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July 21st, 2008
10:07 am - France 2008: Last Day -- Comte
I need to finish this today because I leave for Chicago tomorrow for the American Cheese Society conference and it’ll be at least a week until my next entry. Besides, when I get back I’ll have the conference to write about. Those entries will have more text and less pics so tell your browsers not to worry. France is more picture worthy than a bunch of cheese people sitting around talking about cheese.
The last day of my French cheese tour was all about the big cheese. We were in the Jura, home of Comte. Next to Emmenthal, Comte is one of the heaviest cheeses out there. Generally fatter than Swiss Gruyere, Comte wheels are 80-100 lbs. of dense, wide, hard-to-handle cheese.
All hail the Comte maker!
Gruyere and Comte (often called Gruyere de Comte) are basically the same cheese, just made on different sides of the border. A similar ages, the Comte tends to be more moist, buttery and often nuttier. The Swiss Gruyere tends to be sharper, firmer and more pungent and onion-y. Both the Swiss and the French will point to these differences as symbolic of character flaws of the people across the border. But you, you don’t have to choose. You can love them both.
Comte is an awesome cheese, great for any kind of cooking and also good to snack on right off the block. If you don’t know it, and your budget will allow it, substitute it or mix it in with mozzarella in any recipe. Mmmmmmm. And with potatoes? Double mmmmmmm.
Comte is also awesome because of its name control protections. It must be made with cooperative milk. Villages all have small cheese making facilities called fruitieries where all the milk from the area goes so that they can make such big wheels of cheese. The one I visited only makes about 12-15 wheels a day. The name control also limits the amount of cheese individual fruitieres can make, keeping large scale international agri-business out of the picture so far.
After the cheeses age a week or two they are transferred to a centralized aging facility. The one I visited was in a rehabbed military fort that Napolean designed to keep the people who brine Gruyere on their side of the border. Fort Des Rousses was decommissioned when France stopped compulsory military service and is now the home of 50,000 or so wheels of Comte.
It’s a lot of Comte
First we went to the fruitiere to watch the cheese getting made.
( Ever wondered what rennet looks like? )
Here’s some baby Comte, about a week old, still at the Fruitiere. Look at the bend!
Fort des Rousses is one of the main places where the Comte is aged
( See, it really was a fort! (and many other pics) )
I was lucky to quickly get out my camera and snap this picture. He you can clearly see the difference between the color of cheese from the Summer where the cows are grazing (yellow) and the winter where they are not (white). It’s all yummy, but the yellower the better (all other things being equal)
Mostly, we saw and tasted a lot of Comte. Look at all of it!
50,000! And there are trying to expand capacity.
That’s a lot of Comte. I didn't want to leave the cave. I didn't want to leave France. Of course as soon as we boarded our plane in Geneva the Swiss woman sitting next to us was appalled we hadn't visited any Swiss Gruyere producers. "It's so much better than Comte. Comte is too mild. It's ok for children, I guess," she said. At least she didn't get into the brining issue.
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09:15 am - France 2008: The last day. Jura
The last two nights of our trip were the only days we spent in the same hotel. The Hotel Arbez is half in France and half in Switzerland and it may have been my favorite place to stay. They let us watch (France fail miserably in) the Euro Cup, they let us have a birthday party for on of our group, and they didn’t seem to mind that we got really, really drunk.
Check it out. This place was worth the nausea-inducing ride to get there!
( Look, here’s the border )
I slept in Switzerland.
French/Swiss unity! (Don’t bring up the issue of hand-salting vs. brining Gruyere)
Our last meal: Morbiflette
It looks awesome but it was actually the worst meal we had in France. It was at a rustic inn that we had to hike into and it seemed like it would be awesome. However, it was filled with loud French bikers and the waiter had a mental breakdown while we were there which including screaming and throwing plates. I think it would have been even more frightening if I spoke French.
Or maybe not. Maybe he was just embarrassed, as a Frenchman, about the Euro Cup.
