Germany’s Strammer Max

Strammer Max is a German open-face sandwich or Belegtes Brot, consisting of ham and a fried egg atop a slice of rustic rye bread. Strammer is the masculine form of the German adjective stramm, meaning tight or taut or firm. Max is simply the familiar diminutive of the first name Maximilian. So strammer in this context is usually translated as “strapping,” as in “strapping young man.” Wikipedia’s article on the sandwich points out that the Dutch version is called uitsmijter, meaning “bouncer,” or the strapping young man who will throw you out of a nightclub if you get too rowdy.

A funny thing happened as I tried to research the sandwich though. Alternative interpretations of the sandwich’s name kept creeping in, not fully supplanting the established meaning, but muddying the waters a little. Introducing ambiguities. First it was the YouTuber who claimed stram was slang for “drunk or whatever,” an interpretation that has been corroborated for me by several TikTok commenters. Next it was the all too frequent claim that the definition of stram could be extended to include adjectives like rigid, bulging, or erect, and that the name Max was used in Berliner slang as a nickname for the male appendage, much like the names “Dick” or “Willy” are in English.

My old highschool friend JT has a PhD in the German language, teaches German at the University level, takes such frequent and lengthy trips to Germany that he practically lives there, and maintains friendships with people from all over the country. I asked him about this interpretation of the name and he assured me it was not factual. “When I think of Strammer Max I think of strapping young man,” he tole me, though he did concede that “maybe you could stretch that to virile.” So there goes my opportunity to call this sandwich a Ham Viagra.

Or has it? A few self-proclaimed German commenters have brought up this alternate meaning as well. “It actually means hard 🍆 as far as i know ( I‘m from Germany )” comes from a user named Jannick. Also someone named Frank left this mysterious but unfinished comment: “1/2 It’s also said that the name Strammer Max was given by innkeepers from Saxony in the 1920s, referring to a man’s hard p*nis. They claimed that …” I waited in vain–part 2 of the comment never arrived.

Regardless, I always appreciate opportunities to go to the German deli and buy good ham. Long-time readers of the Tribunal may recognize these hams from another German open-face sandwich we covered, Toast Hawaii. The top slice above is Westphalian ham from the forests of Northwestern Germany, made with acorn-fed pigs, dry-cured and smoked over beechwood and juniper branches. Salty, yes, and smoky, but with a relatively delicate flavor. The bottom slice is Schwarzwälder Schinken or Black Forest ham from the southwest of Germany. It is spiced, and dry-cured, then smoked, then dry-aged some more until it develops a very dark pellicle on its surface, and it is powerfully salty and smoky. In the EU, Black Forest ham is a protected designation, and only hams that meet the above description and are made in the Schwarzwald can be called Black Forest ham, but if you’ve ever been in a grocery store deli in the US, you’ll know that such is not the case here–our Black Forest ham is generally wet-cured and shaped perfectly round, with the edges dyed black to make it look slightly more like the real thing.

Black Forest ham is so strongly flavored, in fact, that it seems like a poor idea to heat it. Yet many of the Strammer Max recipes I’ve seen this month call for pan-frying the ham alongside the bread and the egg, then melting cheese atop the ham. Some instead put untoasted bread, ham, and cheese into an oven and heat the whole together, with much the same result.

I used Gouda with the Black Forest ham, though Tilsit or Emmentaler would be good choices, and I’d have leapt at the chance to try it with a Buttterkäse. The garnishes I used here are also not strictly necessary, but pan-frying a dry-cured ham like that gives it bacon-like qualities that are an ideal match for sweet cherry tomatoes like these, and in the months when I have a ready supply of chives directly outside my back door, it would be a rare fried egg that did not get adorned with them.

I made the same sandwich again, this time with Westphalian ham and Muenster cheese.

In both cases, the dry-cured ham lost some of the textural qualities it had uncooked–some fat and moisture rendered out, leaving it dryer and brittle. The flavors are also intensified, which in the case of the Black Forest ham left it almost unbearably salty, though the milder cheese and the soft egg helped mitigate that intensity somewhat, and as I mentioned the brittle and crisp, salty/smoky ham that resulted from pan-frying was well complemented by the sweetness of the cherry tomatoes. Chives give a nice little pungent allium flavor without overwhelming a dish or substantially changing its texture, and are especially good with egg. And these salty little pickles are a nice palate cleanser between bites.

The Taste Atlas article about Strammer Max mentions variants of the dish–Stramme Lotte made with Kochschinken or cooked ham, Strammer Otto made with roast beef or salami, a Bavarian version with Leberkäse, and one from Köln that inexplicably substitutes Gulasch for the ham. I asked my friend JT about them and he was unable to confirm. However, a commenter from Bavaria mentioned on TikTok that they do make something similar with Leberkäse and call it Ochsenauge, or “eye of the ox.” I have been a fan of Leberkäse for a very long time and could not pass up making one this way.

Leberkäse is a mild bologna-like sausage that is baked in loaf pans, and normally I like to eat a thick slice of it, warmed up in a pan, on a hard roll with some spicy brown mustard. It isn’t much of a stretch then to simply spread some brown Düsseldorf mustard on my pan-toasted rustic rye bread, top it with a thick slice of pan-fried Leberkäse, and then add an egg along with the requisite chives. Here I did not feel that the tomato or pickle garnishes were necessary, but again, I am a fan of Leberkäse with mustard on bread. Even more than with the ham, the gushing yolk of the sunnyside-up egg enhances the soft and gently-spiced slab of Leberkäse.

Though I was not able to corroborate the different variants that Taste Atlas describes, I did find a few online recipes that did not toast the bread, making the sandwich more like a German Butterbrot, with a thick schmear of butter atop which the ham is placed. Some of them use a rustic rye bread like I have been using, and some of them steer closer to Danish smørrebrød by using German-style Pumpernickel bread.

Unlike the molasses-dark but otherwise normal rye bread that is sold as Pumpernickel in the US, German Pumpernickel is a dense, seeded rye bread similar to the Rugbrød used in Danish open-faced sandwiches. Untoasted, it is a good base for spreading thickly with butter and finishing with a slice or two of ham, or salami, or good cheese, or smoked fish from a tin.

With this version of the sandwich (and with the final version you can see in my TikTok video below, which used the same rustic rye bread as my other renditions of Strammer Max) the ham is not pre-heated, simply layered atop the butter.

Then, the fried egg gently warms the ham without melting the butter below it or rendering the fat out of the ham, changing its texture for the worse.

This is a much different experience than the previous sandwiches have been–the density of the pumpernickel bread is attention-getting, and the interplay between butter and ham brings to mind the simplicity of the French jambon beurre sandwich. The pickles and tomatoes and chives add their usual salty, sweet, and pungent notes respectively. It’s more complicated than a German Butterbrot generally is, but not in an unwelcome way.

There isn’t a discordant note to be found here. But if there was, I feel relatively certain that the fried egg atop the sandwich would bring everything together in the end. A fried egg topping is the little black dress of the culinary world—it’s appropriate for any occasion.

@sandwichidiot Strammer Max, a German open face sandwich #strammermax #ham #friedegg #openfacedsandwich #butterbrot #leberkäse #ryebread ♬ original sound – Jim Behymer