Wrapping Cheese - The Professional Way

© 2010 CheeseToast Inc.

Even before I worked in a cheese shop, I wanted to know how to wrap cheese...perfectly & professional.  A recent article in Culture Magazine - Wrap Like A Pro regarding this very subject arrived  with instructive pictures! 

There also is a link to formaticum the people who make great cheese paper in the US which has a video and while no professional fromager in France would ever use tape, it is worth checking their site out.   

 

Pyramids, cylinders, rounds, triangles & asymmetricals (the hardest of shapes)  -  They're all here in this great article. It is an art, one that must be practiced to be learned and perfected. So for those of you that are into precision and flawlessness, this article is your ticket.  

Comté

Since the 12th century deep in the Jura mountains where winters are long and harsh, local inhabitants have made the celebrated cheese - Comté, as a way to conserve their milk production.  Awarded its AOC in 1958, the fame of Comté, its economic importance for the area and terroir have become emblematic of the region of the Jura, parts of the Doubs and a small portion of Ain.  

Made exclusively from milk of the Montbéliard race, each cheese is awarded a score out of 20 according to overall appearance, quality of rind, internal appearance, texture and taste. Those scoring 15 or above are given green casein labels (with the characteristic image of a bell) and may be called 'Comté extra', those with 12-15 being given brown labels and simply called 'Comté'. Any cheese scoring under 3 marks for taste, or under 12 overall is prohibited from being named Comté.  Ageing is from 4 to 24 months with some famous affineurs such as Bernard Anthony holding out for the truly sublime at 36 and 48 months (with a price tag to match).

There is an incredible diversity of taste in Comté. Some are more salty than others, some are very sweet, very milky, others very rich roasted flavor, but always with subtle aromas for each bouquet. There are summer and winter Comté of course. The first is distinguished by its yellow pate and is much more intense than the second, which is pale ivory. The subtlety of flavors of a winter Comté are full of the smells of fresh hay while summer Comté is full of the scent of high meadows full of flowers and herbs.  There are six aroma families for this wonderful cheese:

Lactic : the smell of milk and various dairy products
Fruity : the smells of fruit and also of honey, and  floral odors.
Roasted empyreumatic : the word empyreumatic is from the Greek pyros meaning fire and these aromas are of caramelized, roasted milk.
Vegetal : the smells of  vegetables, fresh or dried plants, humus.
Animal : the smell related to egg yolk, leather and barnyards.
Spicy : the different smells of spices and flavours such as vanilla, nutmeg, pepper.

The nabob of food bloggers, David Lebovitz has penned two recent blogs on the making of Comté :  Comté Cheese Making and Comté Cheese Ripening and Tasting.  As always in his amusing and infectious style, he provides beautiful photographs and tons of information including how he flipped his car in the snow during his visit!  I highly recommend it as it is well worth reading.  

You can also check out the official website : Comté  In French but it has an English version. 

Ah, America! Raw Milk - The Fight Heats Up

In his recent article, Who Took My Raw Milk Cheese?, David Gumpert discussed the politics and reasons behind the FDA raids on respected cheese makers in several states.  As a journalist, he is the author of The Raw Milk Revolution: Behind America’s Emerging Battle Over Food Rights (Chelsea Green, 2009) and his blog documents the on-going battle over raw milk. 

From where I sit here in France, this is a pretty sorry story for the naissant US artisanal cheese business. France as the mother of all raw milk cheeses has it's problems too!  As recently as two years ago, big agro tried to get the EU to ban raw milk Camembert using the listeria argument. Historically however, in France these listeriosis alerts have been traced back to contamination at the source of production and in almost all cases, were from cheeses produced in industrial factories using pasturised milk.   

But here, all raw milk cheeses must comply with the health standards of European regulations concerning micro-organisms and hygiene.  According to statistics, the health risks associated with consumption of raw milk products are very limited if you compare the small number of listeriosis alerts that have occurred when compared with an annual production that exceeds more than 170,000 tonnes in France according to the researchers at the INRA (Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique (France) otherwise known as the National Institute for Agricultural Research) in Clermont-Ferrand-Theix.

In an article by Pete Kennedy from the Farmer To Consumer Legal Defense Fund, FDA's Ace in the Hole, in the last thirty-eight years, there have been no reports of illness caused by the consumption of raw milk that was attributed to Listeria monocytogenes (L-mono).  One must ask why then is the FDA all of a sudden targeting small farm producers?  Reminds me of the UK in the 1970's, and the E-coli 0157 scare.  James Aldridge's wonderful artisanal cheese Tornegus was targeted by the then public health minister Tessa Jowell because of a suspected illness and his triving business was promplty destroyed.

