According to your product link, the Size is: 0,0mm – I really wouldn’t be able to get much cheese on that now, would I?.. Does anyone have any idea what the true dimensions of this unit might be?..
Here’s how to get your cheese home.
and, as a bonus, a pretty good fanfic animation of the cheese fanatics.
Ok, MOLTEN CHEESE LAVA XTREME! is always good, but I think I’ll stick to the broiler. This looks like fun and I rarely cook for more than two, but I just can’t figure out why I should sacrifice that much kitchen space. Drat.
Simple: 'cuz you like CHEESE…
That takes me back to a sort-of-gourmet-club we had in college. I remember trying raclette with some really cheap sauvignon blanc (which everyone would drink too much of). Great stuff, but watch the quantity - I also recall that raclette has by far the highest calories per ounce of any cheese in the world!
We use a larger version of this for dinner when our out of town family is visiting. It works great for a social setting, as it gives everyone plenty of time to visit in between bites. It’s also great for varied diets, as we add meat to our options and keep one side of the raclette designated veggie for those pesky meat haters. This meal adventure is tons of fun for hanging out and catching up, but torture for my small children.
All that said, I can’t imagine going through the work, effort, and time involved in raclette for just two people. And so I will pass on the mini version.
If you’ve never had raclette, you have to try it because it may be one of the best things that ever graces your mouth.
It’s obviously better when you have it the traditional way: a fresh Raclette cheese wheel with a sizable wedge cut out. The exposed cheese in the wheel is melted and singed at a wood fire hearth and scraped off the wheel straight onto your plate with a very large sharp knife. The Swiss villagers traditionally eat it hot and melted with boiled small white potatoes, sweet pickles, and pickled shallots.
Most people like me don’t have access to the hearth or the cheese wheel, so I buy raclette cheese from any gourmet cheesery/supermarche and toast it in a toaster oven. It’s tough to get it right and tough to clean, but delicious.
If you can relate to this, then this contraption sounds like it was made for us.
Moral: buy it (and raclette cheese) - no other cheese will do it justice.
If you wish to order some French Raclette cheese, then I highly suggest iGourmet, but if you wish to hold true to the Swiss, they also offer the Switzerland Raw Milk Raclette and the Cornichons to go along with them…
Combine these items with this woot! and… oh, my!..
While people are rightfully emphasizing the cheese aspect of this, the most fun aspect is basically table top grilling. I live in Switzerland and we do this about 4 times a year.
The top part is basically a little grill. You toss stuff up on there and cook it while the cheese melts in the under part. You never put the little cheese trays on the top as shown in the picture, they always sit in that under space melting.
We usually have all the little veggies, but we also have little tiny hamburgers, bacon, sausages, and chicken.
Little baby potatoes are usually a big part of the process too.
So you melt your cheese, cook up your veggies or meat and then grab a potato, quarter it and pour the cheese over it. Fork up some whatever you grilled, and then a piece of potato with the cheese.
It is quite good.
Put down a big table cloth as the grilling is usually a little spattery if you are doing meat.
That would make perfect sense if you follow Sally, Jimmy, and Tucker’s Amerikan-ized recipes provided by your above link… my suggestion is: You need to get OUT more…
Thanks for the great info. I have a couple of questions:
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Are you using this particular raclette grill? (if that is the term for the appliance).
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What would the cooking times be for the various ingredients you mentioned above, i.e. what kind of thermal temperatures are we talking about here?
And, Oh, yeah!, how BIG is this sucka?
I love raclette - but like its cousin fondue, I think of it as more of a social food. I’d never bust it out for just me and the boyfriend. It’s also generally a hearty winter sort of thing to do; when sitting right next to the heat source, eating hot things off the grill with hot potatoes and melted cheese on top seems like just the thing to get rid of the chill.
Unless you have more space to store things than you know what to do with, I think this is a purchase to skip. If you do have lots of space and like to entertain, I might suggest a bigger raclette such as this model: t-fal
You want at least one grill pan per person. You can get raclette cheese at Trader Joes (or at least I have seen it there before.
Is this energy efficient? What’s the wattage of these things?
I have an 8 person Raclette. While I love the social and fun aspects, I’m not a fan of USA 110v power.
Even at 1800 watts, there just isn’t enough OOPH there to cook anything in a reasonable amount of time on a grill that large. I don’t mind slow, but 15 minutes per shovel is a bit extreme.
This mini one may not suffer from that problem - as long as the wattage is high enough (I couldn’t find the numbers).
The same problem comes up with deep fryers, but that’s a different woot.
I would recommend a 6 to 8 person Raclette.
For the ones that don’t know a Raclette is, this is basically a broiler that sits on your table and you melt cheese (Raclette cheese). You can put veggies, meat and other items. Once melted you pour over your potatoes. It’s absolutely delicious!!
The reason I recommend a 6 to 8 per Raclette is that this makes a perfect dinner party. Having everyone assembling their own dish and cooking in front, it’s a slow process so it gives you time to converse and have great wine.
I have an 8 person machine and it takes about 5 min per dish to cook. I do find the 115v sufficent. Eventhouh the 220v cooks better, the 115v is still good.
Can I use this with my new iPowerPro 150 Watt UltraSlim Universal Power Inverter in the car for an on the go snack?