and a good dose of modesty, Witzigmann raised the local art of cookery to a new level and influenced an entire generation of chefs. "I wanted to improve as a chef every day, I was ambitious and disciplined and put myself under the greatest pressure - often very stressful for my fellow chefs," Witzigmann summarises.

A magazine about 50 years of German gourmandise cannot ignore the topic of health and eating habits. For Germany's best-known nutritionist Dr Matthias Riedl: "Healthy food has to taste good. Otherwise people won't follow recommendations." Food culture has changed a lot over the years. People used to cook everything themselves; today, highly processed products dominate the home kitchen. "This is our common enemy - foodies and nutritional medicine have moved closer together, so to speak. Because if you cook for yourself, you're more likely to have something healthy on your plate," says Riedl.

And no birthday is complete without presents: readers can test their gourmet knowledge in the big anniversary competition and win great prizes, including gourmet holidays, fine accessories not just for the kitchen and attractive vouchers. The anniversary issue will be in stores from 11 April.