swiss

A Proper Swiss Cheese Fondue

maki — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 22:14:20 +0100

Martha passed away on the 26th of December last year. When she was still healthy, we shared many a pot of cheese fondue with her during the cold winter months. Her fondue was without question, the best I’ve ever had anywhere. So in her memory, we made a proper cheese fondue.

I’ve already posted Martha’s fondue recipe 5 years ago (she was still making them then), but since it was one of the very early posts here on Just Hungry, it has no relevant picture to accompany the recipe or anything. To rectify that, here again is Martha’s proper Swiss fondue, with many photos and detailed instructions.

In Switzerland, Fondue is Cheese Fondue

Cheese fondue is a traditional Swiss dish that originated in the Alps, mainly in and around the canton of Valais (French) / Wallis (German). Contrary to popular view outside of Switzerland, it did not originate as an après-ski snack; it’s a hearty peasant dish, using ingredients that were available in the winter: cheese, wine, coarse peasant bread. And since it a traditional dish, it never went ‘out of fashion’ or ‘died out’, as you might think it did if you live in the UK or the US or any place that had the Great Fondue Craze of the ’70s, when a fondue set was a ubiquitous wedding present.

In Switzerland, ‘la fondue’ means a cheese fondue and nothing else. Other types of dip-bits-of-food-in-a-communal-pot dishes are specifically called fondue-something, e.g. fondue bourgignonne (bits of beef filet fried in a pot of oil), fondue chinoise (thin slices of beef or other things cooked in a pot of broth), and so on. (You might be surprised to know that chocolate fondue isn’t that popular in Switzerland. It may be served at touristy restaurants here, but is not a home cooking fixture by any means.)

Finally, fondue is always served as the main dish, not an appetizer or as part of a multicourse meal.

Equipment needed for a proper Swiss cheese fondue

So, what do you need for la fondue? First you need an appropriately shaped pot. The traditional shape is a fairly shallow, rounded ceramic pot with handle, like this one. The critical part is the rounded part, as we’ll see later. This is one of the two pots we have.

You also need something to keep the cheese warm. You actually cook the sauce on the stovetop, so you don’t need a tabletop burner, though you can use one on a low flame. The ideal is a spirit burner, like this one. The pot is suspended over it on the iron frame.

Finally you need fondue forks. Fondue forks are long and thin, perfect for skewering the bread. (Antique chipped hand-me-down plate is optional.)

The cheeses and other things in the sauce

The cheese sauce is usually made up of 2 or more types of cheese. A good moderately aged Gruyère (aged at least 8 to 12 months) is usually one of them, since it has such great flavor.

Another popular cheese is Emmenthaler, the stereotypical ‘Swiss cheese’ with the big holes. Emmenthaler does make the sauce very stringy and somewhat gooey, which can make it a bit hard to handle.

Martha’s preference was to use Vacherin Fribourgeois, which has a full, distinctive flavor and does not make the sauce stringy.

Her secret ingredient was one block of the ‘spreadable cheese’ that comes wrapped in foil triangles in a round cardboard box (e.g. Laughing Cow). The otherwise icky cheese helps all the cheeses melt together and stay together coherently.

The other important components in a fondue sauce are white wine and kirsch. Here in Switzerland, a young Chasselas Romand, aka Fendant, with a slight sourness is used. If you can’t get hold of such a wine, a Sauvignon Blanc will do, perhaps with a squeeze of lemon juice. And kirsch just adds that extra kick.

The bread

In Switzerland, only bread is dipped into the cheese. Any kind of bread with a sturdy crust and a fairly robust crumb is good: a decent baguette, any kind of ‘artisan’ bread. Here we used a Weizenbrot, a hearty country bread. Notice all the pieces are cut so they each have a side with crust.

I guess you could dip other things, but you will still want to have a good quantity of bread. I know people like to dip things like raw or boiled vegetables, apple or pear slices and the like (in Japan they like to dip things like boiled quail eggs, wiener sausages and chikuwa (fish sausage-like things)…), but I think that if you need vegetable crudités or fruit, they are best served alongside the fondue, and to just dip bread in the sauce. (And if you get invited to a Swiss home for fondue, you’ll only get bread in most cases.) If you are gluten-intolerant, use a gluten-free bread.

