Frankfurt Green Sauce

Author:
Thomas Sixt is a chef, food photographer, cookbook author and blogger.
Here he shares recipes, answers cooking questions and helps with cooking.

You can find my Frankfurt green sauce recipe in this post.

You’ve probably heard of the “Frankfurter grie sauce”, right?

This specialty from Hesse is a real highlight for all gourmets who love fresh herbs.

But why should you definitely try the Frankfurt green sauce?

Very easily:

Because it not only tastes incredibly delicious, but is also healthy!

The green sauce is traditionally made from seven different herbs, all of which are rich in vitamins and minerals.

This combination makes the sauce not only a real treat for the palate, but also a real source of nutrients.

So, what are you waiting for?

Be sure to try the Frankfurt green sauce for yourself and let its unique taste convince you!

Here you will find three variants of preparation and lots of cooking tips for easy preparation at home.

The following article provides plenty of information about the special features of the cold herb sauce and accompanies you with a cooking video in the kitchen if you wish.

1. Recipe Frankfurt Green Sauce

Did you already get the herbs?

Here are the instructions for the delicious cold sauce.

After the recipe you will find more tips.

You can send me cooking questions using the comment function at the bottom of the page.

Frankfurt Green Sauce

Prepared, refined, photographed and written down by chef Thomas Sixt

Servings 10

Calories 202

Preparation Time 15 Min.

Cook Time 0 Min.

Total Time 45 Min.

Simple instructions for preparing cold green sauce from Hesse and Frankfurt am Main, Germany

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Ingredients

2	Bunch	7 herbs for frankfurter green sauce The 7 herbs are borage, chervil, cress, parsley, burnet, sorrel and chives.
1	Cups	Créme Fraîche (200 g)
1	Cups	Sour cream (200 g)
1	Cups	Sour cream (200 g or yoghurt)
1	Piece	Lemon
6	Pinches	primal salt
4	Pinches	Pepper
2	Pinches	brown cane sugar
2	Piece	eggs (cooked, optional)
1	Piece	tomato

Instruction

Preparation step 1

Prepare Ingredients

Prepare the ingredients in the kitchen.

I had already washed the herbs here.

Please only put washed herbs on your cutting board.

I often use wooden kitchen cutting boards.

For hygienic cleaning and care of wooden cutting boards you will find a separate cooking school contribution.

Preparation step 2

Base Sauce

I put a cup each of sour cream, sour cream and crème fraîche in a large bowl.

I seasoned the dairy products with salt, pepper and sugar.

Preparation step 3

Taste Sauce

I then seasoned the cold base sauce with lemon juice to make it slightly sour.

I also added some cayenne pepper for the delicate sharpness on the palate.

Optionally, you can add two boiled and finely chopped egg yolks to your sauce according to your own taste.

Prepare the cold sauce in the fridge.

Preparation step 4

7 Herbs

I had two packets of 7 fresh herbs for green sauce brought to me by my friend Marco from the Frankfurt am Main region.

Preparation step 5

Check Herbs

The 7 herbs are borage, chervil, cress, parsley, salad burnet, sorrel and chives.

You can find the individual pictures of the herbs under the heading Green Sauce Herbs in the article below.

Unfortunately, the cress did not survive the 300 km drive well.

That’s why I added fresh cress from Lower Saxony.

Preparation step 6

Prepare Herbs

Select the herbs and remove unsightly leaves.

Place the herbs in a large bowl, vat, or copper pot.

Preparation step 7

Wash Herbs

Wash the prepared herbs in plenty of cold water.

Herb tip:
Wilted herbs can be refreshed with ice cube water.

Put the herbs in cold water with a few ice cubes for 15 minutes.

Preparation step 8

Drying Herbs

After visual inspection, spin the herbs dry in a salad spinner.

If you don’t have a salad spinner, you can alternatively wrap the herbs in a clean kitchen towel in a sack.

Then spin the kitchen towel outdoors with circular arm movements.

Preparation step 9

Stalk Herbs

Remove the large, thick stalks of the herbs.

For borage and sorrel, place the leaves in the palm of your hand and pull the stalks off the leaf with your fingers.

Pick the parsley leaves individually from the stalks.

Pluck off the small leaves of the garden burnet one by one.

Remove the toughest stalks from the chervil.

Have some nice herbs ready for later decoration of the sauce.

I wrap these decorative herbs in wet kitchen paper and then put the herbs in the fridge.

Preparation step 10

Cut Leaves

First cut the leaves of borage and sorrel into strips.

Preparation step 11

Traditional Preparation

Put the chives extra, they are cut just before serving and added to the sauce.

For the traditional production of the green sauce without electrical appliances, finely chop the herbs.

Preparation step 12

Chop Herbs

Finely chop the herbs after cutting.

You can do a:

-> Large chef’s knife,

-> chopping knife,

or

-> Chinese cleaver

use.

When using a chef’s knife and cleaver, place your flat hand on the back of the knife for the final fine chopping.

Then guide the knife through the cut herbs with up and down movements.

Preparation step 13

Check Herbs

Check the chopped herbs, these should be very finely chopped.

