Cheese: An experience
Take two at an essay
“I think I would like to marry a cheese maker. I bet that they would make great husbands.” A close friend made this off-hand comment one day while we were discussing the local Walla Walla Farmer’s Market and some of its highlights. This particular comment was made in reference to a particularly positive experience my friend had with some samples of cheese from a local fromagerie by the name of Monteillet. In addition to making me laugh, her comment got me thinking about cheese and about the power of cheese. While, “the power of cheese” could easily mean the particularly pungent aroma of a good blue cheese, I had something more profound in mind.
Cheese has a tendency to be a very polarizing food group. Part of this comes from the diversity of cheese (and cheese-like products) available. If you were raised on Kraft Singles, anything with more character than rubber might be offensive. The trend towards mass production, while making cheese readily available, has done much to destroy its diversity and complexity. As mass consumers, we like our products predictable and homogenous. Uniqueness and character can be a put off, in my experience, especially when it comes to cheese. Part of this comes from the very nature of cheese. Normally, the sight of blue-green, fuzzy penicillium mold growing on something in your fridge is cause for alarm and excuse for the offending product to end up in the trash. However, particular strains of this mold are essential to the very nature of blue cheeses. In the context of such ignorance and mistrust, there is a lot of room for one to learn, and there are many discoveries to be made with an open mind and an open stomach.
But how to begin? Knowledge and understanding of food cannot be one-sided. Yes, I could research cheese on the internet or at the library. I could become an expert in the various processes by which one makes cheese, how it’s aged, the chemistry and biology involved, or I could try to memorize the encyclopedic diversity of cheeses made around the world. However, the beauty of a food isn’t in its science; it’s in the emotional response it elicits in the person eating it, and so, to learn something about cheese, my exploration needed to be centered on the experience of different kinds of cheeses.
On the advice of a friend, I headed to a restaurant in Walla Walla, to speak with a woman recommended to me by a friend. Immediately, she sat me down with a book and went to prepare a cheese plate for me to work my way through. The book was Cheese: a Connoisseur’s Guide to the World’s Best by Max McCalman and David Gibbons. This was reassuring. To be honest I went with less of an idea about how to learn about cheese first hand than I had about how to go about wine tasting or fine cabinetry. Her advice was to skim the book so that I would have a base with which to understand the gustatory experience I was about to undertake. Cheese contains information about the process of making cheese and how to taste and store different cheeses, in addition to an extensive list of different varieties from around the world with tasting notes, and I was constantly comparing my thoughts and observations with what was written.
Before I knew it, the proprietress had returned with plates: one a fresh baguette and the other with six different cheeses of all shapes and sizes surrounding a stack of pear slices. Her first piece of advice was to do my sampling in order. The order with which one eats one’s cheese is important, and she had arranged my experience in increasing order of “strength.” In order, my first foray into fine cheeses went like this:
1. An aged goat cheese from France
2. A Pecorino-style, wine-washed rind cheese from Italy
3. A Garroxta – a goats milk cheese from Spain
4. An Italian cheese made from buffalos milk
5. A Valdeón, another Spanish cheese; this time a blue that is wrapped in chestnut leaves
6. A Roquefort – a sheeps milk blue
All of these cheeses come from Europe; Hannah prefers European cheeses with the exception of Monteillet, and I am inclined to agree. One of the reasons I undertook this project is because I wanted to experience the diversity of cheese that is out there. The cheeses available at U.S. supermarkets are a neutered selection of the whole, offering muted flavors meant to appease the masses, and I wanted to escape this. As the proprietress says, “American manufacturers have lost the art or story of cheese making. We don’t have that same culture [as Europe].” So, armed with McCalman and Gibbons, I dug in.
I started at the beginning: the chevre from France. Already, I was learning terminology and an approach to cheese. Physically, it is easy to break a cheese into two parts: the paste and the rind. The rind is often lost in mass-manufactured cheeses with the notable exception of brie. The other half is the paste. This is the interior and what one thinks of when he or she thinks of eating cheese. For this chevre, what I am taking to be the rind was a pleasant off-white and soft, about the consistency of the paste of brie. The paste of the chevre, however was firmer, drier; the inverse of what I would have expected. McCalman and Gibbons recommend a step-wise approach to cheese tasting, and I tried to follow their advice. Before tasting, it is important to take in the physicality of a cheese. This includes the appearance of the cheese, its physical texture (yes, I poked my cheese before eating it), and, most importantly, its smell. We can only taste sweet, salty, bitter, acid, and rich/umami. The rest of what is normally referred to as “taste” or “flavor” is all volatile aromatics that we actually smell when eating food.
Suffice it to say, I was chomping at the bit to actually sink my teeth into some of these cheeses. I took a small piece of the chevre, intending to come back around for a second evaluation later. The flavor built slowly. This is called the attack, how the flavor evolves. This cheese, like many I sampled that day, had an incredibly complex flavor. Not only was there the temporal component of the attack, and also the finish, but there were layers of flavors, different tasting notes. Supermarket cheese doesn’t take your senses on this kind of journey. There was a tartness that I detected immediately; it was sour, but in a good way. The richness of the cheese allowed it to melt in my mouth, and, I think, also conveyed some of the sense of depth I tasted. However, my favorite characteristic of this cheese, and of most goat cheeses, was the earthy or maybe “farm-iness” of the cheese. What I had only caught glimpses of in other goat cheeses, this one had in spades; it was like I could taste the udder (in a good way, of course).
