bircher müesli

I have a husband who doesn't tend to get too excited about food. There are a few things however that get him all worked up, like cheeseburgers from Alt n' Bachs in Madison, tacos from La Taqueria in San Francisco, my very own pumpkin chocolate chip cookies, turkish green beans (served warm if possible), and Swiss bircher müesli. Oh yes, of course, he loves tons of other foods, but he doesn't really tend to rave about things. Again, except bircher muesli. So on my recent trip to Switzerland, aside from procuring him 2-3 bowls of the stuff a day, I got a real live Swiss person to explain to me how to do it. This week for our sunday brunch, we made our first attempt. Result? Success!

The first step was to find a decent mix of muesli to start with. I didn't want to go through the trouble of making my own, but all the ones I found that said Authentic Swiss on them had raisins. Sorry, there were no raisins in any of the 50 bowls of muesli we had there. So I went to my trusty organic fair trade health food store and picked up this mix of wheat flakes, barley flakes, oat flakes, rye flakes and rice flakes.


Perfect. Toss half the bag (about 250 g) in a bowl and drown it in whole milk, then dump 250 g of greek yogurt on top and drizzle the whole thing with honey.


In addition you'll need one apple, grated roughly,


tossed into the mix.


And two bananas, sliced to bits,


At this point the milk was all soaked up so I tossed a bit more in, maybe too much, will try less next time. Meanwhile husband was meticulously washing the berries (he's the meticulousest). We used raspberries, strawberries, blueberries and red currants to start.


Chop the berries, some super finely so they are almost a puree, and some in bigger toothier chunks.


Stir.


Then wait. And wait and wait and wait. And when you can't stand it anymore, serve in two beautiful bowls, and devour.


The result that morning was pretty good. Which we were happy with for our first attempt. But we both deemed it too milky and not flavorful enough. So later that day we bought another box of raspberries, a box of blackberries, and some raw sunflower seeds. I chopped the berries really fine again into a mushy mess and stirred them in and we got a lovely deep purpley pink color, (the blackberries I think are key), and a much richer flavor. Once I tossed in a few handfuls of sunflower seeds, it added a nice earthy dimension to it, and that, combined with the extra berries and the 10 more hours it sat in the fridge, resulted in damn good muesli. This morning the last of it disappeared, and yes, I think it was even better. We have no pictures of the new and improved version, because it vanished so quickly, but it was gorgeous. So, lessons learned: use less milk, be prepared to spend over 20 euros on berries, and make it the night before. You can bet we'll having bircher müesli pretty often now.