Mountains of food!

As many of you know it’s been a busy summer for Alpine Ethos with numerous social functions; weddings, birthdays, camping trips and so on which has given rise to lots of opportunities to talk about what we do for a living. It seems that people are (perhaps not surprisingly) quite interested in our chalet venture compared to our previous lives working in the financial sector and often ask us about it at length. Invariably the subject turns to food; what we serve in the chalet and what the local specialities are in and around Meribel and so the inspiration for today’s blog.

Mountain regions the world over are known for their cheese production, and the Savoie is no exception. Local cheeses including beaufort and comte are used in abundance to create that ski resort favourite, the fondue. Traditionally a heated pot of cheese melted together with white wine is placed in the centre of the table and served with bread cubes for dipping and cold, cured meats and salad as accompaniments. Another traditional cheese focused dish is raclette, where a large wedge of (raclette) cheese is presented on a tray-with-heat-element contraption for you to melt the cheese and scrape it onto your plate of potatoes, gherkins, cured meat and salad – yum!

As if this wasn’t enough of a cheese-fest, another local speciality is the humble tartiflette; an oven baked dish of creamy, carbohydrate-loaded loveliness using potatoes, lardons (bacon bits), cream and reblochon cheese.

For those meat lovers, the ‘pierre chaud’ may be your dish of choice, literally a ‘hot stone’ which is brought to your table with a platter of raw meat for you to sizzle to your liking. A variation of the fondue is also found where the cheesy sauce is replaced with hot oil for you to cook strips of meat at your table.

Many of you will already have heard of the dishes described above, so onto a couple of other local plates we’ve come across. Diots de Savoie is the name of the local sausage, possibly the meatiest pork sausage you’ll ever come across which is often found on menus braised in white wine and served with crozets. Crozets are little squares of buckwheat pasta (specific to the Savoie) which are boiled then put into a dish with cream and cheese and baked before serving. It’s not unusual to order a steak in Meribel and find it served with French fries, crozets and bread for that sleep-inducing triple carb hit! We suppose the active lifestyle of the mountains justifies this Atkins-unfriendly feasting.

All this talk of food is making us hungry, time to stock up on some good old UK favourites before we head back to France....Yorkshire pudding anyone?