Passport & Plate - Traditional Swiss Fondue
Switzerland | Friday, March 6, 2015 | 5 photos
Ingredients
- 1 loaf of a crusty bread - something like a baguette is ideal
- 5/8 cup of a dry white wine
- 1 large clove of garlic
- 1/2 lb of Swiss cheese
- 1 tablespoon flour
- dash salt
- dash nutmeg
- dash cayenne pepper
You can vary this by your selection of the wine and the type of Swiss cheese that you decide to use. Many recipes suggest, instead of a single block of Swiss cheese, using half Gruyère cheese (which typically has more flavor) and half Emmental (which generally is easier to melt). If you’re able to find both of these, and you’re willing to spend a bit of cash on cheese, this can be wonderful. If your supermarket is like mine, and it’s more difficult to find any good Swiss cheese, you may only be able to find one of those types, or you may be stuck with only finding a generic Swiss or baby Swiss cheese. Any of those options will work, but if you buy the cheapest block of generic Swiss cheese you can find, the resulting fondue probably won’t have enough flavor to really be interesting. If at all possible, try to use Gruyère for part of your cheese.
What sort of cheese you select will also impact what sort of wine that you’ll want to use. Although any dry white wine will be fine, Chardonnay seems to match the fondue better if you’re using Gruyère - both the wine and the cheese are strong enough that they can stand up to each other. If the cheese combination you’re using has a bit less flavor - if you’re using only baby Swiss, for example - then maybe a dry Riesling would be better, or perhaps a California Sauvignon blanc. If you try to serve this with a big oaky Chardonnay, the cheese is likely to be overwhelmed.
Picking the right kind of bread is also important - you’re going to want something that has a crisp crust that won’t collapse when you dip it into melted cheese. Baguettes are ideal.
How to prepare this recipeFirst, we’re going to cube the bread: get yourself a sharp serrated knife and cut the baguette into disks about 3/4 of an inch thick, and then cut the disks into several pieces. The exact number of cubes isn’t terribly important - however, the end goal is for each one of the resulting pieces of bread to have part of the crust still attached to it. Avoid, if at all possible, cutting a piece out of the center of the loaf. After you’ve cubed all the bread, you can set it to the side.
Next, we’re going to grate the cheese: whatever flat or box grater you’ve got around the kitchen will be fine. As you’re grating the cheese, add the flour and gently toss the cheese and the flour together.
When all the cheese is grated, add a dash of salt, nutmeg, and cayenne pepper to the cheese and flour mixture. Don’t add too much - we’ll add more at the end after tasting it.
Pour 5/8 of a cup of the white wine into the fondue pot. As long as you’ve opened the bottle of wine, now is a great time to pour a glass of wine for yourself and anyone else that’s hanging around the kitchen.
Put your clove of garlic though a garlic press, or dice it - however you typically chop garlic in your kitchen will be fine. I usually grate it, since I’ve already got a cheese grater out, but this is only works will if you’re using grater that is fairly fine.
Put the garlic into the wine in the fondue pot, and turn it on - depending on your fondue pot, probably “Warm” or “Low” is the right setting to use, here. We’re looking for the lowest setting at which the wine will boil. Keep turning it up, gradually, until the wine starts to boil and then stop.
Stir in the cheese, a handful at a time - stir it and let it melt before adding another handful, and continue this until you’re out of cheese.
Taste the result, and the add more salt, nutmeg, or cayenne if necessary. Look for a balance of the spiciness from the cayenne and garlic, the flavor of the nutmeg, and the nuttiness of the Swiss cheese.
The story behind this recipeI grew up in a conservative family in Alabama, and although I grew up enjoying my mom’s cooking, we as a family would not have been considered to be any sort of culinary adventurers. The only forays into what I thought of as “ethnic food” came from the local takeout Chinese restaurant or occasionally Taco Bell, and wine or beer was never a part of our family at all.
This changed dramatically when my parents took a tour of Europe, and came back drinking wine. They had been to France and Switzerland, and came back talking about fondue, French food, and restaurants where a glass of wine was less expensive than a Coca-Cola. They blew the dust off of an old fondue set that a long since forgotten friend had given them for their wedding, and set about trying to recreate what I later learned was Neuchâteloiser fondue. At the time that they introduced me to this, I had not encountered fondue before, and it was a revelation: this was my first encounter with wine, and it was the first food that I ever enjoyed that tasted unlike everything else that I liked. It was also the first food that I was interested in enough to learn to make myself, and I’ve since realized that early success with a simple fondue is one of the main reasons that I’m so enthusiastic about food and travel now.
This isn’t a complicated recipe - it’s basically a deconstructed cheese sandwich - but the simplicity of it is a large part of the appeal. It’s easy enough that anyone with a bit of patience can make a passable version of it the first time, but there’s also a large amount of variety to be had. Years after I first ran across this, I’m still trying this recipe anytime I find it in a new place, I’m still making it, and I’m still using it to try new kinds of wine and cheese. There are meals that I’ve made that are better, more complicated, or more impressive, but for a meal that forces everyone to slow down and interact with each other, this is about as good as it gets.
