Gourmet Cheese

Cheese Fondue - Hot and Tangy
Michalis 'BIG Mike' Kotzakolios


Defined Tag: Cheese Fondue.

Cheese Fondue, that delightfully hot sauce that you dip bread and vegetables into for a party style treat was actually invented by the Swiss because of difficult times. In the winter when food was harder to come by, the Swiss discovered that you could take old hard cheese and refresh it by heating it up. It was making stale food usable instead of garbage. They added a little spicing and some cheap local wines. Mixing it all up they realized they had a nice warm treat. At the same time they used stale bread and discovered how well that went with their hot cheese concoction. Fruit and vegetables were tried with the same enjoyable outcome.

Each area of Switzerland had their very own recipe for cheese fondue depending on the type of cheese used in that region. In Geneva they used Gruyere, Emmental and Walliser Bergkase. While in Eastern Switzerland it was the flavors of Appenzeller and Vacherin cheese that were used with a little dry cider to give it that zingy taste. Other areas use a variety of cheeses all with the same goal; to serve a tangy hot cheese fondue to be used for communal dipping.

When serving a cheese fondue remember to try to have everything laid out for ease of use. Buying a proper fondue set is probably a good idea as it will include the skewers, a sufficiently large pot on a stand that can have on one level the simmering pot and below that hold whatever you are using to keep it warm. A variety of things to dunk are always nice. The usual, of course, is bread chunks. Any bread is good, but something a little heavier is better like rye or pumpernickel.

Fondues have come a long way in the last fifty years from the introduction of these hot tangy ones, to fondues used with beef broths to desert fondues where fresh fruits were dipped into hot chocolate sauces.

You enter the room where the cheese fondue is simmering and you smell that tangy cheese. Then you put the skewer into it with a piece of bread on the end, slowly pulling it out, watching the cheese drip back into the pot before you take it out to taste it. At that moment you know that of all the possible choices, cheese fondue is by far the most satisfying of tastes.

BIG Mike is a well known author, developer and Adsense expert as well as the owner of Niche Maniacs - a unique Adsense Marketing System designed to build long-term passive income streams from Adsense, Amazon, YPN, Chitika and other PPC services.