The Cheese Board (36 page)

Gruyère is made from unpasteurized milk that comes from cows fed on hay, either from mountain pastures or from hay cut and stored for winter use. The herds are not treated with hormones or antibiotics. It is possible to taste the sweetness of the hay and mountain flowers in the final product. The evening’s milk is delivered to the cheese dairy, where it is held in two thousand-liter copper vats at slightly below room temperature. The morning’s milking is added to the vats.

A starter culture is added to the vats of milk. This bacterial culture is grown in-house on the whey produced from the cheese-making process. Calf rennet is then added, causing the milk to curdle over a period of thirty minutes. In the last three to five minutes of this process, the milk separates into yellowish whey floating on top and whiter curds clinging together beneath the surface in a gelatinous mass. The curd is almost ready to be cut.

Using a combination of experience and instinct, the cheese maker must determine the precise moment to commence the cutting of the curd; a mistake in timing even of one minute will result in an inferior final cheese. To cut the curd, metal cheese rakes that resemble gigantic egg slicers are drawn through the vat until the curd is the size of grains of wheat. This procedure takes about ten minutes. Cutting the curd allows the whey to drain more readily. Generally, the finer the curd is cut, the firmer the final product will be.

The temperature of the curd is then raised to 131°F over a period of forty-five minutes to achieve the classic dense, smooth texture of Gruyère. At this juncture, the cheese maker decides if the curds are the proper dryness; when sufficiently dry, the curd is pumped through stainless steel tubes into the waiting forms.

The curd is pumped into a two-level form made of a stainless steel bottom section and a high-sided plastic top. When enough whey has drained off that the curd is at the level of the stainless steel section, the plastic top is removed. The cheese is then marked with the dairy number, date, and mold number, which allows quality and production count to be accurately controlled.

The cheese maker transfers the wheel to the press and begins the pressing to expel even more whey. Over the next two and a half hours, the pressure will increase to over two thousand pounds over the surface of the wheel. The cheese remains in the press for twenty hours.

The wheels are removed from the presses and put on a rack; the entire rack is then submerged in a brine bath for twenty hours. Half of the final amount of salt in the cheese is absorbed during this brining stage.

The cheese is placed on spruce wood shelving and turned and rubbed with salt water daily for ten days. The daily washings and turnings are then slowly decreased to once weekly. At three months of age, the wheel is transported to a finishing house to be aged for a minimum of five months, at which point it is cored and tested for flavor. The cheese is then either held for further aging or sold at this stage.

Considered an aphrodisiac by Casanova and written about by Pliny, Roquefort is still delighting blue-cheese lovers today. This cheese has a pronouncedly blue flavor overlying the sweetly delicate flavor of the sheep’s milk it is produced from. It is always aged in the natural caves of the
causses
(plateaus) in the
département
of Aveyron, which provide the optimal climate for the
Penicillium roqueforti
that produces the blue veins running through the buttery interior.

Following centuries of tradition, Roquefort is made from unpasteurized sheep’s milk produced in the Au-vergne and Rouergue regions. The milk is produced by a special breed of sheep called Lacaune that are specially adapted to the dry climate and rocky terrain.
AOC regulations
restrict their feed to natural fodder in the form of pasturage or fresh-cut hay. The milk is transported to the cheese-
making facility, where it is tested for quality and heated to 80°F.

The milk is then curdled with lamb’s rennet (some dairies use the less-expensive calf’s rennet). The mixture is allowed to stand for two hours, then the curd is cut and stirred to release the whey. The curd is allowed to drain on cloth-lined flat wicker baskets. The curds are then hand ladled into perforated draining forms.

The
Penicillium roqueforti
that produces the blue veining in the finished cheese is grown on enormous loaves of bread—made of rye and wheat grown nearby in Lévezou—specially baked for this purpose. The loaves are allowed to sit for over two months in the same caves that the cheese will later ripen in, to become thoroughly colonized by mold. If determined by their appearance to contain the correct mold, the loaves are dried and ground into powder. This powder is then either mixed with the milk when the rennet is added or folded in by hand as the curds are ladled into the cheese forms.

The cheese sits for two weeks in a draining room, where the forms are turned frequently (up to six times the first day) and kept at 65°F. They are then dated, marked, and transported to the caves.

Coring the cheese

The Roquefort caves have been used to age cheese for over one thousand years. The massive series of aging caves are under Combalou, the plateau near the town of Roquefort-sur-Soulzon. They are the unique product of geology and the presence of man. In some places, the caves are eleven stories deep, and they cover an area twice the size of the town of Roquefort-sur-Soulzon. The wheels of cheese are naturally cooled (with some adjustments) by chimneys, called
fleurines,
that connect the caves to the outside and allow a steady breeze for cooling and humidity control, keeping the interior climate at 90 to 95 percent humidity and below 47°F.

Once the cheeses are transported to the caves, they are salted with a fine dry sea salt in the salting chambers. First the top and the bottom of the cheeses are salted, then salt is applied around the sides. The cheeses are pierced with needles to allow air to reach the interior of the cheese. This promotes the growth of the mold that produces the characteristic blue veins; if you examine a slice of Roquefort you will notice the streaks of blue that surround the needling marks. The cheeses are turned three times daily during this period.

