Tastes of Zurich with Josh Eggleton
The best way to know a place is through the food. Zurich does not immediately identify with any particular food. Since I have only ever been to Switzerland during the winter, I associate it with lots of melting cheese. I am obviously really out of touch as today, the city is home to many artisan producers and innovative chefs and is a bit of a gourmet heaven.
Recently, Josh Eggleton took a break from running his Michelin star restaurant the Pony and Trap in Chew Magna to do a food discovery trip to Zurich and Zug. While there he made some food discoveries of his own.
He found that Zurich has a trendy, casual food scene and not the stuffy banker lunches he was expecting. Europe’s first vegetarian restaurant, Hiltl is in Zurich.
Back in London, he led this cooking lesson where he shared his Zurich inspired dishes with a group of us.
For starters, he made gin cured lake trout with Turicum gin, the first ever to be made in Switzerland. This was in reflection of the river fish he encountered while in Zurich.
Inspired by the amazing cheese products and the iconic fondue dish, he recreated a cheese and mushroom fondue, a melty cheese recipe using beer, resembling a welsh rarebit. You can recreate the recipe here. It’s quite delicious.
With this, instead of a just dipping bread, we chargrilled a stack of spring onions, fennel, long stem broccoli which surprisingly worked really well. Josh was inspired by Chef Chris Züger cooking with open fires on “fire rings” at FOOD ZURICH.
The team brought over some Swiss wine from around the Zurich to have with the meal. We had a delicious white and a red Swiss wine. Unfortunately, they produce so little that most of the wine is consumed there, not enough to export. So that’s another excuse to visit Zurich to taste it for yourself.
For pudding he served his Zug inspired Cherry mascarpone cream Kirsch brandy snap. Zug is famed for its cherry products and making Kirsch and the Kirsch cake, the Zuger Kirschtorte. This dessert was his homage to that heritage.
Having tasted the flavours of Zurich today there is obviously much to discover, I am keen to go and explore more for myself. I hear that spring time is a good time and it might even be “warm” enough to have a swim in the River Limmat by then. Or maybe arrange a trip to FOOD ZURICH, their annual food festival.
To read more about Josh’s trip to Zurich, read more here. To arrange your own gourmet adventure, get more tips for the Visit Zurich website.
EatCookExplore was a guest of Visit Zurich and Great British Chefs
