Easy Swiss Recipes at Home: My Tested Family Favourites

Because recipes are meant to be shared, I thought the blog was the perfect place to collate our favourites. And secretly, I am excited to have a one-stop online home for my digital recipe collection.

Next time, there will be no need to search the depths of the internet to cook the bolognese that even our picky eater will enjoy.

You will find Swiss recipes we eat regularly, meals I cook just for myself and the cake that will always be baked for birthdays no matter how better other recipes we find.

This list is by no means definitive or claims 100% ethnic authenticity. But what they do represent is our tastes, our family’s food story, all my favourite recipes in one place.

Swiss Food

• Having experimented with Zopf recipes for the past few years, this is the recipe I have finally agreed is the perfect balance of soft bread and golden crust.
• Our weekend staple on the breakfast table is Bircher Müesli. After years of tweaking I’ve landed on a version the whole family actually agrees on. It’s the easiest Swiss recipe here: no cooking, you just make it the night before. Here’s my full Bircher Müesli recipe.
• My kids’ favourite Swiss dish has to be Älplermagronen, the Swiss version of mac and cheese. It’s pasta and potato cooked together, folded through with cheese and softened onions, with a spoonful of Apfelmus on the side (non-negotiable in our house). We follow the recipe from TipTopf, the Swiss high-school cooking bible every kid here learns to cook from, and it comes out perfect every time.
• And if there’s any Apfelmus left over, you can be sure it turns up a few days later alongside Ghackets mit Hörnli, seasoned Swiss minced beef with little horn-shaped pasta. It’s the kind of unfussy main meal that’s on tables all over Switzerland, and we make ours from The Club recipe.
• Chäskuchen (chäswähe/käsekuchen) or cheese quiche appears on the table of almost all of our family celebration’s and when it’s my turn to make it, I use a recipe from Helvetic Kitchen: Chäswähe and pastry.
• While not technically Swiss, rather Hungarian, you will find Gulasch Suppe on almost every mountain restaurant menu. I use the recipe from Andreas Caminada (via Gault Milau) which, is in german, But pop it through your translator programme of choice – I use DeepL. Caminada has another great soup recipe that we love too, Gersten Suppe.

European

• I loved Samin Nosrat’s “Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat” series on Netflix, and my tasted buds came alive watching her make Focaccia. Plan ahead for this recipe as the dough needs at least 12 hours to rise.
• This simple but rich (tomato-based) Bolognese pasta sauce over on my friend Andrea’s blog is the only one my picky eater approves of thanks to “no bits”.

Asian/Indian

• Whenever my kids want “noodles like in Singapore”, as they call it, I refer to this recipe for Wantan Mee and use the seasoning sauce to make however many portions as noodle eaters.
• A recent addition, thanks to a lockdown cooking club, this Biryani from Recipe Tin Eats is entirely worth the effort to make it. It is easily adaptable, too. Sometimes I skip using the yogurt and often replace the rice with cauliflower rice.
• I am obsessed with spinach and love this recipe for Saag Paneer from Caramel Tinted Life. I don’t have an instant-pot I just cook this in a regular (deep) fry pan.

The Americas

• This Kale and Chickpea Salad from my online entrepreneur hero Elise Blaha Cripe appeared daily on our lunchtime table when little Z was a baby as our AuPair back then, Christina, recently reminded me. BTW I never add the chickpeas and always massage that kale ahead of time.
• These Flour tortillas aren’t something we make regularly, but when we do, we turn it into a family affair, bake a big batch, freeze for later, resulting in flour everywhere. And for awhile, we swear never to buy store-bought again … until our stash runs out.
• Homemade fajita mix is easy to make and tastes soooo much better than store-bought. I use this recipe as a base, making my own tweaks, always make x4 the recipe and store it in a glass jar ready to use in our bi-monthly fajita lunches.
• This is one of my favourite flavour combos as a child (especially toasted with mayo), so I make a big batch of these Chicken Avocado burgers to freeze.
• While I will always remember waking up to fluffy pancakes after friends sleeping over, my kids will associate pancakes as the treat they got for dinner whenever their Papa travelled.
• The Pioneer Women was probably the first blog I ever really followed religiously, and her Chocolate sheet cake (minus the frosting) is our go-to recipe anytime we need a birthday cake. While we enjoy other (even better) chocolate cake recipes throughout the year, my kids won’t let me make anything else when their birthdays roll around.