Recipes

    Switzerland & Austria

    The mountain does the organising here, and it does it more completely than any other geography in this tour.

    Guilds and the Alps has the institutional history — the fruitière, the co-operative, and the customs rule that made Emmental enormous. Cooked, pressed alpine cheeses has the mechanism. This page is the tour, plus the single best piece of cheese science I have come across while writing this section, which happens to answer a question about my own bench.

    Why alpine cheese is the way it is

    One constraint explains nearly all of it: the milk arrives in one enormous summer flush, at altitude, a long way from anywhere, and it has to last until spring.

    Everything follows.

    Cook the curd hot. A high cook expels water, so the paste is dense and low-moisture and won’t crack or spoil over a two-year age.

    Make the wheel huge. Less surface per pound of cheese means slower moisture loss and less rind to manage. Forty to a hundred kilos is not showing off.

    Pool the milk. A Comté wheel takes something like 500 litres. No single alpine farm has that in a day, so the co-operative had to be invented before the cheese could exist — the cheese is downstream of a social technology.

    Take the herd up and bring it back. Transhumance isn’t folklore; it’s the reason the milk exists where the cheese is made, and the Alpabzug — the decorated descent in autumn — is the calendar of the whole system.

    And note what is absent: almost no soft cheese, almost no blue, almost no fresh cheese in the export tradition. You cannot ship a delicate cheese down a mountain in 1750.

    ⭐ The holes are seeded by barn dust — and the eyes are disappearing

    This is the best thing on this page, it overturns a century of textbook explanation, and it lands directly on a wheel of my own that came out with no eyes at all.

    The standard explanation: Propionibacterium freudenreichii eats residual lactate and produces CO₂; the gas collects into holes. True, and taught everywhere, including on my own cultures page.

    It is incomplete, and Swiss researchers proved it. A 2015 study by Agroscope, with EMPA (the Swiss federal materials laboratory) and Lucerne University, set out to explain why Emmental and Appenzeller had been developing fewer and smaller eyes over the decades. They challenged the century-old assumption that bacterial CO₂ is a sufficient explanation, and proposed instead that microparticles of plant origin — fragments of hay — act as nuclei that the gas bubbles form around.

    They tested it the right way. Experimental cheeses were made with powdered hay added at doses from 0.0625 mg up to 4 mg, and the wheels were followed by computed tomography across 130 days of ripening. The relationship between hay dose and eye formation was “highly significant.”

    🔴 And the explanation for the vanishing holes is the cleanliness of modern milk. In their words, the industry moved from traditional milking in the stable into buckets to closed, automated systems in separate rooms, and added fine-pored filters — which “resulted in a drastic reduction of solid microparticles in raw milk.”

    The holes in Swiss cheese were, in part, barn dust. We filtered out the barn, and the holes went with it.

    Why this matters at my bench

    I have made Swiss and got no eyes — it came out closer to a Swiss cheddar. That page carries a diagnostic list of seven causes, all of which are about whether the gas gets made: warm-room stage, culture blend, pH, salt, cook temperature, and so on.

    This is an eighth cause, and it is about something else entirely: whether the gas has anywhere to nucleate. You can do everything right, produce plenty of CO₂, and still get no round holes if there is nothing in the paste for a bubble to start on. Dissolved gas with no nucleation site does not politely wait to be noticed.

    Two honest limits before anyone reaches for the hay:

    ⚠ This was industrial Emmental made from filtered milk, at scale, with instrumented CT analysis. It is not a validated home technique, and “add hay dust to your milk” is my inference from their result, not their recommendation. Deliberately introducing unspecified plant matter into raw milk has an obvious other side to it — see sanitation and safety.

    ⚠ And I don’t know what milk I used, which is the first thing to establish. Supermarket milk has been through exactly the fine filtration the study describes. Farm milk in a bucket has not. If my Swiss was made from filtered store milk, this is a live candidate; if it was raw farm milk, it is a weaker one.

    But the reframing is the valuable part, and it is the opposite of discouraging: a wheel with no eyes may be telling you about your milk rather than your skill. That is the third time in this section that what’s in the milk has turned out to explain something everybody attributes to technique.

    ⭐ Tête de Moine, and the cheese saved by a kitchen gadget

    Tête de Moine is a small, dense, strong AOP cheese from the Bernese Jura, monastic in origin. It is not sliced. It is shaved, in a rotating cut across the top of the cylinder, into thin ruffled curls called rosettes.

    ⭐ The formula is written — Cheese, Tête de Moine-Style — including why the cylinder has to be taller than it is wide.

