We focus on only the very best cheese from Switzerland. And when we say best, we mean it: We exclusively supply the world-famous Sélection Beeler range from acclaimed Maître Fromager Rolf Beeler.
The Red Cow range of Sélection Rolf Beeler & other artisan cheese
Today we import the following award winning cheese:
With cheeses from our own country, you can create diverse and delicious recipes. However, if you want to put very special cheese preparations on the table, you must see what’s available in our mother continent, Europe. There you will find cheeses with a rich history and sometimes with a very surprising character. Perhaps when you consider Europe and cheese, you first think of France, the Netherlands and Italy. But Swiss cheeses are an alternative that is just as viable after all it’s arguably the birthplace of semi-hard, smear ripened cheese.
Are you organising a cheese fondue in Sydney or a cheese & beer tasting in Melbourne? If you are looking for the best Gruyere in Australia, you’ll easily find an address nearby you. If you prefer to buy cheese online, we offer an extensive selection of the best Swiss Cheeses, from the best farmers in Switzerland and carefully refined by a maître fromager/affineur who is considered one of the world’s best. A good cheese is treated with “tender love and care”.
What You Can Expect From Us Regarding Artisan Cheese
There are thousands of original recipes for Swiss cheese, but you should try our cheese pure before you head to the kitchen. For a first taste, we recommend the absolute classics:
Start with Emmentaler Swiss Cheese. The cheese is immediately recognisable by the large holes. Both the taste and the texture are buttery and mild.
Young Gruyere AOP has a creamy texture. It’s slightly sweet flavour is initially reminiscent of fruit, but then transitions to a nutty taste. If the cheese matures, the texture becomes drier and the flavour more earthy and more pronounced.
Appenzeller is the spiciest of the classic trio. It owes its flavour to the so-called “sulz,” a mixture of salt and spices.
These three cheeses alone give you a clear idea of the taste that Swiss cheeses have to offer. We offer them together in our Alpine Express’ Swiss Classics’ cheese box. Once you have tasted them attentively, you can also combine them with some additions. Our recommendation? With JimJam fig paste and a glass of Sauternes, or, if that is a bit too pricy, any other sweet wine will do as well.
Tips For Eating Swiss Cheese Brands
Bread with cheese is a tried-and-true combination. Here are our tips so you can enjoy Swiss cheeses to the fullest.
A sandwich with just a lick of real butter on it and a slice of good cheese is always a success. Preferably use Tilsiter, Vacherin Fribourgeois or Wilde Hilde because these Swiss cheese brands are relatively young and easy to slice.
All classic combinations with ham or smoked meat fit well. Make it extra fresh with a leaf of lettuce and a slice of ripe tomato.
As a purebred Australian, you might be especially curious about whether you can combine any Swiss cheeses with a Vegemite sandwich. It is not always the case. You might want to try our Cream Tilsiter. Or what does go well together with Vegemite is Brie or other white mould cheeses with a subtle aroma. If you can get your hands on it, buy a triple cream cheese like a Brillat Savarin. It is divine goodness melting in your mouth.
The first of the more special cheese is the Tête de Moine, Fromage de Bellelay. It has been around for several centuries in its homeland Switzerland, but has only been well known to us in Australia since the beginning of the 21st century. Tête de Moine immediately stands out among all other cheeses because of its small round shape. The name literally means “monk’s head”. Its texture is soft, very fine and melts in the mouth. It is not cut but traditionally scraped with a girolle or pirouette and turned into fine florets. This is how the flavour of the Tête de Moine comes to its full potential.
Sélection Beeler Hagenbuttekäse is a Rolf Beeler cheese very much worth mentioning. Also made of raw milk, like many other Swiss cheeses, it has the extra addition of dried rose hips. This creates the little red dots in the cheese and, of course, its specific flavour.
When you see the Cinderella for the first time, you might mistake it for a Roquefort or a Danish Blue. However, it is not a blue-veined cheese. The marbled pattern is created by adding salt crystals from Cyprus. These contain activated carbon. There really is no comparison, however to mind comes the French Morbier cheese, traditionally manufactured in two batches, morning and evening with a black, ash stripe in the centre.
Recipes Regarding Fondue in Melbourne
You must have tried the famous Swiss cheese fondue at least once in your life. You can buy cheese fondue ready-made, which is easy to use. Of course, you can also make fondue “from scratch”. There are hundreds of variations. See our favourite recipe for Gruyère cheese fondue.
The only thing missing in our recipes are the garnishes. They are different for us each time, but the things we almost always eat with fondue are steamed kipfler potatoes or crusty bread (no sourdough as that competes with the cheese too much), steamed broccoli florets, thick slices of cucumber, cherry tomatoes, dried ham, bresaola or other charcuterie.
The wine in the fondue does not necessarily have to be the famous Swiss Fendant. Better save that for drinking while you are fondueing. If you cannot find a Fendant, most dry white wines also go well with fondue.
Tips For Getting More Value Out of Your Red Cow Cheese
Like cheese fondue, raclette is worth exploring. However, many people prefer not to start because they do not have an appliance. Perhaps you want to buy one, but you do not know how to distinguish good quality and value for money. Therefore, it is wise to buy an appliance from us. We import the best raclette grills on electricity or gas.
In principle, for raclette, you can use any cheese you like, but you are guaranteed success with the types we offer specifically for this purpose. Whatever cheese you choose, make sure it includes the Swiss Raclette with pepper. Traditionally, you will eat raclette cheese with peeled potatoes, pearl onions and gherkins. For an extra luxurious raclette, you can also add grison meat (bresaola).