So, let’s make fondue!

Recipe: Martha’s Cheese Fondue Sauce

This amount of sauce will serve 4 people as the main course. If you only intend to have fondue as part of a bigger meal, adjust the amounts accordingly.

1 garlic clove
50ml / about 1/4 cup kirsh
2 tsp. cornstarch
400 g / a bit less than 1 lb Gruyère cheese (aged at least 8 to 12 months), shredded
400g / a bit less than 1 l Emmenthaler or Vacherin Fribourgeois cheese, shredded (Please use real Emmenthaler. A generic ‘Swiss Cheese’ will not do. Note that in Switzerland you can buy bags of pre-shredded mixed cheese called “Moitié-moitié”, meaning ‘half and half’.)
1 piece of ‘spreadable’ cheese, e.g. Laughing Cow/La Vache Qui Rit (not the mini-Babybel type, the triangular foil-wrapped soft gooey double-creme type)
3 dl / 1 1/4 US cups of young slightly sour white wine such as Chasselas or Sauvignon Blanc

Rub the inside of the fondue pot with the garlic clove. Discard the garlic. (This optional step adds a little extra flavor to the sauce.)

Dissolve the cornstarch in the kirsch. Set aside.

Put the fondue pot on a medium-heat. Add the wine and cheeses. Heat while stirring, until the cheeses melt. Add the kirsch and keep stirring until the sauce is smooth and bubbly. This takes about 20 minutes.

Now, set up your fondue pot stand and burner and transfer the pot to the stand. The burner flame (or tabletop cooker) should just be hot enough that the sauce stays how and just sort of seething on the surface. Any hotter and the cheese will burn on the bottom.

Take a piece of bread, and spear it firmly on the fork so that the crust is on the outside. You can optionally lightly dip it in kirsch at this stage.

Take your speared-bread fork and stir it around in the cheese sauce. Each person should scrape the sides and the bottom of the pot at least once with each go. This prevents the cheese sauce from sticking or burning on the sides. None of that namby-pamby dip-and-go!

Here the bread being used to scrape off the cheese bits that stick to the surface of the pot. Now you see why a rounded-sides pot is ideal; a pot with sharp angles is much harder to scrape around properly.

If you do insist on dipping other things into the sauce, you will just want to dip those lightly, but still use the bread for that stir-wipe action.

(A point of etiquette: Pull the bread off the fork with your teeth, trying not to touch the fork itself with your mouth. And absolutely no double-dipping!)

As the cheese sauce gets less and less, it will get thicker. It’s important to keep stirring-wiping. You may gradually want to lower the flame’s intensity if you can too.

When there’s just a little cheese left in the pot, turn off the heat. Keep scraping off the cheese. If you’ve done it right, you’ll just be left with a small circle of burnt on cheese, which you can carefully pry off. (Note how the pot is scraped almost clean.)

The burned bit is considered to be the final treat of a fondue. A generous cook may cut it up and share it, but a more selfish one (cough) will just pop the whole thing in her mouth.

So, there you have it. A proper Swiss cheese fondue, eaten the Swiss way.

What to drink with a fondue, and what’s for dessert

The same wine that you put into the fondue would be perfect. You could also have kirsch in shot glasses. Martha always served stron black tea, which served as a perfect palate cleanser to counteract the strong taste of the cheese sauce.

The winter fruit salad she also served as dessert (usually just whatever citrus fruits were available, like grapefruit, blood or regular orange, etc.) was a nice refreshing ending to the meal.

If you can’t use alcohol for some reason

Do remember that this sauce is properly cooked on the stovetop, not just heated through until the cheese melts, so most of the alcohol content will evaporate. Swiss kids eat fondue along with the adults and grow up to be fine upstanding citizens. If you can’t have alcohol for religious reasons and so on, this recipe is not for you I’m afraid. To satisfy your cheesy urge, try a bagna cauda - fontina cheese melted in milk. It won’t be the same though.

Zurich shopping news: Best of British store opening

maki — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 12:31:11 +0100

(This item is only of interest if you live in Switzerland, specifically in the Zürich area. Everyone else, just move along.)

