TODAY’S SPECIAL: RAINBOWS
The Swiss have got it right with habit of scraping sheets of melted cheese onto food
Food vendors brighten Pride with colourful cakes, bagels — even sushi,
Isn’t there an adage that goes something like: the best food is the plainest, simplest and, you know, the meltiest?
Case in point: raclette, the Swiss habit, pastime and obsession of scraping sheets of melted cheese onto anything really — toast, pickles, fried potatoes.
“Who doesn’t like melted cheese on fried potatoes?” says Daniel Mo, a restaurateur unabashed about speaking the foodie truth. My thoughts exactly. That’s why Mo, who co-owns Brampton’s J Red & Co., decided to turn raclette — which is also the name for the contraption that does the melting — into a pop up at this year’s Front Street Foods market.
Raclette Suisse, an aptly named 10foot-by-10-foot booth, is near the University Ave. entrance to this annual, sprawling open air homage to Toronto’s best, local purveyors (you know, like Tacos 101, the Rolling Pin doughnuts and Holy Chuck) which began last week. It ends in late August.
Bay St. types and passersby who ascend to this market, which is sandwiched between the towers bordering University Ave. and York St., just north of Adelaide St. W., always stop as they pass the booth. That’s because raclette is also something of a show.
Eaters can watch the cheese melting. The cut end of a half wheel of raclette, clutched by a black, metal “raclette melter,” is held inches from a searing hot broiler. It’s a mesmerizing thing to watch as the top layer bubbles and caramelizes and bunches up like a bed sheet before a staff member scrapes it with a “racler” knife onto a waiting cache of wedged, fried new potatoes ($15).
Mo figured Torontonians — with their heightened sense of foodiness — might be interested in this concept, which appears to be novel in the local cuis-scene. This booth is a temperature gauge, of sorts, he says, to see if raclette is a winner.
The concept came to him and his business partners only a few months ago, shortly after opening J Red & Co. They couldn’t believe it hadn’t yet been done locally.
After all, baked brie is popular. And raclette isn’t unlike poutine — minus the gravy. “I guess it’s sort of like a European poutine,” Mo says of his product.
Perhaps more refined. And Canada’s unofficial, official dish — fries, curd and gravy — isn’t much of a looker. Or a spectacle. Not to mention, it doesn’t have the same tantalizingly sharp smell of an imported goat’s cheese from Switzerland.
That’s the first thing that’ll draw you to Raclette Suisse — and then it’s all about the slowly browning layer of cheese, which stretches languidly over hot, garlicky potatoes. The dish comes with a light, fresh baby kale side salad. Add a sausage for ($3 extra).
The star of the show is the cheese — the darkened, bubbly bits, which teeter dangerously on the edge of burnt, are the crispiest and best. The potatoes are as if home-cooked; a bit soft around the edges, hardy and make for a yummy landing pad.
I love the way this imported goat raclette stretches and curls like a silken fondue between the tines of my fork. It’s a lunchtime luxury. Got an idea for Sourced? Email mhenry@thestar.ca.