Nothing needs to stop you from adding your personal touch to the garnishes. Many people find raclette a bit heavy and like to add some vegetables. We will let you in on another secret. Buy some young stems of radicchio or any other kind of chicory. As with fondue, almost all white dry wines are suitable for drinking, but a young red wine will do as well.
Cheese fits very well as a flavouring in a salad, but it can also play the part of the main ingredient. Combine raw milk cheese with fresh vegetables or sweet fruits for the best results. Some people turn up their noses at cheese salad, but a mistake many hobby cooks make is using mayonnaise. This makes the meal far too heavy. Consider our recipe, which consists of 100g of steamed broccoli florets and 300g of Luzerner Alpkäse. Gruyere or Emmental will also go perfectly, because the Luzerner has a relatively strong flavour. We add a dressing to the cheese salad of 1 tablespoon Boursin, 1 tablespoon whipping cream or yoghurt, a chopped spring onion, a lick of mustard and some pepper. Salt is not necessary, as cheese is quite salty by itself. Pepper is allowed, spicy with white pepper or aromatic Tellicherry pepper.
You may have heard that in Europe people do not choose a sweet dessert after a meal but rather a selection of cheeses. In fact, it is not an oddity for restaurant guests to eat cheese after a sweet dessert. In France, the cheese country par excellence, it is even unimaginable not to have a cheese board afterwards. The reason for the portion of cheese at the end is not clear to everyone. The most common reason we have heard: if you were to eat the last meal of your life, it should at least include cheese. Whatever the reason, cheese is a sublime ending to a good meal. Because a cheese board consists of only a small selection of 3 to 5 pieces, you can easily add them. Served with grapes, French bread and possibly jam, it is also a bit of a sweet treat. Although it is not that common in Switzerland these days, we can recommend cheese after dinner. We encourage you to combine some French cheeses with raw cheese from Australia and Swiss Gruyere. The only exception we can imagine is if you have had a cheese meal beforehand, such as a fondue or raclette. In that case, cheese afterwards seems a bit too much of a good thing or is it?
We have already made some suggestions for wines that go well with Swiss cheeses, but there is another beverage to consider when you enjoy cheese, and that is beer. Low-fermentation beers and white beers do well with semi-hard cheeses. Mature, refined cheeses prefer the company of a high-fermentation beer. If you have some favourites at a local microbrewery, absolutely consider buying a few bottles when you order cheese from us.
The History of Swiss Cheeses
The very first cheeses in the world are said to have been Swiss-produced. Archaeological discovered pottery shards in the Urnfield pile dwellings near the Lake of Neuchatel. It is highly likely that they used these as cheese strainers. The product at the time is best compared to cottage cheese. When the Romans conquered the lands north of the Alps, they introduced methods to make hard cheeses that they could store for a long time.
Approximately 1 000 years later, Swiss cheese had become an export product loved throughout the then known world. The two world wars forced numerous Swiss farmers to close their factories, and many recipes went missing. Fortunately, in the last few decades, the product has experienced a revival, and in the 21st century, Switzerland produces more than 1 000 different cheeses. In our The Red Cow Online Cheese Shop you will find many of these cheeses. To make the most of your cheese, you need to know how to store them:
In principle, as long as you do not open the vacuum packaging of our cheese, you can store it simply like that for one to two months. However, we assume that you are curious and want to taste as soon as possible. Once unpacked, you can wrap the cheese in cheese paper, but a clean towel will also do. If you bought cheese in a wooden box, it is best to keep it there. Cling film will also do, but if the cheese stays wrapped in it too long, there is a chance it will mould.
Store the cheese in the refrigerator at a temperature of no more than 5°C. Usually this is in the middle of the fridge. There is no reason to keep cheese in your refrigerator for too long. The ripening process at the affineur is over, and you have a final product of which the quality will no longer improve. Do you have cheeses that smell quite strong? Then store them under a cheese cover suitable for a refrigerator.
If you are going to eat cheese, take it out of the refrigerator 30 minutes beforehand and let it warm up. This will allow the cheese to develop its full aroma.
Many cheeses, especially the varieties that have been aged for a longer time, show small white specks. These are not dangerous and safe to eat. It is not mould, nor is it salt. The specks are crystals that form from protein during ripening.
If you have kept cheese for a long time and it has become mouldy, you should not necessarily throw it away. The culture mould that occurs in blue-vein and white-vein cheeses is quite normal. If you notice that hard cheeses get a light velvety layer of mould, simply remove this layer. The rest of the cheese can be kept and eaten.
About The Alpine Express by The Red Cow
Tom was born and raised in Switzerland. The love of cheese is literally in his genes, as it was his mother who made him understand what a fantastic product Swiss cheese really is. He was also lucky enough to work for Rolf Beeler for a while. No, do not call Rolf Beeler “just a cheese farmer or a cheese merchant”. He is a maître fromager/affineur, and that means something completely different.
An affineur selects cheeses and allows them to mature further. Every day he checks which cheeses need to be washed or turned. He carefully controls the temperature and humidity of the environment. Because of him, the cheese refines and get their specific taste. It really used to happen that a farmer in Switzerland would not recognise his own cheese at Rolf Beeler.
So, when Tom moved to Australia in 2010, it was clear where his calling lay. One year later, The Red Cow opened, and it was not long before the first shipment of Swiss online cheese was on its way to its customers in Australia. Today, our products have found their way to many shops. Looking for raclette cheese in Australia is no problem whatsoever. Now you know how much Swiss cheeses are worth trying. Are you planning a dinner party where Swiss cheeses should play a starring role? Whether it is a fondue in Melbourne or a cheese salad in Adelaide, you can contact us. We are happy to give you all the advice you need.
