Watching, Eating, Learning…

Since we were in a country famousfor its cheeses, we had to make our way to at least one cheese making factoryto learn how its made. Thus we made our way to a little town and found ourselves at La Maison du Gruyere to learn how cheese is made and also watch a live demonstration as well. Before entering the enclosed area where you can watch the cheese-making process, we walked through a small exhibition which taught us about what the cows eat inorder to produce the required amount of milk for cheese-making. There is also an interactive display to smell the different types of flora of the pastures and of course cheese-tasting! It was a rather small exhibit but rather fun towalk through, and then after that it was off to the enclosed area to watch the demonstration.

Where milk churns to cheese

There are only 3 people making cheese in the area that we could see and it basically requires a lot of churning and stirring. After the cheese wheels are formed, comes the aging process of cheese wheel turning. It is a back-breaking task to mature the cheese and give it the complexity we taste. It is of course all automated now but overall there’s still a fair amount of labour involved. All very interesting but one mind-blowing fact to remember - cheese-making cows eat 100kg of grass a day! That’s more than a whole human’s weight (at least for some of us) in grass!!??

Endless rows of cheese wheels

Next, we headed to the Alimentarium. This is a food museum sponsored byNestle about all things cooking, eating and digesting.

It was a pretty fun museum andthey even have cooking classes there! There was a chocolate making class when we were there but you have to sign up in advance and it was in French. It’s a pretty hands-on museum so we had a lot of fun playing with the displays. One of the better exhibitions was about digesting and we had a lot of fun tasting food and playing the various games. They also had a garden outside featuring all our favorite salad leaves and herbs.

Vegetable Garden

Just outside of the museum is Lake Geneva, the weather was beautiful so we spent some time walking around. As one of the symbols of the museum is a fork, they stuck a fork sculpture into the lake, quite a funny sight.

Anyone dropped a fork?

That’s all for Switzerland, butis that the end of the Alps? Not yet, we have yet another taller mountain to ascend!