There are two approaches to traveling gluten free (gf) in foreign lands.  Either approach will require a degree of flexibility – and sometimes you need to employ a bit of both.

Approach 1 I call the “5-star” method.  You stay in hotels, travel with organised tours and eat mostly in restaurants.  You have to negotiate with tour operators, waiters and hotel staff, perhaps using restaurant translation cards written in the local language (“I have Coeliac Disease and cannot eat wheat…” etc).  You carry emergency food for times when the tour bus pulls up at a motorway fast food roadhouse and you can’t find anything gf (or edible) to eat.  You pray the restaurant staff are not poisoning you.

My preferred approach is the “Backpacker or Independent” method.  You stay in non-hotel accommodation (we use AirBnB or VRBO) and eat out of local supermarkets.  These days you research your trip (and food) online (no more Lonely Planet guides) and you take public transport to get around.

Each approach has its pros and cons.  Cooking your own meals may not seem like a holiday but it can be cheaper, quicker and more flexible than eating in restaurants.  For instance, on a previous trip to Paris, we visited many of the museums after 6pm taking advantage of discounted entry prices and much shorter queues.  We just cooked ourselves late dinners when we arrived back at our apartment.

So what do you need to travel independently?  Three things:

1. Accommodation with at least a stove or preferably a microwave
2. Internet access (has the apartment got wifi?)
3. A smartphone or tablet with GPS and Google Translate app

Other useful apps include maps that will work offline (we use Here WeGo) and of course Google search itself that will now not only find you the closest supermarket but also tell you whether or not it is still open.

Eating becomes pretty normal: go to supermarket, buy food, cook it and eat it.  You just need to find food that is both gf and can be cooked easily in a microwave or perhaps a one pan meal such as a stir fry.  The tricks are to avoid flying in to a new place late at night (everything closed) or on No Food Sundays; in Germany most supermarkets (and other shops) are closed on Sunday – don’t expect to get the 24 hour 7 day supermarkets we have in most of Australia.

As you may guess, this approach relies on food labelling rules at least similar to what we have in Australia and New Zealand.  Germany is part of the EU so big tick here.  As far as I have found in the EU, the rules are pretty similar, right down to the habit of often capitalising or bolding the bad stuff (gluten, milk, soy, seafood etc).  It is best to not only know (or have a written list of) the local terms for gf (gluten frei in German – how easy!) and the words for wheat, barley, malt etc, but also the other stuff most of us can eat (milk, soy etc) so we don’t panic when we see them bolded.  If you are not sure, when you get back to your accommodation you can run every ingredient through Google Translate, even better, that app can now use the camera in your phone to instantly translate the whole ingredients list in one photo.  It isn’t perfect (sometimes even it can’t read bad or microscopically printed ingredient lists) so don’t rely on it alone but it beats the old days of having to type every single word carefully into your phone.  It also works on other signs (e.g. Private Keep Out or Visitors This Way) so I found myself translating over 50 signs and phrases every day (mostly nothing to do with food).  In case you don’t have net access, you can download the whole Google app German (and other languages needed) dictionaries before you leave home.

Northern Germany doesn’t get a lot of non-German visitors and, boy, the Germans like their signs.  Most are not also in English so you need to either know German, do a lot of translating, or guess.  Fortunately most ticket machines do have the Union Jack symbol that means you can get the instructions for buying your train tickets in English because the “I’m a dumb tourist” won’t stop you from getting fined if you travel without the proper ticket.

So what did I eat in Germany?  A lot of Schar stuff.  We get this gf-only German brand in Australia so many will recognise the yellow packaging.  Not surprisingly it is the main non-generic gf brand in Germany and has a large range (and is a lot cheaper than when imported to Australia).  They do everything; bread, cereal, pasta, cake, biscuits etc.  We also found a lot of different supermarket chains in Germany (not just the two in Aussie) and most had Schar stuff (except Aldi which is mostly home-brand only as it is in Australia).  We shopped at ReWe, Edeka, and Citti but others may have been just as good.  The home-brand gf goods were pretty good (may have been from the Schar factory for all I knew).  Prices were OK, sometimes quite cheap by gf standards (depends a lot on the AUD exchange rate of course). Food prices in Germany overall were generally a little cheaper than Australia.

In the supermarket look for the “bio” section.  I sourced gf cornflakes and muesli for breakfast.  For lunch we made our own sandwiches – there was a big choice of breads, rolls, croissants etc available gf.  We filled them with cheeses, meats (check labels but mostly gf) and salad items.  I got packs of Schar cakes (e.g. brownies) as treats.  For dinner we had pasta, rice, chicken, gf sausages (Germans like their sausages), pork steaks and salads, pretty much as we would at home.

In summary, Germany is pretty good for gf: the alphabet is the same, the language is easy to translate, good labelling, and gf items easily available in supermarkets.  There were no unexpected risks (as in Turkey where they traditionally put pasta pieces in rice).  On the cons side, we did not find (google) a lot of restaurants that specially catered for gf but many waiters spoke enough English to get by when we did eat out.