    That happens because in 1982, Nicolas Crevoisier invented and patented a tool for it: a spike through the cheese’s centre and a blade swung around it. He named it the girolle, after the chanterelle mushroom the shavings resemble.

    ⭐ And the tool rescued the cheese. Tête de Moine was a minor regional product; the girolle turned it into something with a performance attached, and its fortunes turned around. The physics is real, too — thin ruffled shavings expose far more surface to the air than a slice does, so the same cheese genuinely smells and tastes stronger presented this way.

    I like this because it runs against the grain of everything else on this page. Alpine cheese is a story of enormous constraints producing enormous wheels over centuries. And then a cheese gets saved in living memory by somebody inventing a better way to cut it.

    ⭐ Schabziger: a cheese specification fixed by public vote in 1463

    Schabziger — sold in America as Sap Sago, a corruption of the name — is made only in the canton of Glarus. It is a hard, pale-green, intensely pungent cone of skimmed cow’s milk flavoured with blue melilot (Trigonella caerulea), also called blue fenugreek. It’s grated rather than eaten in pieces.

    Two things make it remarkable.

    It is a skimmed-milk cheese, and it is green because of a herb. Not a mould, not a rind — a deliberate flavoured cheese in a tradition far older than the modern herb-and-garlic shelf. Reportedly first made by monks in Glarus in the 8th century.

    And its specification was laid down at a Landsgemeinde in 1463. The Landsgemeinde is the canton’s open-air assembly of all voting citizens — so the recipe for this cheese was fixed by a show of hands in a field, four and a half centuries before Roquefort’s 1925 appellation, which is usually called the first protected food.

    If you want the origin of the appellation idea, it is not 1925 in France. It is a Swiss valley voting on how its cheese must be made.

    The rest of the tour

    Le Gruyère AOP — dense, no meaningful eyes despite the cartoon, aged 5–18 months and longer. Note that Swiss Le Gruyère AOP and French Gruyère IGP are both legitimate and different cheeses.

    Emmentaler — the eyes, and the wheels made enormous partly by a 19th-century customs rule that charged duty per wheel rather than by weight.

    Appenzeller — washed with a herbal brine whose recipe is genuinely secret, which puts it across the washed-rind line as well.

    Sbrinz — aged hard enough to grate and shave; arguably Switzerland’s Parmigiano, and older than it as a type.

    L’Etivaz — cooked over an open wood fire in a copper cauldron, in mountain chalets, in summer only. The oldest surviving method in the country, and the smoke gets into the cheese.

    Berner Alpkäse and Hobelkäse — the same cheese young and then aged years to the point where it is shaved with a plane (Hobel).

    Vacherin Mont d’Or — the winter cheese, and the counterweight to everything else here: soft, made when there is too little milk for a big wheel, bound in a band of spruce bark which holds the collapsing paste together and flavours it. Eaten with a spoon, or baked in its box. The Franco-Swiss border runs through this one; the French side is Vacherin du Haut-Doubs.

    Formaggio d’Alpe Ticinese and Bündner Bergkäse — the Italian- and Romansh-speaking alps doing the same thing in their own idiom.

    Austria

    Less famous, same logic, and the Tyrol has one real oddity.

    Vorarlberger Bergkäse and Alpkäse — the Austrian arm of the alpine tradition, and excellent.

    Tiroler Graukäse — “grey cheese,” and it belongs on any list of surviving pre-rennet cheeses: skimmed sour milk, acid-set, no rennet at all, ripened from the outside in until it is grey, soft and extremely strong. Low-fat by accident of history rather than design, and eaten dressed with vinegar and onion. It is claimed by both Tyrol and South Tyrol, which is what happens when a border moves and the cheese doesn’t. See fresh cheeses for the mechanism it never left behind.

    Steirerkas (Styria) — the same sour-milk idea again, sharp and spreadable.

    Mondseer — a washed-rind from the lakes, mild by the standards of this page.

    What I’d take from here

    The alpine cheeses are the least improvisable family in the whole section — culture, temperature schedule and wheel size all have to agree, and a home kitchen can’t supply the size. That’s fine. What this region offers a home cheesemaker is not a wheel to copy but three ideas:

    Two thermal environments, not one — the warm room is the whole trick, and it’s why my converted fridge and my basement cave are more useful as a pair than as two of the same thing.

    Bark, leaves and wood are ingredients — spruce band, wood fire, chestnut leaf, tufa pit. Four regions, one idea.

    And the milk may be the variable you’re not controlling. Which, after the milk wing, I should probably have expected.

    Next: the Netherlands & Belgium — where the cheese was engineered for trade before anybody used that word.

    Sources

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