Recently I had the opportunity to go on a press trip with Creative Tourism Austria. We spent the first day in the lovely little town of Schlierbach. I am pretty familiar with the Alpy part of Austria, and the Viennese part of Austria, but I think this was my first visit to the gently-hilly part of Upper Austria. We were assured that the landscapes and views are lovely in this part of the world, but alas, heavy fog kept us from enjoying them with our own eyes. No matter, as we found plenty to do indoors at Stift Schlierbach, a monastery full of activities that don’t require the least bit of chastity or charity.
Our first stop was the Stiftskeller restaurant for a very cheesy lunch: three types of local cheese, wrapped in breading and molten in the middle. Mmmm.
Next it was time for a tour of the monastery, which included a beautiful ornate old library, a modern art gallery, and a stained glass workshop. The tour concluded with a look at the dairy, where we were able to observe cheese-making in all its steps. Lower elevation parts of Austria, such as this one, tend to specialize in soft cheeses, while up in the mountains they produce harder cheeses (Bergkäse).
Next it was time for the main event: cheese making! Which, incidentally, is called selber käsen, a phrase that made me giggle myself silly (or, to coin a phrase, it almost caused me to cheese myself). But I digress! Before we could enter the cheese-making area, we each donned protective booties, coats, and hats, thus ensuring that all our photos of the process were extra comical.
We used big metal rackets to slice semi-solidified (thanks to cheese cultures) milk into cheese curds, and then poured the curds into little round cheese forms (it all seemed a bit familiar, thanks to lots of Sesame Street watching back in my formative years). The whey drained out, the forms were off for a dunk in the salt baths, while we were off to the next activity: cheese tasting.
You’d have thought we’d have been a bit sick of cheese by this point, but you’d be wrong. We gobbled it up while listening to a presentation about the local producers who have come together (under the label Genussland = pleasure land) to find ways to promote their artisanal, traditionally-made foods and beverages (everything from frankincense chocolate to fish salami). We finished up with some tasty local liquors – a pear schnapps and a nuss geist (which tasted like liquid ginger bread).
There was still one more stop on our little Genussland tour – we said goodbye to the monastery and headed next door to SPES Hotel Schlierbach for a chocolate tasting with a twist. We sampled several kinds of local Bachhalm chocolate while sitting in the Dunkelgenussraum, a dark restaurant similar to the Blinde Kuh in Zurich. Our waitress (a local blind woman who runs the dark restaurant) made us guess what flavors of chocolate we were tasting, and we were surprisingly bad at it. At least we could tell milk from dark.
Sounds like a cool excursion!!