Swiss Cheeses
There are surprisingly few things in the world named after Switzerland: a knife, a watch - and a hole in cheese. The holey slice from the cartoons is simply called Swiss cheese, and back home we say that a law or an excuse is "as full of holes as Emmentaler". But anyone expecting a country riddled with holey cheese is in for a shock at the cheese counter: Gruyère, Appenzeller and Sbrinz don't have a single eye between them.
Swiss cheeses are mostly hard and semi-hard cheeses made from raw cow's milk and aged for months or years - and out of the whole family, only Emmentaler really has the famous holes. Swiss cuisine is home to dozens of them; this article walks you through nine, from the world-famous ones to those that never leave home.
Emmentaler and Gruyère: The Dethroned King and His Conqueror
Emmentaler takes its name from the valley of the river Emme in the canton of Bern, where it has been made since the 13th century. The wheel is an impressive thing - it usually weighs around a hundred kilos - and no cheesemaker cuts those eyes into it: the holes in Emmentaler are blown by bacteria that release carbon dioxide into the paste as it ages. The flavor is sweetish and nutty, and it grows more pronounced with age. Abroad this is by far the best-known Swiss cheese - and at the same time the one slipping fastest out of Swiss hands. Emmentaler is now made in Germany, Austria, France and Finland, and in 2025 the European Union definitively refused to grant the name protected origin status: as far as it is concerned, this is a generic type of cheese, not Swiss property. At home it is protected, but it has no way of policing labels in the rest of the world.
Gruyère is its exact opposite: smooth, dense, without a single eye - and sitting on the throne right now. While Emmentaler production has been falling for decades, Gruyère is today the most produced and the most exported Swiss cheese. It is named after the little town of Gruyères in the canton of Fribourg, where cheese was already being made up in the mountains in the Middle Ages. The best way to get to know it is to compare it at different ages: young, it is springy, milky and nutty, while older wheels firm up and grow more pungent until, after more than a year, they crunch with salt crystals. One practical tip: buy the same cheese at two ages and taste them side by side - there is no faster crash course in cheese flavor. Meanwhile the name is being fought over: an American court ruled in 2023 that gruyere is a generic word and any cheese can use it, and just across the border in the Jura its close relatives Comté and Beaufort are aging, the pride of French cheeses.
A Secret Brine and a Cheese from a Town That No Longer Exists
Appenzeller from Appenzell in eastern Switzerland owes its peppery bite to a bath: as the wheels age, their rind is washed every two days with an herbal brine called Sulz - water with yeast, salt and more than twenty herbs steeped in alcohol. Supposedly only two people know the exact recipe, and it sits in a safe; scientific attempts to crack it have never got past guesswork. The legal side is juicy too: despite its geographical-sounding name, Appenzeller has no state protection of origin at all - it is a private trademark of the producers' association, with quotas and rules of its own. It is sold in three strengths, from the mild Classic up to Extra, which locals like to pair with apple cider or a decent wine.
Tilsiter is, by Swiss standards, a newcomer with the wildest pedigree of all. The recipe was created in the middle of the 19th century by Swiss emigrants from the Emmental in the East Prussian town of Tilsit - they were aiming for Emmentaler, but with different milk and in a damper climate they ended up with a suppler cheese dotted with small holes. In 1893 cheesemakers brought the recipe back to the canton of Thurgau and made it a local staple. It is named after a town that no longer exists: after the war Tilsit became the Russian Sovetsk. And just like Appenzeller, the Swiss Tilsiter is legally only a trademark - the name itself is unprotected, so you will run into tilsiter in Germany and Denmark as well, only squarer and milder.
Raclette, Fondue and the Cheeses That Melt
Raclette is the only cheese here named after a gesture: the French racler means to scrape, and scraping is exactly what you do with it. Herdsmen in the canton of Valais used to heat half a wheel by the fire and scrape the melted layer onto bread and potatoes; the dish only got its official name in 1874, until then it was simply fromage rôti, roasted cheese. Protected Raclette du Valais may come only from Valais, but raclette as a type of melting cheese is made just about everywhere these days - including the Savoy side of France, whose version is finer and creamier. The plate calls for potatoes in their skins, pickled onions and cornichons; the one mistake you can make with raclette is rushing it - overheated cheese turns bitter.
The two softest characters are the vacherins. Vacherin Fribourgeois is a semi-hard cheese from the canton of Fribourg, and without it there would be no moitié-moitié fondue - "half and half", meaning half Gruyère, half Vacherin, the only acceptable ratio as far as purists are concerned; you drink white with it, ideally one of the Swiss wines. Vacherin Mont-d'Or, on the other hand, is a soft winter cheese sold in a spruce box, without which it would run all over the table, and you eat it with a spoon or baked right in it. Until the 1990s the Swiss and the French in the Jura mountains made it in practically the same way; what split them was hygiene, not politics - after two outbreaks in the 1980s Switzerland brought in compulsory heat treatment of the milk, France stayed with raw, and ever since they have been two cheeses with two protected designations.
Sbrinz, L'Etivaz and the Cheeses You Don't Slice
Don't try to cut Sbrinz with a knife - it can't be done and there is no point. This extra-hard cheese from the inner Swiss cantons around Lucerne gets broken into irregular shards with a short spike, or shaved and grated; it is the cheese that the grated stuff from the school canteen dreams of becoming when it grows up. People call it the Swiss parmesan, yet it is its own thing, and commercially perhaps the older of the two: as early as around 1530, porters were hauling it by mule over the Alpine passes into Italy and trading it for salt and wine. Where the name comes from nobody knows for certain - the usual candidate is the village of Brienz, which the caravans passed through, but there are theories about a Lombard dialect too.
L'Etivaz is proof that even a cheese can emigrate from its own family. It is made only in summer in the mountain dairies of the Pays-d'Enhaut, exclusively over a wood fire in a copper cauldron - and it is a breakaway branch of Gruyère: when Gruyère production moved down to the valley dairies in the 1930s, a handful of mountain cheesemakers rebelled, founded a cooperative and kept the old method for themselves. The reward came more than sixty years later: L'Etivaz became the very first Swiss product with a protected designation of origin. The least known cheese here is officially the oldest. And there is one more stubborn character to add to the list, one that gets shaved into rosettes instead of sliced: Tête de Moine, which already has a whole article to itself here.
Four Cheeses on One Plate
I did my tasting in Switzerland my own way: buy, slice, lay it all out side by side. Four of them made it onto the plate - Tilsiter, Appenzeller, Gruyère and Emmentaler. Emmentaler, the only one with holes, was the mildest of them, springy and sweetish; Gruyère denser and saltier, the flavor that stays on your tongue the longest; Appenzeller had the most punch of all - you can taste that herbal rind; Tilsiter played peacemaker in the middle. What fascinates me is that the Swiss get all of this out of one single ingredient, out of ordinary milk. I didn't declare a winner, though. My favorite doesn't get sliced, so it never made it onto the plate at all: Tête de Moine plays in a league of its own.