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July 19th, 2008
09:12 am - Chicago
Hey, no promises whatsoever... but anyone out there live in Chicago and love cheese? I sometimes end up with extra Festival of Cheese tickets at the cheese conference and hate to see them go to waste. If it happens it will likely be last minute notice but it would be be for Saturday 7/26 at the American Cheese Society Conference
It's basically a tasting of 1200 or so cheese made in North America. Here's an example from last year .
Must not be scared by crowds.
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July 17th, 2008
09:22 am - France 2008: Day Seven, stopping briefly in the town of Morbier
You know I love stuff like this
So I had to stop and pretend to take a bite.
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July 14th, 2008
12:17 pm - France 2008: Day Six -- Cheese "cave" interlude
After eating frog legs, the rest of the group wanted to go to the hotel (bar) so Molly Mc40 and I got a special tour of the Tournette aging “caves”. Like most “caves” this was a well-designed, temperature-controlled warehouse in an industrial park.
( It was here that we got to see our first cheese-flipping robot. )
Look at all the Tomme de Abondance! I love this underrated cheese!
Lots of Gruyere de Savoie too!
Cheese is just so damn pretty!
So let’s try some!
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July 9th, 2008
06:19 am - France 2008: Day Six -- Food prOn
Typical mid-day Degustation
Amusingly enough, they made a big deal out of us tasting the real Reblochon and the Fleur des Alpes, a US-legal pasteurized version. They had us taste them both and whisper into the ear of a French person. Clearly they were hoping to fool us. No luck. Every single one of us guessed which was which.
And here was our lunch. We knew they had something planned when they wouldn’t tell us what we were eating. It wasn’t that hard to figure out though.
Sandwiches were in here!
Mystery food!
Greens!
Mousse in tilty cup!
Carnage!
Need another hint
Did any of you folks read “Plop” as children? I think the story I remember was called “The Gourmet”. If you know it, you’ll know why I couldn’t get it out of my head as I ate.
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July 8th, 2008
09:33 am - France 2008: Day Six -- Gruyere de Savoie
Besides Tome des Bauges, the same cheese plant also makes Gruyere de Savoie. Well, they can’t call it that anymore due to “Gruyere” name control reasons, but these are still a traditional Savoie thing, 80-90 lb. alpine monster cheeses shaped more like Beaufort than Comte.
These are some hot and steamy photos! All proteolytic action!
Curd shower!
Hot curd waterfall steamy group action!
Fresh Gruyere de Savoie
Fresh gruyeres
It’s getting hott in here!
We’ll have aging cave photos later! Just hold on. Because those are the real cheese pr0n money shots!
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08:47 am - France 2008: Day Six -- Bathroom photo supplement
If you've known me a long time, you know that I think understanding toilets are a clear view into understanding a culture. What do we make of these then:
When I walked into this bathroom I assumed the window must be tinted or something. No way you could see from the outside, right? Ha. At least it wasn't on a busy street.
This is universal even without the words, eh?. Still, translation needed!
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July 7th, 2008
12:18 pm - France 2008: Day Six -- Savoie
Our next stop on the French cheese tour was the Savoie. Probably best known for Tomme de Savoie, it’s a beautiful part of France full of Mountains and lushness and the happy cows that California mostly just pretends to have. I do think there’s a limit to our abilities to measure the happiness of dairy animals, but if cows can be said to be happy, then wandering around with a few friends in big grassy fields an awesome mountain views should qualify.
After a nausea-inducing fast ride through the mountains we arrived at La Tournette. This is the house that the Sales Manager grew up in. It’s a cheese factory now, but after the tour, he showed us where the kitchen used to be and where he lived. Nice place to grow up, eh?