After two to three weeks in the caves, a natural crust begins to form on the outside of the cheese. This layer is scraped off and the cheeses are resalted and wrapped in foil. The wrapped cheeses are held at a temperature of 40°F for a minimum of three months. At this point, the Roquefort is ready to be sold.

Soft (but not runny) and fragrant, Taleggio is a washed-rind cheese with a winey, sweet flavor. This cheese was served at the papal coronation banquet of Pope Clement VI in 1344 and at the wedding feast of Francesco Sforza in 1441. Originally called Stracchino, it was given the name it currently bears in the early twentieth century. It is made in its traditional production area of the Val Taleggio, near Bergamo, as well as in other provinces in the Italian Alps, the Veneto, and the Lombardy plain. Taleggio arrives in our store as a ten-inch square stamped with its distinctive emblem of four circles and wrapped with several layers of paper. Like all soft-ripened cheeses, it ripens from the outside in. The surface of the cheese is supple and pink and somewhat sticky, while the interior is creamy and sometimes doted with small holes. The raw-milk version has a firmer center and a more flowery flavor than does pasteurized Taleggio.

While Taleggio can be made from either raw or pasteurized milk, today most Taleggio is made from pasteurized whole cow’s milk. When made in the traditional manner, the morning milk is added to the ripened evening milk. The milk is heated in cauldrons or vats to 86° to 96°F.

The starter culture is added to the heated milk, followed by liquid calf’s rennet. After about fifteen minutes, the curds begin to form.

The curd is broken into small pieces and allowed to rest for ten to fifteen minutes. At this point, the curd is stirred and crumbled into ¾-inch pieces.

After resting again for a period of five minutes, the curd is poured into bottomless square forms placed on mats and allowed to drain.

The molds are placed in warm (75°F), humid rooms and turned repeatedly to expel whey and assist the ripening of the cheese. Depending on the acidity of the curd and the characteristics of the milk, this step takes between eight and twenty-four hours.

The cheeses are salted either by immersion in a brine bath for eight to ten hours or by hand salting them with repeated applications of dry salt.

The cheeses are moved to ripening rooms or, in the case of one-third of the Taleggios made today, to the natural caves of the Valsassina where the temperature is kept to a low 39° to 42°F. The caves, like the Roquefort caves, have fissures in them that allow for the entrance of the
soffioni
(the mountain breezes) and maintain an ambient humidity of at least 90 percent. During the thirty- to forty-day maturation period, the cheeses are frequently turned and washed with applications of salt water, which encourages the traditional pink mold to cover the cheese.

Cheese is a living food that changes almost daily, so the best way to select cheese is by tasting it. At the Cheese Board, we hand the customer a taste on a slip of waxed paper. The customer can see the whole cheese in front of them, notice the interior and exterior
condition, smell the cheese as well as taste it, and ask questions of their clerk. We find that many of our customers are not confident in their own palate and want to rely on us for cheese recommendations. While we enjoy giving recommendations, we encourage you to trust your own palate, using our recommendations as a complement to your own experimentation in developing a list of favorite cheeses.

Start by finding a market or cheese shop that has a good variety of domestic and imported cheeses, and asking the clerks to give you samples. You might also encourage the shop to lay out a table with different cheeses to be sampled each week. Once you find such a place, and clerks who make good recommendations, develop a relationship with them and explore the cheese world with their guidance.

If you don’t have a vendor who is willing to let you taste a cheese before you buy it, then you will have to rely on the look, smell, and feel of the cheese.

The
appearance of cheese tells a lot about it; its outward condition, outer rind, and color are just a few of the clues. The exterior of a soft-ripened cheese such as Brie or Camembert should be supple and soft, not sunken or slimy. Cheese grows mold, and many will have amazing-looking molds growing on the outside. In the case of an aged goat cheese, the brainlike spiraling mold is a healthy sign of proper aging. Aged cheese can also have very funky-looking rinds. The rind on a
Tomme de Savoie, a raw-cow’s-milk cheese from France, is crusty, like someone left it under a rock for years; but the inside will have a golden
pâte
(the interior part of the cheese, also known as the
paste
or
pasta
) with tiny, even holes throughout. Such a rind protects the interior ripening during the aging process, and in many cases the rind is essential to the growth of the bacteria needed to properly age the cheese. For example, the rinds of cheeses rubbed with salt, or washed with brines, wine, or beer (known as
washed-rind cheeses
), create a suitable environment for specific bacteria to grow on the outside. The microbes then penetrate to the interior of the cheese, giving the cheese its strong, deep taste—such as in the case of
Fournols, a more powerful
cousin of Chaumes. Some microbial growths, however, are not desirable; pink or yellow mold on a fresh cheese like Ricotta, for example, is a sign of spoilage. Cheese should always be free of mold on the cut surface.

The pâte of a cheese is another important visual indicator. Aging a cheese—which so enhances the flavor and
texture of such varieties as Swiss Gruyère and Emmental; Italian Parmigiano-Reggiano and domestic Parmesan; Asiago; and Dutch Gouda—often results in crunchy bits of crystallized whey that
appear as whitish spots in the interior of the cheese. These spots are a unique characteristic of the pâte of some aged cheeses. Soft-ripened cheeses, such as a
Reblochon, a raw-cow’s-milk cheese from Savoie, should have a pâte that looks moist, smooth, and luxurious. No pâte should appear grayish brown, which indicates that the rind has eaten too far into the interior, usually resulting in a bitter taste.