Fondue Fiasco

I had a brilliant idea to make cheese fondue for dinner last week. We love fondue and I happened to have come across a recipe for beer cheese fondue recently and wanted to try it out. I've made fondue before but haven't really found a recipe I love. I made focaccia bread to dip and we had carrots, celery and apples as well. That was the end of the good experience. The plan.

I shredded the cheese and tossed it with flour just like the recipe said. I followed the recipe to the T. What I got was a large amount of melty cheese below a layer of cheesy liquid. If I heated it enough and stirred rapidly, I could get the liquid to incorporate. At that point, I thought it had "come together" and I dished some onto plates to cool a little for the kids (we'd done this when we had our friends over recently for fondue and it worked great). When I stopped cutting apples to check the temp of the goo on the kids' plates, I discovered a solid lump of cheese. I called Steve in for council.


We agreed I should try adding a little milk (despite the fact that checking the large pot revealed that we'd returned to a state of cheese on the bottom, cheesy liquid on the top). That seemed to help enough that maybe at least the adults could eat it from the pot. I sliced some cheese for the kids' plates and we sat down. It became immediately clear that we'd be having a VERY brief window in which to eat the "fondue" before it returned to a state of a solid lump of cheese. I reheated it once in the middle of dinner to sort of make it usable, but it was so stringy when we dipped into it that we were having to wrap it around the dippers manually and then "cut it off" with our fingers. NOT optimal, appetizing, or desirable. Needless to say, the search for a good fondue recipe is still on and that one found it's way into the recycling bin.

Are there any seasoned fonduers out there who know where I went wrong?