Tomme de Savoie is a much asked-for cheese at our store, but one which has a problem getting here in good condition. It shouldn’t, mind you, because it is a cheese built to be able to withstand some temp and transit issues, but many distributors buy too much, and demand isn’t quite high enough (at least in the Bay Area) so I try to buy fresh stock until it seems old and then not carry it while the distributor sells off that batch. Like Cantal, Tomme de Savoie gets fishy when it’s old.
Tome des Bauges is a relatively newly name-controlled cheese, similar looking to Tomme de Savoie and from the same general area but with a fattier, bigger flavor. Raw milk, made in copper vats, from local breeds of cows that pasture all summer… Good stuff. The best thing is that right now no one is distributing it here so when I special order it, I know my batch will be in good shape. It also has less makers and stricter controls than Tomme de Savoie, so hopefully there will be less variation between producers. If you feel like scrolling down and downloading a PDF, there’s an interesting case study on the action farmers and producers took to make Tome des Bauges a protected designation cheese here.
Tome des Bauges
Copper vats! (corrected)
( clicky clicky for a lot more pics including me flipping cheese and the steps in cheese production! )
Aging and furry!
Current Music: Rosie Flores -- "Don't let our love die"
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July 3rd, 2008
09:36 am - Thanks!
Hey, I haven't had a chance to individually thank everyone, but I really appreciate all the congratulations you folks gave me for the book deal. It really means a lot to me.
More France trip next week, I promise.
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June 30th, 2008
10:24 am - I have a big announcement to make…
My book Cheesemonger: (really clever subtitle goes here) will be published in April 2009 by Macadam/Cage. Memoir, food politics, and cheese, oh yeah.
Yes, I have been keeping this a secret writing project for the most part. But if you wondered why I haven’t visited your city in awhile or why my LJ appearances have been sporadic over the last two years, well, I was writing a book.
I will give you plenty of chances to buy it when it’s closer to the release date and might hit you up to crash on your couch if I’m reading in your town, but for now I just wanted to let you all know. This book germinated from some things I originally did for LJ so most of all I just wanted to say thanks for paying attention to a random blog on the internet! Ha! Whoo-hoo! Heeeeeee.
*Many people helped me with this (my co-workers for inspiring me and covering for me, a number of friends who gave input on particular sections, ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) beelavender for introducing me to my agent, smallstages for massive editing help...), but over a year ago nihilistic_kid gave me some really good input on the first 50 pages or so. Nick is trying to fund a move across country right now so if you’re a writer working on a project, and you want some reality-based professional criticism, you should check out Uncle Nick's Crazy-Ass Critique Service!. Fast and honest!
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June 26th, 2008
09:37 am - BTW
Because of Pride weekend activities (Pride is gonna be extra huge this year with all the folks coming to get married) and lots of work, the last couple of days of France entries probably won't appear until next week. Just fyi.
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08:27 am - France 2008: Day Five --Drive to Aix-Les-Bains
Our last really long drive was from Roquefort to Aix-les-Bains. We amused ourselves in the car by playing that game where someone names a celebrity (say Brillat Savarin) then the next person names another celebrity whose first name starts with the same letter as the first celebrity’s last name (in this case “S”). We played for about 6 hours.
The only memorable part of this is that when someone said, “Vanessa Williams” Molly, a true grown-in-the–East-Bay-hip-hop kid, yelled out, with a moment’s hesitation,
“Vanessa with the singing career or the X-rated video queen?” (Know what I mean?)
Aix-les-Bains is a spa town and we stayed in our only real fancy-schmancy hotel. Unfortunately the indoor pool closed just after we got there and besides eating, we weren’t there very long.
Long enough for food porn though!
Reblochon ravioli
ocean fish and lake fish unity
my neighbor’s lobster (at this point in the trip we were all sharing everything!)
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June 25th, 2008
06:37 am - France 2008: Day Five -- Roquefort photo supplement
Just pictures today. They are too good not to share!
In France, Even “wear a hairnet” signs are hott:
The local custom of brining Roquefort in a local stream*
What cave would be complete without a tasting room?
