Taste Switzerland
Schweiz / Suisse / Svizzera
Four languages, one mountain pantry: cheese, potatoes, cream, veal and chocolate, cooked with Alpine thrift.
Swiss cooking is Alpine farmhouse food refined by cities that got rich. The German-speaking cantons eat rösti, veal in cream sauce and sausage; the French west melts cheese into fondue and raclette and drinks the white wine that goes with it; Ticino cooks polenta and risotto like Lombardy next door. Cheese is the connecting thread: Gruyère, Emmentaler, Appenzeller, Sbrinz and raclette, each from its own valley. Bircher muesli is breakfast, chocolate is an industry, and portions are generous because the climate once demanded it.
5 recipes · 1 cuisine
All dishes 5
- 30 min
Cheese fondue
Käsefondue / Fondue au fromage
Gruyère and Emmentaler melted into white wine with garlic, kirsch and nutmeg, kept bubbling over a burner for bread on long forks.
Easy
- 13 hr
Rösti
Bernese potato cake: par-boiled potatoes grated coarse and fried in butter into a crisp brown disc with a soft middle.
Easy
- 35 min
Zürcher Geschnetzeltes
Zurich's sliced veal in a white wine, mushroom and cream sauce, cooked in half an hour and served only ever with rösti.
Medium
- 50 min
Raclette
Raclette cheese melted and scraped over boiled potatoes with gherkins and pickled onions, at the table over two unhurried hours.
Very easy
- 8 hr 10 min
Bircher muesli
Birchermüesli
Overnight oats the Swiss way: soaked oats stirred with yoghurt, grated apple, lemon and toasted hazelnuts. Nothing is cooked.
Very easy
Regional cuisines
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Take the Switzerland food quizFood history
Dairy farming on steep Alpine pasture made cheese the storable protein and the currency of the mountains; cheese-melting dishes come from herders using up hard ends over a fire. The potato arrived in the 18th century and became rösti, the Bern farmer's breakfast. Cities added veal, cream and French technique. The 20th century turned fondue into a national symbol through a cheese marketing board and gave the world Bircher muesli from a Zurich sanatorium. Regional dishes stayed stubbornly regional.
Common ingredients
Techniques
- melting cheese over heat
- grating and pan-crisping potatoes
- quick-sautéing veal
- cream sauces
- soaking grains overnight