Potatoes are our ingredient of the season. You can find our full archive of potato posts here.

Today we’re sharing one of our favorite winter dinners : raclette.

If you haven’t heard of raclette, don’t fret; it’s not a common meal in America. Read on below as we introduce you to the perfect meal for a snowy day. And if you think we’re crazy sharing a “wintry” meal at the end of April, just know that it’s snowing in the mountains of Colorado this weekend!

Raclette

Raclette is both a cheese and a dish. It’s a semi-hard French cheese made from cow’s milk. It melts well, and that’s how it’s used in the Swiss dish called Raclette.

To make raclette, the cheese is heated, and the melted layer is scraped onto a diner’s plate. It is commonly served with boiled potatoes, gherkins, pickled onions, and a cured meat, such as prosciutto.

Raclette cheese can be found in speciality cheese shops and in many grocery stores with a good cheese counter. It is a bit pricey, but worth it for a special meal.

If you go out to a restaurant for raclette in Switzerland or France, you’ll commonly see a large machine that’s warming the open side of a huge wheel of the raclette cheese. Since buying a wheel of cheese doesn’t make sense for a single meal at home, table-top raclette machines are often used. This is the exact raclette machine that we own.

If you can’t fathom investing in a machine just for melting cheese, I can only speak from personal experience and say that we used ours regularly during the winter months. We use it at home, especially when guests are in town (especially, when they have to suffer through a spring snowstorm). We also like to take ours along for our ski weekends. Raclette makes a great group meal when you’re staying in a condo and don’t want to do a lot of cooking.

Using the table-top machine is fun for a group dinner because everyone gets to manage their own cheese, so no one person has to man the cheese.

Here’s how it works:

• make a platter for the table with a spread of sliced cheeses, prosciutto, gherkins, boiled small potatoes, and any other sides
• places slices of cheese into the raclette machine trays, which are warmed by a heating coil
• once the cheese has melted, pour it over a plate containing the a selection of the small potatoes, prosciutto, and gherkins
• make what we call “combo bites” by picking up bits of the food on your plate with the melted cheese
• melt more cheese…

Even though raclette cheese in the most commonly melted cheese for this meal, we like to add other cheese options to our platter. Most of the time it’s a good cheddar, but we’ll try whatever odds and ends we have in the fridge. Each cheese melted differently, for example, the oil in cheddar separates more from the solids, but we love it just the same.

Raclette is definitely best served on a snowy day. Boiling a big pot of water for the potatoes steams up the kitchen (and the windows), making the house feel extra cozy. Then everyone sits around the table to a enjoy a meal that’s unique and requires more time than a traditional plated dinner.

How could you not be in a good mood with snow falling outside and everyone filling their bellies with melted cheese inside?