It’s not really a family-run business if there aren’t kids’ drawings somewhere:
Here’s Gabriel and me:
*it’s a fountain at the Coulet factory not real cheese. Duh.
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June 24th, 2008
07:59 am - France 2008: Day Five -- Roquefort
It’s corny but true that since my early days of cheese selling, fourteen-ish years ago, I’ve always wanted to visit the Roquefort caves. It’s one of the great symbols of cheese. Natural caves, indigenous mold, accidental discovery, the wonder that someone would be the first to put something like blue cheese in their mouths… it’s all there.
It’s also a symbol for American blue cheese makers. I have heard many the (apocryphal) story about someone’s granddad going to the Roquefort caves and stealing the culture off the walls so that they could bring the secret ingredient home. Now one buys their Penicilium Roqueferti from a culture house, but the romance lives on.
Roquefort was France’s first name-controlled cheese, i.e. in such a cheese-centric culture as France, it was recognized that the name Roquefort was so special that it had to be protected from imitators. It developed in relative isolation in a valley with natural caves and “fleurine”, crevices that let the caves breathe, yet not so much that the caves would be sensitive to temperature changes from weather. They are perfect environments for cheese aging, the reason why so many people will lie to consumers about their caaaaaaaaves in today’s dynamic retail environment.
We visited the Gabriel Coulet Roquefort* factory and cave.
Gabriel cuts an imposing figure on the Roquefort landscape:
Coulet is my favorite Roquefort. It’s aged longer than other Roqueforts and, the “Petit Cave” at least, has bluing all the way to the rind. They are also still a family business owned by the family that still lives right above the cave. Currently they’re on their 5th generation and raising a 6th.
( See? )
Here are some caves:
( and a spooky empty cave )
( Here’s a whole lot of aging Roquefort )
Every wheel is cut and graded. Some of the best never leaves Roquefort. The best of what is sold to outsiders is the “Petit Cave” brand that has the orange label (and which is the one we sell). Here’s a Petit Cave Roquefort chosen because of its bluing right up to the rind
Here’s the packaging difference. Only about 1/3 made is Petit Cave.
( and lastly, here’s Molly and me in front of mural where I stupidly forgot to hold up my wine glass. )
Then we went to lunch where I neglected to take pictures on my food but did get a shot of the Roquefort tasting. How many kinds of Roquefort can you count?
After our tour we got to go upstairs, drink champagne and sing happy birthday to one of the owner’s sons. Awwwww.
*I find badly translated websites tres endearing. “The fourth generation… knew how to conquest over the years the hart and the papillae of lovers of Roquefort from France and abroad expanding strongly sales in the world.
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June 23rd, 2008
10:42 am - Joan Jett next week
Someone told me it had sold out, and I had been spreading that news, but it appears to not be true. There are still tickets to see Joan Jett at the Marin County Fair July 2.
Go here: http://www.ticketmaster.com/event/1C0040AFF3AF3F2A
Hey Cyclofiend, are you going?
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09:41 am - France 2008: Day Four supplement
Here I was in France in June 2008, 40 years after a general strike that almost took down the French government. Paris ’68 is, like the Spanish Revolution of 1936, an important moment for anarchist study, at least to those of us who grew up when the USSR still existed. It was another time when Stalinists actively worked to defeat more revolutionary organizations.* Certainly there are fair criticisms of whether the events in Paris constituted a revolutionary moment, but it sure was something. Student strikes and arrests led to wildcat strikes by workers. Paris was shut down. Degaulle and the Communist Party eventually collaborated on a plebiscite that ended the striking.**
In college, a now semi-famous friend of mine had to watch a movie for class about the Events of May. She had missed the class where it was shown so she arranged a screening in a University movie lab where she invited all of her activist friends. We watched another documentary first called “The Riotmakers”, a clumsy right wing scare film about Civil Rights activists who would come to your door armed with facts and figures. When we watched the documentary we were primed, cheering the Molotovs and barricades, and booing the police and Stalinists.