The Cheese Club (previously), a mailorder purveyor of fine British and other artisanal cheeses, is teaming up with Spiffing Ales, a microbrewery specializing in British style ales, to open a Best Of British store in Thalwil, ZH. The official opening date is November 1, but they’ll be open tomorrow (Thursday Oct. 29) and Friday from 15:00 - 19:00 for a ‘practice run’. On November 1st they’ll have their grand opening from 10:00 - 19:00, and thereafter they’ll be open to the public on Wednesdays, Thursdays, Fridays and early evenings (the rest of the time they’ll be doing wholesale; consult their web sites for more info when they’re posted).

Besides cheese and beer, other British delicacies like back bacon and sausage, handmade pies, tea and biscuits, Christmas puddings and more are promised.

The address is 11 Seestrasse, 8800 Thalwil. The nearest SBB station (and parking) is at Obberieden BH, a 3 minutes walk away. Map. See also.

The Japanese 100 list finally complete, and other things

maki — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 12:58:06 +0200

It took me two whole weeks, but I have finally finished putting in descriptions and links etc. for all 100 items on the Japanese Foods to Try list. If you missed it the first time around, or found it too annoying or obscure without the descriptions (sorry)…take a look! Remember, click the ? to open up the descriptions.

Switching gears totally: for some reason, this ridiculous letter by PETA to Ben and Jerry’s has gotten into my email , Twitter, IM, etc several times yesterday and today. I had to really check the date to make sure I hadn’t been unconscious for a few months and woken up on April 1st. If indeed PETA is basing this stupid request based on an ‘innovative new idea from Switzerland’, it’s flawed to begin with since the local authorities have banned the restaurant from going ahead, for really obvious reasons, all of which are detailed in the linked article. (For what it’s worth, swissinfo is an excellent news site in several languages, run by the Swiss Broadcasting Corporation (SBC), with non-sensationalized news from around Switzerland. Every country should have such a site.)

Of course, none of the non-Swiss outlets who reported the original story about the restaurant seem to have picked up on the anti-climactic aftermath, but that’s shortsighted mainstream media for you. Most of the reactions within Switzerland to this whole thing boil down to 1. the restaurant owner probably did it for the publicity, and/or 2. it’s just a joke to start with. One comment on the Tages-Anzeiger (a one of the leading Zürich area newspapers) from someone who had been to the Storchen restaurant in Iborg sticks in my mind: he said that he’d had regular cow’s milk Zürigschnätzlets there, and it wasn’t that good, and he couldn’t see it improving much with thinner human milk! Yep, that’s dry Swiss humor for you.

Anyway, if PETA are truly serious about that letter, perhaps their female members can help to overcome one of the most obvious obstacles - how to harvest human breast milk - and donate their own. Maybe let Ben or Jerry squeeze it out themselves!

Sheesh.

A bit of Swiss milk chocolate

maki — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 12:52:08 +0200

(A quick note here. From time to time, I get an email asking if I can send Swiss chocolate bars to another country, if they pay me etc. (OK some people just email asking for chocolate without even mentioning payment, but those are easy to ignore :P) I really don’t have the time for that I’m sorry to say. Besides, I am not in Switzerland at the moment (I’m in France), and even though I go back to Zürich once a month or so, I don’t have the time to run around buying chocolate bars and mailing them out to strangers. I suggest that you google around for people who might do this kind of thing for profit. Chocolate selling ain’t my game!)

I spent the last couple of weeks surrounded by chocolate bars.

First, I sent out 53 (plus a couple…I lost count) of chocolate bars to the winner of the Menu for Hope raffle. (It was sent out so late because the recipient was away from home.) The winner had requested that the selection be made up mostly of milk chocolate bars. Now, you might think that assembling 50 + different kinds of milk chocolate would be a tough call, but not here! There are many, many more than 50 kinds of milk chocolate sold in stores here - and I’m not even including the kinds with things like nuts or fruit or whatever mixed in.

Then last week, I got the ‘bill’ from my stepfather (who is an accountant) for doing my U.S. tax return. (Yes, all U.S. citizens must file them regardless of where they live.) He wanted some Swiss chocolate - milk, of course.

