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Raclette (Melted Cheese Scraped over Potatoes)

Name: Raclette (Melted Cheese Scraped over Potatoes)
Prep time: 15 min
Cook time: 30 min
Total time: 45 min
Yield: 4 servings
Cuisine: Swiss
Ingredients: 800 g raclette cheese; 1.2 kg waxy potatoes; 150 g cornichons; 100 g pickled onions; 150 g air-dried ham; 1 tbsp coarse salt; to taste black pepper; to taste paprika

A Swiss cheese dish that is barely a recipe: the cut face of a half wheel is held under a heater and the melted layer scraped straight onto hot potatoes. Nothing is added to the cheese — no starch, no wine, no emulsifying salts — because nothing is ever held long enough to need it.

Ingredients

4servings

Cheese
raclette cheese · semi-hard washed rind; 200g a head is the measure800 g
To go with it
waxy potatoes · small, skins on1.2 kg
cornichons150 g
pickled onions100 g
air-dried ham · optional, thinly sliced150 g
Seasoning
coarse salt · for the potato water1 tbsp
black pepper · ground over each plateto taste
paprika · optionalto taste

Steps

Boil the potatoes in their skins in well-salted water for 20-25 minutes, until a skewer meets no resistance.
⏲ 25 min
Drain and keep them covered and hot. Onto a cold potato the cheese sets on the plate before you get to it.
⏲ 2 min
Prepare the cheese: for a half-wheel grill use the cut face as it is; for a tabletop machine cut 1.5cm slabs into the little pans.
⏲ 5 min
Heat the element. On a half-wheel grill set the cut face 5-10cm from it.
⏲ 5 min
Melt it. The surface goes glossy and the edge starts to sag, and that is the end of it — one to two minutes. Do not wait for it to run off by itself; by then the fat is already coming out.
⏲ 1 min 30 sec
Scrape the melted layer only, with the back of a knife, straight onto the hot potatoes. Leave the firm cheese underneath alone.
⏲ 20 sec
Grind pepper over (paprika if you like) and eat it immediately, with cornichons, pickled onions and ham.
⏲ 30 sec
For the next helping put the cheese back under the element. The face you just scraped has already cooled, so it starts from the same place the first one did.
⏲ 1 min 30 sec

Variations

The cheese: Raclette du Valais AOP is the original, but Gruyere, Fontina or Morbier — any semi-hard washed-rind cheese of about the same moisture — melt the same way.
Bread instead of potato: it works, but bread holds far less heat, so the cheese sets sooner.
With vegetables: mushrooms, courgette or sprouts, roasted. Watery vegetables weep on the plate and the liquid pools under the cheese.
What is drunk with it: kirsch or herb tea by tradition, and cold water avoided. That is a custom rather than a cooking reason.

More detail and the reasons why (1)

The tabletop machine: a row of little pans that slide under an element, each person melting their own. The same principle moved, and the usual form at home. The photograph is the half-wheel version.

Tips

Nothing is added to the cheese here. No starch, no wine acid, no emulsifying salts. The usual fix for a clumping cheese sauce is lower heat plus a little starch, which gets between the casein and stops it knitting (dairy and heat), and the answer goes in at one of three places — in the pot (fondue's starch), at the stove to a curd that has already refused (soda and egg), or in the factory, before you buy it. All three are answers that add something.

More detail and the reasons why (8)

What those three share is the assumption that the molten cheese has to survive being held, and here it is not held. A fondue pot keeps several hundred grams hot for an hour. This keeps about forty grams molten for ninety seconds and then takes them away. Casein knitting back together and fat coming out are both temperature multiplied by time, and with the time gone the problem does not arise.
The temperature is controlled by mass, not by the heat. The heat arrives from one side only and an unmelted block of cold cheese is still attached behind it, so the molten layer is a few millimetres deep and nothing below it gets there. The fix above is lower heat plus a little starch, and this dish does the heat half with geometry. Mid-aged cheese goes oily and clumpy if the heat is too high — exactly the cheese in this recipe — and this is why it does not split at that heat.
Set it beside cheese fondue and the difference is plain. Fondue tosses the cheese with cornstarch and melts it slowly over low heat. There is a pot to keep. Here there is no pot to keep.
Set against aligot, the three come apart. Against fondue, which holds cheese dispersed in a liquid, aligot knits cheese into potato starch and makes a mass. One is dipped into, the other is spooned out. Raclette is neither: not dipped into and not spooned out but scraped — and because it was never mixed with anything, what lands on the plate is still cheese.
The name is the scraping, not the melting. French racler is to scrape, with a diminutive ending on it. The action that ends the melt is the one the dish is named for, which stops looking like a coincidence once the reason above is clear.
The potatoes have to be hot. The cheese lands at 60-70C and is eaten inside a minute; a cold potato pulls it below the point where it flows. Quesadilla makes that happen on purpose — a minute takes the temperature back below the point where it flows, and the wedge holds its shape; the rest is not cooling it down, it is setting it. There it is the structure of the dish. Here it is the failure.
Melt one helping at a time. Fondue and aligot are dishes with no grace period (serving temperature). Raclette has none either, and answers it differently: it is never made in a batch. A plate is made at the moment it is eaten and the next one starts from a cooled face. So a meal can run an hour without the cheese ever having to last one.
Choose the cheese for structure rather than flavour. A long-aged hard cheese gives up its fat before it flows, and a young one like mozzarella strings onto the knife. What the scrape needs is between the two: a washed-rind semi-hard cheese in the forties for moisture.