How much cheese can one eat in Switzerland? It’s harder than you think

Sunday, 4 January 2026

The mission: eat as much cheese as possible.

The location: Le Châble, a small town in Switzerland's southern Val de Bagnes, known as the country’s “raclette capital”, which hosts an annual major cheese celebration.

The cost: 30 Swiss francs ($65) for unlimited cheese.

The catch: how much cheese can one person actually eat?

“Sometimes your eyes can be bigger than your stomach,” warns Franco Sessa, an international cheese judge and training partner with NZ’s Academy of Cheese, who is known in the industry as The Grand Gourmand.

I’ve retrospectively enlisted Sessa to try and figure out why I failed so badly at eating lots of cheese; but we’re getting ahead of ourselves here.

It had seemed a stroke of luck that my arrival in Le Châble was timed perfectly for ‘Bagnes Capitale de la Raclette’; an annual festival as part of ‘Désalpes’, the traditional homecoming where alpine farmers bring their cows down into the valley from high-altitude pastures before the onset of heavy winter snow. Everyone in the valley was serving, talking about and eating cheese - and I, too, love cheese. This all sounded promising.

Raclette, for the uninitiated, is a popular Swiss/French dish where large wheels of cheese are gently grilled, with gooey scrapings served alongside boiled potatoes and pickles - and maybe cured meats, if you’re feeling bougie.

“There is an element of richness in the meal,” explains Sessa, who grew up in neighbouring Italy and is well familiar with raclette.

“It’s very popular in alpine settings. It was a dish designed for hardworking people, not sitting at the desk as we do, during very cold times of the year. They were people with appetite, so they could definitely digest [something rich like this].”

“Hardworking” may have been a stretch for our earlier activities that Saturday, but I’d eaten lightly in anticipation - and my stomach was growling when we arrived to the sound of cow bells and a local accordion-player; the kind of quintessentially Swiss scene that would be twee if you weren’t in Switzerland. (The previous evening, a runaway cow had interrupted our alpine aperitivo, in a moment straight out of Swiss author Johanna Spyri’s Heidi.)

With more than a dozen stalls to choose from, and a ticket for unlimited cheese in hand, it was hard to know where to start: sheep’s cheese perhaps, or something from a flock of goats on a nearby hillside? Everything was hyperlocal, with the farmers themselves manning the raclette grills, and origins pinpointed to specific slopes from mountains overhead.

Our first serving did not disappoint: a generous scraping of soft, melted cheese from Alpage du Tronc - an alpine farm further up the valley run by Sébastien Sauthier and family - dished up with a single boiled potato, two pickled gherkins, and three pickled onions.

I had assumed it was important to eat the cheese with these accompaniments to get the full experience, but no, Sessa later tells me, their only real purpose is to stretch the meal: “It’s just another technique of making the food provisions go further. No more, no less.”

As we progressed, my favourite - and the only stall I revisited to buy a wheel to take away - was a goat’s cheese from nearby La Chaux; it was a treat to be hiking on the mountain the following day and have the herd pointed out to me: “That’s where your cheese came from!”

But after three plates of cheese, potato and pickles, I was starting to feel full. This did not bode well. My wine was going down a treat - but I later learned that to truly appreciate cheese, it’s best to skip the booze.

“From a social point of view, definitely you have alcohol and cheese together,” Sessa says.

“But you need to keep the alcohol completely away and separated from cheese-tasting. And the reason why, with wine and cheeses, the two flavour profiles, they complement each other, so the last thing you want is something that is altering your sensory experience of the cheeses.”

My main sensory experience by this point was a feeling of being overwhelmed. Several hours in my eating had slowed, and I was struggling to face another cheesy potato. A queasy ball settled in my stomach.

“That’s why you need to have a palate-cleanser,” reflects Sessa. “The best ones are green apples, because they have a little bit of acidity and tartiness that really works as a detergent for your mouth.”

Failing miserably, I was barely halfway to my stated goal of trying every cheese. How, I want to know, does Sessa manage on the judging circuit, where he might be trying up to 200 cheeses a day?

“Pacing is important! … You cannot swallow everything, you’ll feel sick after a while. It will affect your sensory performance. But also, you need to take frequent breaks, so you need to give your mind and your body and your palate some time to reboot.”

And crucially: “Don’t finish the pickle! Just focus on the cheese, try to go through all the options first, and then when you’ve decided which one was the best, you pick your top three, and then you go full servings with those ones.”

Alas, this advice came too late for yours truly. I had to admit defeat halfway through the raclette offerings; the bonus stalls selling polenta, churros and pancakes didn’t even get a look-in.

Sessa has some final tips for anyone who would like to give raclette a go at home, but doesn’t have the proper kit. He recommends using a cheese such as emmental, gruyere or smoked mozzarella, placed on a stainless steel or aluminium dish on the warmer tray of a barbecue.

That indirect heat is key, he says, so the cheese warms gently: “If the heat is not applied correctly, then you will start to have melting problems, which will start to cause separation, and the fats and oils will become very messy.

“While it’s heating, warming up, you’re making smashed burgers for example, take it off the warmer, and just scrape it as you go. And you will achieve exactly the same result as a raclette.”

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