Nowadays, dark chocolate is in, especially since it’s supposed to be healthy or something. I do like that intense hit of cacao now and then, but I must admit that I am a milk chocolate kind of girl. Nothing surpasses the sensation of a combination of chocolate and smooth creamm melting smoothly on the tongue.

Here in Switzerland, it’s generally believed that the chocolatiers got a bit behind on the dark chocolate craze, and have been playing catchup to the Belgians and the French. These days there are all kinds of dark chocolate varietals and such on the shelves here. But still, Switzerland does milk chocolate the best in my opinion. Sure you can get terrific handmade truffles and pralines in Paris or Bruges, and you could argue that Belgian dark chocolate is better (though I’m not sure that’s true anymore). But a plain, (relatively) inexpensive bar of milk chocolate? Swiss all the way.

Here are a few of the mostly milk chocolate bars that were sent out to the eager recipients (sorry for the iffy photos for some of them, I was in a hurry). At current exchange rates you can just about convert the francs (CHF) directly to US dollars (1 CHF = $1). Going from the least expensive on up:

M-Budget is the ‘no-label’ house brand of Migros, the leading supermarket chain in Switzerland. This full size 100g bar of chocolate is only 50 Rappen, or 50 cents! It’s not bad, quite sweet. I think the package design is quite nice too. (The cheapest not-on-sale bar of chocolate I’ve seen so far is 25 Rappen. That one is not so nice.)

Frey is another Migros house brand. This one has a Euro ‘08 (that’s soccer/football) design on it. Here’s the Frey lineup on the Migros online shop, LeShop.

This is a standard bar of milk chocolate from one of the big makers, Cailler (Nestlé), costing about 1.20 CHF. (They messed around with the packaging a couple of years ago, and had to woo the Swiss public back, but now they seem to be back on top.) A very sweet, vanilla-rich flavor.

This is a bio and free trade chocolate bar from Max Havelaar. Tastewise it’s average, but you can feel righteous eating it.

Swiss Army brand chocolate with guarana, in Survival portions (50 grams, half the size of a regular bar). Obviously aimed at the tourist trade, but nice design anyway!

Villars is a more upmarket brand, and they make terrific, creamy milk chocolate. My mother’s favorite! This is a half-size bar, but they make bigger bars too. The design is very Swiss-cliché, but we will forgive them for that.

Another Villars - milk chocolate with little bits of coffee in it! I love this one so much, it’s a good thing it’s a tad too expensive to buy every day.

Finally, this is not strictly a milk chocolate bar, but it is very creamy and very intense. It’s a house brand bar from Sprüngli, my favorite confectionery store. Made from Cru Sauvage varietal chocolate from Bolivia. The truffles are even more intense, but they go off very quickly (after a week the flavor is already rather faded), so these bars are more durable. Sprüngli online shop.

These chocolate bars are not edible. They’re actually an ad for Lindt chocolates, near the Central tram stop in Zürich.

I have often wondered what it would be like if those bars were real…

(Sidenote: For a while, I was contemplating putting up yet another blog dedicated just to Swiss chocolate. But, my waistline and my teeth told me that the necessary research would be too much for them. So I’ll just have to confine myself to the occasional chocolate outburst here.)

More chocolatey photos in my Chocolate! flickr set.
More chocolate related articles.

Whatever lame April Fools' jokes you may encounter today, there is none better than the Swiss Spaghetti Harvest

maki — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 13:51:38 +0200

Today, you will be encountering many lame (and perhaps a handful of not-lame) April Fools’ Day jokes. But there really is none better, than the Swiss Spaghetti Harvest.

I know I keep bringing it up every year on this day, but it really is that good.

Here’s a fairly acceptable YouTube version:

The attention to detail is quite good too - the boccalini used at table looks very authentically Ticinese!

Also quite funny, and very well made, is the New Jersey Spaghetti Harvest:

More spaghetti related chuckles - allegedly a banned Ikea commercial. Hmm, it’s also time for spring cleaning!

Happy April Fools’ Day!

