Gruyère--January 7, 2007

My co-work, Amélie, and I are obsessed with cheese. She is French, so her love for cheese is understandable. Me, on the other hand, I am not sure where I get the constant desire to chomp on fromage at any time of day.

One day at work while we both were eating cheese with our lunch, we decided to plan a trip to Gruyère, the town where the cheese hails.

Exploring our options with how to get there, the train was ridicously over-priced and a car rental would not have been necessarily worth it. We turned to option number 3, genevaonline.ch, the Geneva online networking community. Amélie posted a little blub about wanting to go to Gruyère, and about an hour later her phone rang. It was a nice sounding guy, Gregorie, who offered to drive the 3 of us (Jaren, Amélie and Steve) to the cheese capital of Switzerland.

Sunday morning rolled up hard and fast, but with cheese as our dangling carrot we were motivated to get going. Gregorie picked all 3 of us up and we were on our way. After some small talk, we later find out that Gregorie was a former tourguide in Switzerland. He took us on the back roads through Vaud's vineyards, showed us where famous people live (or lived) and talked about Swiss culture and history.

Before we knew it, we were at the Gruyère cheese factory.

At la maison de la Gruyère, we took a tour of the dairy and learned why Gruyère is, how do it put it, so damn delicious.



In short, it soley depends on when and what the cow eats. The cheese actually has several different flavors and colors.

For example, if Cherry, the cow, ate flowers in the summertime her milk and therefore cheese would taste different than her milk in the winter when she is fed hey.



Left to right: salé (salted), mi-salé (slightly salted), and doux (soft) . Can you see the difference in color (and texture)?

We also caught a special treat: real life cheese making by fire.




After learning how to make the cheese, it was time to TASTE it. We headed up the hill to the medevil town of Gruyère. This is mainstreet.

Gregorie took us on a stroll through old town, down the hill to the church, up and around the castle to one of his favorite restaurants, Le chalet de Gruyère.




LEFT: The castle. CENTER: beautiful landscape. RIGHT: Steve, Jaren and Gregorie





At the restaurant, the 4 of us dined on raclette and fondue made with the local cheese.

But we were not done eating. Dessert was next on the agenda.We went to another local restaurant where were had "double-crème" made from local Gruyère cream with fresh rasberries and meraugine. Here is Amélie enjoying the delicious dessert...

By this time, we stuffed ourselves to the rim. Nothing but dairy was in us (this day would have been a lactards nightmare). I ate so much cheese, I didn't eat anyfor several days.

For more pictures of our cheese fest, click HERE