Preparation step 14

Add Herbs

Add the finely chopped herbs to the prepared cold sauce.

Preparation step 15

Stir Sauce

Mix the green herb sauce with the whisk.

Preparation step 16

Cover Sauce

Cover the sauce with cling film.

Preparation step 17

Sauce Mature

I wrapped the chives with the sauce as a bunch in wet kitchen paper and placed them on the covered sauce.

Place the sauce in the fridge for 12-24 hours until ready.

Preparation step 18

Cut Chives

Just before serving, cut the chives into fine rolls and add to the green sauce.

Put a few chives aside for decoration.

Preparation step 19

Serving Variant

Tomaten Concassée zubereiten und dekorativ auf die Soße legen.

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Arrange the traditional, modern version of the Frankfurt Green Sauce in a bowl or in portions on plates.

Decorate with the herbs and add tomato strips.

You can also prepare tomato concassée and place it decoratively on the sauce.

Preparation step 20

Meat Grinder

Process the dried herbs with the meat grinder.

This is how a frog green sauce is made.

Use the smallest disc from the meat grinder and insert the knife correctly into the meat grinder.

Place the dried, prepared herb leaves on the meat grinder.

Place an extra bowl under the meat grinder outlet to catch the herb puree.

Preparation step 21

Processing Herbs

Process the herbs quickly through the meat grinder on high speed.

A fast or high level is better, so that the processing takes place quickly and without much heat development.

Heat turns the herbs gray and we want to avoid that.

Preparation step 22

Herb Puree

Check the processed herbs.

It should be a fine herb puree without stalks.

Please drain the water so that the sauce does not become watery.

Preparation step 23

Finish Sauce

Add the processed herbs to the base sauce and stir.

Store the sauce covered in the refrigerator for 12-24 hours.

Preparation step 24

Serving

Supplement the green sauce with fresh chives.

See point 18 in this description.

Season the sauce again and serve decorated with herbs and tomato strips or cubes.

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2. Calories And Nutritional Values

The green sauce Calories and nutritional values are clearly listed in the table below.

Depending on how it is prepared, the green sauce has around 150 kcal per 100 g.

3. Frankfurt Green Sauce Herbs

Seven traditional herbs are used to make the famous German “Frankfurter Grünen Sauce”:

1. Borage,
2. Chervil,
3. Cress,
4. Parsley,
5. Salad burnet /garden burnet
6. Sorrel and
7. Chives

The lovage is also mentioned, I will go into that in a later paragraph.

Special fresh herb mixtures of these seven herbs are sold in and around Frankfurt.

Under the name “Frankfurter Grüne Sosse” or “Frankfurter Grie Soss” herbs are sold with an EU-wide protected geographical indication (PGI).

These herbal mixtures have to meet certain requirements in terms of origin, harvest and composition in order to bear this name.

The herbal mixture should not contain any type of herb with a higher proportion than 30%.

A version of the herbal packets from Hesse and Frankfurt am Main can be found below.

The following photos of the individual herbs should offer you additional support.

4. Green Sauce Tips From Frankfurt, Germany

From a family point of view, I had a great advantage when it came to researching green sauce.

My stepfather Andreas comes from Hesse and gave me the cooking tips from his grandmother and mother.

As he told me, the herbs used to be collected and then washed in a vat in the garden.

The herbs were then destalked, finely chopped, then chopped and mixed with the cold base sauce.

Andreas gave me sour cream, sour cream and yoghurt as ingredients for the cold basic sauce.

In fact, the grandma had a different recipe than the mother, so we can see that taste is individual.

Anyway, the sauce was a white sauce with herbs in it. and no frog-green sauce from the blender.

Therefore you will find two variants of herbal processing in the recipe:

First traditionally with chopped herbs,

secondly with herbs, processed in a meat grinder.

Below you will find the variant with the Thermomix.

5. Green Sauce Original Recipe

For the original you definitely need all 7 herbs for green sauce.

There’s no way around it.

You can find the herbs regionally depending on what is available on the market or you can collect them yourself.

Sour cream or sour cream as well as yoghurt or sour cream are usually used as the base sauce.

The history of the sauce is interesting, which I will summarize for you below.

History of Frankfurt sauce:

Also known as Frankfurter Sauce, green sauce has a rich history dating back to Roman times.

The following is considered to have been handed down:

Legionnaires brought the green herb sauce from the Near East to their homeland, where it is still popular today.

In the 18th century, Italian tradesmen brought the recipe to Frankfurt, where it quickly became a staple of local cuisine.

However, the Frankfurt variant of “salsa verde” was slightly different from the Italian version, as it could only be prepared with the herbs that were available on the market.

This is how the Italian “Salsa verde” became the unmistakable “Grie Soß” of the Frankfurters.

Preparing the green sauce offers a variety of options, as the choice of fresh herbs can vary depending on the season and personal taste.

However, one thing is crucial:

The herbs must always be fresh in order to unfold their full aroma.

With its rich history and distinctive combination of fresh herbs, the green sauce is a culinary treasure appreciated in Frankfurt and beyond.