Swiss restaurant news: blindekuh "blind eating" restaurant group owner honored

maki — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 10:03:00 +0100

A couple of years ago, I wrote about our visit to a most unusual Zürich restaurant, the blindekuh, where sighted people can experience what it’s like to dine in total darkness. Yesterday it was announced that the founder of the chain Stefan Zappa, was honored as the Swiss Social Entrepreneur of the Year.

According to the story, “The “Blind-Liecht” charitable foundation was set up in December 1998 by Zappa, a partially sighted psychologist, with help from three other blind people.”

It’s still the most unusual restaurant experience I’ve ever had. If you have a chance to visit Zürich, I’d highly recommend a visit there if you want a dinner you’ll never forget. There is a blindekuh restaurant (it seems it’s officially spelled in lowercase) in Basel also.

Swiss shopping news: Get used to happy foie gras

maki — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 18:22:38 +0100

We received a PR release the other day from LeShop, Migros’ home food delivery web site, that they are no longer going to be selling traditionally raised (with the gavage method of force-feeding) foie gras to German speaking Switzerland. This didn’t come about because of government legislation, but apparently was a decision made by Migros, following the results of customer surveys which were overwhelmingly against gavage.

Indeed if I put in my postal code (which is in German speaking Switzerland) before browsing around LeShop’s site, the traditional foie gras doesn’t even show up. Only a non-gavé version of foie gras shows up. (It looks suspiciously like liverwurst, but I’ll reserve judgement.) Non-gavé basically means that instead of being force-fed, the geese (or ducks) have been gently persuaded to feed. (Maybe they should be sat down in front of a TV with a remote control too.)

Migros is just one store, but anyone who lives in Switzerland knows how much they dominate here, so it’s quite a big deal when they stop selling something for ethical/political reasons.

It all seems a little bit silly though, since you could just go over to to French speaking (or I guess, Italian speaking) Switzerland, or even France, to get a lobe of gavé foie gras if you wanted to. (Strasbourg, which is one place known for good foie gras, is just 2 hours by train from Basel.) Non-chain comestibles stores in the area are probably going to continue to sell it for the time being too, and no word yet on what Coop will do. Besides, I wonder how many of those customers surveyed actually have had real foie gras to start with. The results of the survey cold have been influenced by a recent feature on gavage that was shown the leading consumer reports show on SF DRS, the leading Swiss German TV channel, though I’m not sure if the survey was taken before or after that show.

But I guess the decision was made, either for the sake of P.R or for genuine ethical considerations. In any case, I’m now very curious about this non-gavé foie gras, and will try it soon and report back.

I must say I am not necessarily gnashing my teeth over the foie gras issue, for selfish reasons: I like foie gras well enough, but I wouldn’t kill for it. I like it in its simplest form, poached and sliced, preferably served cold. All those fancy patés and seared foie gras and whatever…don’t do much for me. Now if we were talking about caviar or toro…

It will be a muted Christmas

maki — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 21:30:40 +0100

I realize that compared to a lot of other food blogs, I don’t get that personal on this blog most of the time. I just wanted to mention though that posting may slow down a bit for a while. I know that I’ve promised some articles such as one on pressure cooking, and I had planned some festive Christmas-y recipes and such. However, yesterday we heard that Max’s mother Martha, who is in a nursing home, has suddenly taken a turn for the worse. So, it will be a rather somber Christmas around here.

My pressure cooker actually used to belong to Martha, until she went into the home a couple of years ago. Except for replacing the rubber gasket, it’s as good as the day she bought it more than 20 years ago. She used it all the time, mainly for steaming potatoes, but for a few other things too. I hope to put those recipes up here in due course.

In the meantime, here is her authentic Swiss cheese fondue recipe, which is the absolute best I’ve ever had. A cheese fondue with crusty bread was always one of our favorite meals to have together.

Swiss food shopping news: The Cheese Club has British cheese

maki — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 19:08:08 +0100

Here’s another bit of food related shopping news for my fellow Swiss residents, expat or not. I recently got an email about a new site called The Cheese Club. They are still in pre-launch mode - the official launch is scheduled for February. One thing that makes they quite interesting is that they are run by an English and Swiss couple and will be selling British cheeses, as well as Swiss and Spanish cheeses. As far as I know, British cheeses aren’t that widely available here in Switzerland (Jelmoli has a limited selection, at least in Zürich) so this could be good news for a lot of people. (There really is no substitute for a good Stilton, for example.)