We were exhausted when the lights came on. It was then we noticed that another person from our friend’s class had shown up to watch the movie also. He said timidly, but with a good sense of humor, “I guess I’m the only Gaullist in the room.”
I saw a few signs of commemoration of May 1968 but perhaps my timing was off. The most notable being a banner somewhere near Nantes that said, “1968: Social Movement. 2008: Social Death” but not much else.
I tried asking our tour guides but, while they are all very nice, they are all 20-somethings with MBAs. While they, rightly, think certain things in the USA are national embarrassments (lack of healthcare, homelessness etc.) and those things would mark them, as lefty in the US scheme of things, they don’t have much interest in the revolutionary social movements of the ‘60s. In fact, they seemed to find it a little embarrassing when I asked about it.
This was especially apparent when I tried to ask about Jose Bove. Probably its partly because they are used to being mocked about French politics by Americans. Partly it’s because some blame Bove for the high price of Roquefort due to American retaliation. Our guide said, she “appreciated his goals but not his methods”. I said, “Without his methods, I would never have heard about the issues.”
We let it drop. Obviously she was not one of the half million who voted for him for President.
I wanted to spend more time in the “hippie region” of France, but it would probably be best to do that tour with anarchists or political farmers, not MBAs.
*Of course slogans like, “Please leave the Communist Party as clean on leaving as you would like to find it on entering” probably didn’t help endear the Stalinists to the strikers. Nor did “Worker: You are 25, but your union is from the last century.”
**That’s the quick version. Of course it’s more complicated.
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07:13 am - France 2008: Day Four, Raspes (on the way to Roquefort)
Our longest travel day of the trip was from Paris to Roquefort. It could have been much longer though. I could not believe how far Paris was from Montpellier was when I looked at the map.
I mean, look at this. 764 km traveled by train in 3.5 hours.
( Luckily we had wine )
From there we drove another ways to Raspes, a small town right near Roquefort. That was supposed to be a 1.5-hour drive but there was some kind of village festival involving a bull that delayed us an hour or so.
( Luckily we had wine )
Near Roquefort, we started seeing anti-GMO signs on the farms and our tour guide informed us (not in these exact words) that we were in the hippie area of France. This is not only the region of Roquefort but also the region of Jose Bove. Bove is not allowed in the U.S. because of his politics, and his role in the dismantling of a McDonalds that was about to open in France. Bove is a sheep farmer as well as an activist, selling his milk to Roquefort producers as well as making his own cheese.
I tried to find out which Roquefort company he sells his milk to (or indeed, if he still does) but my tour guides weren’t as big Bove fans as I was. The McDonalds dismantling was part of a campaign against France accepting US beef because of the use of hormones by American cattle farmers. This lead to a retaliatory tariff on Roquefort cheese, one of the reasons it’s so expensive in the US these days. I don’t have much hope for the scale of change we will see with President Obama, but maybe he can fix that.
We arrived in Raspes which is just about the cutest French village you can imagine. We had 15 minutes to settle in and then met with the owner of Gabriel Coulet Roquefort for dinner. I know you’ve wanted more food porn, so here it is.
Salad (highlight: puff pastry with Roquefort-based filling!):
Lamb (heh, we’re in sheep country. bah.):
Dessert (omg I love dessert):
Afterwards we were so full we walked through the town for an hour. Evidently in July and August it’s a huge tourist destination, but tonight we had it pretty much to ourselves.
Raspes at night:
Raspes in the morning:
The cuteness!
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June 22nd, 2008
01:19 pm - Ditty Bops at Redwood Hill Farm!
Ha! Thanks sarahshevett!
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June 21st, 2008
07:26 am - Any Questions?
Curd Hammock:
Kirk Hammett:
You don’t have to choose one; you can love both.
Current Music: Conflict (U.S.) -- "Last Hour"
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