As in the case of James Aldridge, the American farmers are being required to destroy their cheese, thus their livelihood.  The most disturbing bit here is that the FDA is only using a test to discover the presence listeria bacteria (which by the way is on your hands at this very moment) and not the one that drills down to find the specific form and quantity. I read that in the case of the Morningland Diary, 100 swabs at the dairy found no indication of presence the bacteria; however, the FDA is not publishing their results. It is like being condemned of a crime without actual proof.

  

If you are interested in the subject of biopolitics, I highly recommend you read the research paper by Heather Paxton at Massachusetts Institute of Technology - POST-PASTEURIAN CULTURES: The Microbiopolitics of Raw-Milk Cheese in the United States, published in CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY, Vol. 23, 2008.  And further reading on the raw milk issue, you might try the Research report : Food Fears and Raw-milk Cheese by Harry G. West for the Food Studies Centre, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, 2008.

But by all means, please judge for yourself. I have been eating raw milk cheeses here in France every day for 20 years and am still alive and kicking!  Buy your cheese, raw milk or otherwise, from a quality fromagerie who source the best quality cheeses from the best producers; keep the properly and enjoy them safely.

An update : For those of you who what to keep posted on the latest developements on this story.  Two articles in the International Herald Tribune, November 19 & 20 2010...A matter of taste versus safety and As Cheesemaking Blooms, So Can Listeria both by William Neuman and there is an interesting video on the Vermont Institute for Artisan Cheese.

Update 30 November 2010 : Senate Passes Overhaul of Food Safety Regulations

Fighting that Fat! Cheese on the front line?

The other day I was surfing the web regarding weight  because in my role as a fromologue, people constantly insist that cheese is fattening and bad for you. Since I eat a vast quantity of the stuff and other dairy products, don't do that much exercise except if you consider walking to the métro in Paris, have pretty low cholesteral and am not considered even vaguely fat, I am always looking for scientific evidence to fortify my argruments as well as my personal evidence to the contrary. 

 

So imagine my glee when I stumbled across this article regarding a study from 2004 which indicates that honest to goodness real, unadulterated diary products should not be considered necessarily fattening and, to the contrary, possess a lot of benefits especially for those who are obese. According to the articles I read following the subject, "getting enough calcium in your diet seems to stimulates the body to burn more fat and reduces the amount of new fat the body makes" per Dr. Michael Zemel, a professor of nutrition at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and a pioneer in this emerging area of research on the relationship between calcium and weight management.

Whoa! Gotta love that, but what is going on here? Apparently, researchers found overweight people who consumed 3 servings a day of calcium-rich dairy lost more belly fat than those who followed a similar diet with less of the dairy servings. To further emphasize the point, they found that calcium supplements didn't work as well the real deal! According to the good doctor, a diet low in calcium appears to stimulate the production of fat-producing enzymes and decreases the activity of enzymes that break down fat. "The moral of the calcium story is to not dump dairy when you're dieting...as it can help make your weight lost efforts easier," Zemel said.  

A note of caution however as this does not give people the license to go wild and over-indulge in dairy products hoping to generate weight loss. Helas! As we have always known, there is no gain (or loss in this case!) without some pain. In otherwords, you still have to burn more calories than you take in; eating properly and doing some exercise on top of that doesn't do any harm either. Still it's nice to know that eating all those diary products, in my case my cheese addiction, isn't killing me and could actually be helping keep those love handles under control!  Here's a link to one of the articles. 

Domaines & Terroirs Updates

Back at the ranch, we have been very busy updating our site and our tours with a new home page, a sublime tour to Alsace and some short breaks in and around Paris.
 

- Alsace is home of Munster, fabulous wines, artisanal beers, fois gras  and la Cérémonie des Fromages by Bernard Antony at his käs-kaller in Vieux Ferette.

- Paris features several half day seminar/tours like visiting our favourite cheesemongers, creating a cheese board, and a trip to Rungis as well as two new trips - a day trip to Philippe Olivier's Fromagerie in Boulogne-sur-Mer and an overnight trip to la Cérémonie des Fromages by Bernard Antony in Vieux Ferette as well.
 
Have a look at Domaines & Terroirs and let us know what you think!  

"We shall not cease from exploration. And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time."  - T. S. Eliot, 1942