This is one of those “very winter” recipes 🙂
I managed to accidentally find here the Appenzeller cheese (a cheese with a 700 years history), which is a very good mountain cheese from Switzerland, more precisely of the Appenzell canton, so I thought that this recipe would be perfect. There are 3 types of this cheese, depending on the aging, and the best for this recipe is the Appenzeller Surchoix (aged longer it wouldn’t melt so perfectly).
The original recipe, as the name says, it’s made with a type of pasta called “hörnli” (kind of macaroni), but I think that by using one of the best pasta of Gragnano I can even improve the recipe (sorry dear Swiss neighbors 😀 ).
Another very good alternative it’s to make it with the Spätzle (in Switzerland called also Spätzli or Chnöpfli/Knöpfli), which is a very good homemade pasta, egg noodles exactly. Probably this is even better.
It’s a very simple recipe, the flavor it’s all about the good mountain cheese, and the onion rings simmered in the butter just match perfectly. And the final touch in the oven just make it perfect 🙂
Let’s see the recipe.
INGREDIENTS (2 people):
- 180 g pasta (read above), I used mix pasta from Gragnano
- 150 g Appenzeller cheese (but I’m sure it’s very good also with Fontina valdostana, Comté, Gruyère and other similar mountain cheese)
- 2 small potatoes
- 30 g butter
- half purple onion
- First of all peel the potatoes and cut them into small cubes, and boil them in salted water.
- Then take a pan, melt the butter and add the onion cut into thin slices, make rings from it. Simmer until they get softer with some color.
- Meanwhile in another pot boil the pasta “al dente”, in salted water. While it’s boiling grate the cheese.
- When everything is cooked, take an oven pan (or two smaller) and assemble the dish in this way: on the bottom some of the butter, then some pasta, some potatoes, cover with cheese. Then again pasta and potatoes, cover with cheese and top with the onion rings, and the remaining butter.
- Put in the oven (previously heated) at 200 °C, fan-assisted mode, for about 10 minutes.
- Serve it and enjoy it 🙂
And it’s very good also if you do it with homemade Spätzle, so we make Käsespätzle 🙂
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Products used:
Pasta: pasta mista corta from Pastificio Gentile
Cheese: Appenzeller Surchoix
Polenta & Baccalá 