The oldest printed Frankfurt green sauce recipe

In 1860, Wilhelmine Rührig published the second, expanded edition of her “Practical Frankfurt Cookbook”.

She describes an original variant of the Frankfurt green sauce as a vinaigrette:

“A hard-boiled egg yolk is mixed very finely with salad oil for a quarter of an hour, several spoonfuls of fine mustard are mixed in and quite a lot of finely chopped herbs such as borash, tarragon, parsley, basket, chives and pimpernel, and vinegar, salt and pepper are added. “
– Wilhelmine Rührig: Practical Frankfurt cookbook, 2nd edition, 1860

The recipe is considered the oldest printed recipe for the famous green sauce from Frankfurt.

Word explanations:

Körbel –> chervil

Hard Boiled Egg Yolk –> Cooked Egg Yolk

The relationship to the Italian Salsa Verde is clearly recognizable.

6. Prepare Green Sauce In Meat Grinder

To be honest, I chopped the herbs first and prepared the green sauce in the traditional way.

Somehow I had a barrier to processing the herbs straight through the meat grinder.

I just like the handwork, but wanted to complete the post and add the unflattering meat grinder variation.

Of course, not the whole sauce goes through the meat grinder, only the herbs.

So you can prepare and taste the cold base sauce first, then take care of the herbs.

Process my cooking tips for herbs in the meat grinder:

Process chives:

The chives definitely don’t go in the meat grinder.

If you were to grind the chives through the meat grinder, you would have a sauce that tasted strongly of onions,

At the same time, the sauce would keep for less than a day because the crushed chives start to ferment quickly.

You save your chives until just before serving.

The chives are freshly cut and stirred into the sauce just before serving.

Wash the herbs well

For this I used my large copper cauldron from Jan, because copper also has an antibacterial effect.

I washed the herbs several times in plenty of cold water and then put them in my salad spinner sieve.

Let’s come to the second important point…

Spin the herbs dry

Putting wet herbs through the meat grinder is not a good idea.

The more water adheres to the herbs, the more watery the green result will be.

Since we don’t want to produce a smoothie and the sauce should have a creamy consistency at the end, water is our enemy.

Therefore, please put the clean washed herbs in the salad spinner and spin dry.

I dried the chives in a towel.

If you don’t own a salad spinner, I would highly recommend buying one.

Alternatively, you can put the herbs in a sieve and shake dry first.

Then put the herbs in a cloth, form a bundle and spin the water out with circular movements.

You can only do that outdoors. because otherwise your kitchen will get wet.

Destem the herbs

Remove the coarse and fine stalks of the herbs.

The stems are particularly woody and contain a lot of water.

Pimple stems are particularly critical.

Even made very small, these are no joy for the palate.

Process herbs in separate bowl

Now process the dry herbs in the meat grinder.

I took the small slice and an extra bowl for the herb puree.

You can determine the amount of water that goes into the sauce yourself.

If you would grind the herbs directly into the base sauce, all the water in the herbs would end up in the sauce and make it watery.

Please avoid this, you can strain the herbal water or simply pour it off.

You can then add the dry herb puree to the base sauce and finish it off.

7. Prepare the Green Sauce In the Thermomix

Wunderkessel owners should also be able to find their way around here in the article.

Therefore, here are the quick instructions for the Thermomix.

Prepare herbs:

Select the herbs, wash thoroughly in cold water and spin dry.

Cut the chives into small pieces later with a knife.

Pluck the borage and sorrel leaves into small pieces with your hands, cut them better and place them in the blender jar.

Stem the remaining herbs and place in the Thermomix.

Chop herbs in the Thermomix:

Put the Thermomix lid on and put the spatula in the mug.

Chop the dry herbs on speed 5 for 25 seconds, using the spatula in stirring motions.

Check the result. The herbs must be chopped really small.

Prepare sauce:

When the herbs are crushed you can use the mixing blade and add the remaining ingredients.

Then mix at level 2-3 for 20 seconds at level reverse and complete.

Since I worked on a Thermomix cookbook, I would like to recommend the first Austria cookbook from Wunderkessel.

8. Green Sauce Goes With…

Let’s get to an important point, what does the Frankfurt green sauce go really well with?

Traditionally, the sauce is eaten with potatoes and boiled eggs.

I tried it once and I think it’s ok.

As a chef, I’m always looking for a finer variant.

My favorite variation is green sauce with poached egg and potatoes.

This is a nice dish for Maundy Thursday and Good Friday, Easter week in general and family dinners.

Let’s look further…

Since the early 1990s, the Frankfurter Schnitzel has spread on restaurant menus.

It is a Wiener Schnitzel or Schnitzel Wiener Artl with fried potatoes and green sauce.

I’ll post the recipe soon 🙂

The cold herb sauce goes really well with boiled beef and fish.

I’ve been waiting for the Frankburger for a long time, that would be a burger with green sauce 🙂

You can serve the herb sauce for grilling, it tastes great with meat, fish and seafood.

Here are some pictures and recipe tips to go with the wonderful sauce:

9. FAQ Green Sauce

The most important, collected questions about the green sauce can be found below:

10. More Sauce Recipes