The 10-Minute German Side That Skips the Boxed Pasta

Dinner's nearly there and the side is the same question it was last night. Rice, potatoes, or the box of pasta at the back of the cupboard.

If you cook most weeknights and you're bored of the same three starches, there's a fourth. It's called spätzle, it's German, and it takes about as long as the box would have.

Spätzle is a soft egg noodle from Swabia, in the southwest of Germany. The Kitchn's Stacy Brooks, who's been making it at home for years, says it's usually compared to pasta but eats more like small, dense dumplings. The batter is flour, eggs, salt and milk, plus butter for the pan, and odds are all of it is in your kitchen already.

The catch has always been the shaping. Spätzle is made by pushing a loose batter through holes into boiling water, and pushing it through a colander with a spatula is the part that goes wrong. A single-purpose tool fixes it, and it's cheap.

How long does spätzle actually take?

Ten minutes is the figure on the recipe card at Chisel & Fork, a home-cooking blog: five of prep and five of cooking, with the noodles done when they float, two or three minutes after they hit the water.

Brooks puts hers at "less than 20 minutes of effort", and her routine is the whole method in one sentence: mix the batter, pour it into the hopper, slide the hopper back and forth over the holes, and scoop the noodles out with a slotted spoon a few minutes later.

The gap between those two numbers is the rest. Julia Foerster, a German-born recipe writer at Plated Cravings, lets her batter sit for five to ten minutes before it goes in the pot, and her card says fifteen all in. Either way, it fits the slot the box was going to take.

I am ruthlessly selective when it comes to my kitchen tools. If it doesn't fill multiple roles, or if it isn't something I use every day, it won't make the cut... But, weirdly, half of a drawer in my modestly sized kitchen is occupied by a gadget that seems like the biggest space-wasting unitasker of them all: my spätzle maker.

Stacy Brooks, The Kitchn

How does a spaetzle maker work?

The one Brooks keeps in her drawer is the Norpro spaetzle maker: a flat stainless plate full of holes with a small hopper riding on top. Norpro's own instructions are three steps. Rest it across the pot, spoon the batter into the hopper, and slide the hopper back and forth. The batter drops through the holes into the water below as short, plump noodles.

Two unrelated people landed on the same tool. In r/Cooking someone asked whether to buy a press, a grater or a board, and one answer linked this exact Norpro, saying it works "much better" than the overturned grater lid they'd used before. The holes are bigger than a potato ricer's, so it makes thicker spaetzle. The Kitchn essay links the same listing.

Can you make spaetzle without a spaetzle maker?

Yes. Several people in the r/Cooking thread make it without one, and this is what they push the batter through instead:

• A perforated plate and a spatula. One cook uses the steaming plate that came with a rice cooker and presses the batter through with a silicone spatula: "Works perfectly fine."
• A pizza pan with holes. Another used one until an ex bought them a proper spaetzle maker, and reckons the gadget is neither better nor worse.
• A potato ricer. The rice-cooker cook tried one and found the holes too small, so the spaetzle came out "too long and thin".
• A wooden board and a scraper. The traditional way, and the thread's first reply: "When in doubt use a wooden board and a bench or dough scraper."
• A colander or slotted spoon. A reader under the Kitchn essay tried to make do after theirs broke and hasn't made spätzle since: pushing the batter through a colander "is just not the same thing".

None of which makes the tool necessary. What it buys you is a batch that goes in fast and comes out the same shape every time, without the knife-flicking technique one Kitchn reader tried several times and concluded "was not in my skill set".

Which style should you buy?

The owners quoted here don't agree on this one.

The Norpro is the hopper-and-slide style. Another r/Cooking commenter, who's owned a few, wants nothing to do with that shape:

The ones where you need to get the dough into the small area on top and then move it are NOT fun, I hate needing to try and do that with oven mitts on and the steam is hot.

u/OLAZ3000, in r/Cooking

Their pick is a flat perforated lid that sits over the pot and takes a scraper. It's a real style, but it's sold as the same white-label item under a handful of brand names, so there's no single one to point you at. A third voice in the thread just says buy a Westmark press, "simple and straightforward and requires little skill". Westmark makes several, and the comment doesn't say which.

If you don't mind working over a steaming pot, the hopper style is the only one here with a specific product behind it, and two owners who like it. Take the steam seriously, though. The hopper sits right over the boiling water, and one owner's oven mitts tell you what that's like.

What owners grumble about

Beyond the steam, the complaints are small and specific.

It's a unitasker, and a long one. Brooks's takes half a drawer, and Norpro lists it at just under thirteen inches. It does nothing else.

It won't taste like Stuttgart. Brooks is clear that hers is "never as good" as the spätzle she ate in southern Germany, with packet gravy on her husband's plate and whatever cheese is in the fridge on hers. What it does have is "a fresh, bouncy texture that's superior to anything that comes dried in a box", which is the whole reason to bother.

Do you have to bring one back from Germany?

That's the reputation the tool has. Eleven years ago someone in r/AskCulinary asked what kitchen gadgets their mother should hunt for on a trip to Germany and France, and one answer was "Maybe a spätzle maker from Germany." The reply under it called them "reasonably small, cheap and easy to use; basically just a different sieve", then added that it's sad you can't get them anywhere else.

A reader under the Kitchn essay bought a press while living in Stuttgart and "made sure it was in my boxes" for the move home. Brooks's own was a Christmas present after a study term in Potsdam.

You don't need the plane ticket. The Norpro ships from Amazon like a set of measuring spoons, and it's the same tool Brooks and the r/Cooking owner both have.

Start with the plain version, butter, salt and pepper, next to whatever you were cooking anyway, and make it with the Norpro spaetzle maker both owners above keep. Once that's routine, the r/AskCulinary reply has your second week planned: fry them with onion and bacon, or bury them in cheese and put the whole dish in the oven.