Moving clockwise around the plate brought me to the wine-washed Italian cheese. The most distinctive aspect of this cheese is the deep red rind, almost the color of dried blood. Wine, in this case red, is only one of the liquids used to make washed-rind cheese; other possibilities include: brine, brandy, or local spirits. In this way, the cheese takes on even more of the local character because the curing process is reliant on a local liquid. This particular cheese provided an interesting contrast to the chevre I had just tried. The texture was far different, crumbly and, to my senses, drier and firmer. Of all the cheese I tried that afternoon, this was the hardest for me to place. Its flavor was subtle, and I had a lot of trouble trying to describe it to myself, much less to anyone else.
Third was the Garroxta (gah-ROTCH-ah). This goat’s milk cheese from Spain was one I was very excited to try. My fascination with artisanal cheeses first began in Spain when I was visiting in 2007. To be sure, I had a religious experience with a tetilla on the shores of a glacial-melt river in the region of Aragón. Tetilla, so called because it looks like a breast, is a cow’s milk cheese that is ridiculously rich and creamy. The flavor is nowhere near as complex as the chevre I had just tried, but the mouth feel was something else. That experience piqued the curiosity that I was finally satisfying four years later with a bite of Garroxta. McCalman and Gibbons suggest that a Garroxta will be “flaky and firm but moist and smooth.” To be honest, I have to agree with this contradiction. The attack is not consistent. The intensity of the flavor ebbs and flows as the cheese moves around and slowly dissolves. The flavor is herbal, although I couldn’t tell you what herb, and has some of that earthy character that I associate with goat cheeses, although nowhere near that of the chevre. This was more muted and balanced. I wasn’t able to pick out a distinct or unique finish on the first two cheeses, but as the Garroxta lingered in my mouth after swallowing, the flavor profile changed from herbal to nutty (McCalman and Gibbons say hazelnut).
Pear slice to cleanse the palate.
The Italian buffalos milk cheese was next. I have never had a cheese made from buffalos milk. Texturally, it was incredibly smooth and creamy, and that creaminess defined its finish for me as well. There was a mild attack, and the overall flavor profile was not earthy in the way of goat cheeses but instead had a mineral quality that I had never encountered before.
The last two cheeses I approached with trepidation and curiosity. Both were blue cheeses. I have friends who love cheese but refuse to eat blues because of both their appearance and their incredibly strong flavor. Blue cheeses are inoculated with a fungus, usually a species of Penicillium, which contribute to both their colors and flavors. The Valdeón is another Spanish cheese (I didn’t know there were Spanish blues before this) and is unique in that it is wrapped in chestnut leaves which add to the appearance and the flavor of this cheese. Hands down, the Valdeón was the most complex and interesting cheese I tried that day. Like most blue cheeses it is salty, although with an undercurrent of sweetness. It is so strong that I could taste it before it even touched my tongue. The presence of the Penicillium adds grittiness to the paste, but it is smooth and rich apart from that. The attack builds continuously to a strong and sharp finish. In my notes I have: “I would describe this as a spiky cheese,” and I stand by that observation. It is aggressive. This is aided by a hard and hot flavor that reminds me of peppercorns and seems to arise from within the “blue” flavor of the Valdeón. My parents have always had a soft spot for putting blue cheese on salads, so growing up, I was never afraid of strong, oddly colored cheeses. However, I had never had anything to rival the Valdeón or the last cheese on my plate: a Roquefort.
Roquefort is just one of those cheeses, or at least, it is for me. It is a sheep’s’ milk cheese with history as well as flavor. There is a specific species of mold, Penicillium roqueforti, that is responsible for producing this cheese, and its character and history is so important to France that it was the recipient of France’s first Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée, which protects its production and naming. Only those cheeses ripened in the natural caves of Mont Combalou in Roquefort-sur-Soulzon in the South of France are allowed to bear the name. Intimidating to say the least. This was by far my favorite cheese of the evening. I had heard about Roquefort, but I cannot remember having ever tried one before this. The paste dissolves incredibly quickly and the flavor of the blue cheese floods your mouth, even permeating the sinuses. It is a pleasantly overwhelming experience. The flavor itself is that quintessential flavor of blue cheese but cleaner and more powerful. It was truly a wonderful finish to my experiment.
A lot of dairy later, I had some perspective. While I could have learned about cheese by going to the grocery store and playing “Eeny Meeny Miny Mo” or reading excessive online articles, actually going somewhere, sitting down, and methodically working my way through a sample of diverse cheeses, many of which I had never heard of before, was the way to go. I learned more from being able to compare one cheese to the next and from bouncing ideas off of the proprietress and McCalman and Gibbons. I am by no means an expert on cheese, but I have some ideas and a foundation from which I can build.
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