Although they haven’t officially opened yet, they are already selling a cheese tasting pack, which includes wedges of blue Stilton and Wensleydale, for 69 CHF. They guarantee delivery by December 21st. Could be a great gift for your favorite homesick Brit!

The Cheese Club

Christmas in Japan, Switzerland, elsewhere

maki — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 20:11:49 +0100

A reader emailed me asking, how people celebrate Christmas in Japan.

My answer to that would honestly be… “Not very well.”

It really has to do with the fact that there is a lack of tradition. Japan is not a Christian country, and the number of people who identify themselves as Christian is miniscule.

And even if you grow up in a Christian household, the traditions are just not there. My father’s family was unique in that they were indeed Christian (both my grandparents were Salvation Army officers, though they both worked at a Salvation Army hospital rather than…religious activities.) But did they celebrate Christmas in fancy ways? Nope.

Christmas in Japan is mostly, or maybe even all, about the decorations and the lights and the special things to eat. By which I mean mainly the ubiquitous Christmas Cake, which is just a regular decorated cake with Christmas-y flourishes. Most Christmas cakes sold at shops have strawberries on them, for the cheery red color. Strawberries in December! Not good. There’s a reason for fruit cake…in December, you mostly get dried and sugared fruits.

Above all though, Christmas in Japan means commercialism. You feel mildly or overtly pressured to buy gifts, even though you’re probably not a Christian and neither is your recipient. The Christmas gift thing gets a bit jumbled up by the tradition year-end gift called oseibo, which is sent to people you want to say thanks to, or suck up to, or generally want to be on the good side of. (In-laws, bosses, clients, and the like.)

So, in my humble opinion, Christmas in Japan sucks. The really magical part of this time of the year is just a week later, New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day.

It was only when my family moved out into the world to live in England and America, then later on when I went wandering around Europe on my own, that I experienced what Christmas could be. In my biased view, Christmas in Europe is where it’s at. (I’m not even accounting for the truly religious parts of that much, such as attending mass.) Christmas in the U.S. is indeed very colorful and cheerful and festive, but it’s also awfully commercial. You have all the Instant Traditions (doing something two years in a row is not a tradition, imho), the rash of special Xmas CDs from various hip-hop artists filling the air, the blindingly colorful holiday sweaters adorning overly ample bodies, and the commercials. Oy vay the commercials.

That is not to say of course that commercialism has not taken over in Europe too. Oh boy has it ever. But still, there are the long-running traditions that keep things grounded. Decorations tend to be a bit more restrained. The food and drink is rooted in old customs. The cold air seems to always smell faintly of spices.

I think I am lucky though: I get to enjoy Christmas, and still follow up with a Japanese style New Year’s. My build-up cynicism melts away, and I think, what a wonderful time of the year it is. It’s also a bitter-sweet time because I am so far away from most of my family. If you can spend Christmas and New Year’s with your family, wherever that might be, that is the best of all.

In no particular order, some of my favorite Christmas things (what are yours?):

Christmas dinner in England. Christmas pudding, mince pies, turkey or goose with bread sauce…
Stollen from Germany, especially Dresden
Real pannetone from Italy, especially from Milan. Once you have tasted a really good, buttery pannetone you can’t go back.
Christmas nougat in Provence, rich with honey
Glühwein, mulled wine, to warm you from head to toe as you totter around a Christmas market
In Switzerland: Wienachtsguetzli, little Christmas nibbles such as Mailander cookies, butter-sugar cookies, and Grittibänz, figure shaped breads…especially the ones from Sprüngli
Lebkuchen, spiced filled gingerbread, from Germany
Handmade Christmas stockings hanging from a mantelpiece, even if they’re empty
The way one of our local bakeries decorates their facade to look like a gingerbread house:

My favorite Christkindlmärkts: in Salzburg, Strasbourg, and Aix-en-Provence. (But if you have to do just one representative market, the crowded and rather overwhelming one in Nurenberg is the one…)
My favorite Christmas decorations: handmade balls made with lavendar and ribbons, from Provence

The best Christmas in New York, my old stomping grounds: the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center.