Parmigiano (ancora)

Perhaps you're paying attention to all the hullabaloo over whether German cheese that kinda-sorta-maybe tastes like Parmigiano can be called Parmigiano.

So the time seems right to take a look at what many (including me) believe is the most incredible, sophisticated cheese variety in the world.

Deceptively simple, deeply complex, full of flavor and nuance. Plus, it's really a fun word to say with an Italian accent. Repeat after me: "Par - MEE - Ja - no." See what I mean?

Enough with this silliness. To read the profile on Parmigiano Reggiano, click here.

And if you want to read still more about the fight over cheese names, follow this link to an AP story on the battle.

What's in a name?

European food producers, especially good ones, have invested a lot of time, money and legal effort to create and enforce rules about the naming conventions around their foods.

You can't, for example, call sparkling wine Champagne unless it comes from Champagne.
Same goes for cheese, at least sometimes. Parmigiano or Parmesan is supposed to come from Parma, right?

A few years ago, some producers in Germany were slapped by European courts for skirting the rules on Parmigiano. That seemed to be the end of that, and käse-loving Germans would be the beneficiaries of clearly labeled cheese.

Not so fast, says a German prosecutor. If you translate the name into the local language, perhaps, naming rules may not apply.

Now let's see, what is the German for "tasteless, fake Parmesan?"

Click here for the story, about a German prosecutor's latest remarks that Berlin may not be on the hook, after all, to go after its famous fakes.

And, if you're really interested, here's a bit more background on the topic, from 2004.

Idiazabal

The Basque is confusing to many Americans. Is the region Spanish? French? Neither, or perhaps both?

How you answer depends on your politics, I suppose. But one thing everybody can agree upon is that Idiazabal, a signature Basque food, is one terrific cheese.

It is a classic sheep's milk cheese, aromatic with a buttery, nutty flavor. It has a slightly oily texture, which becomes less pronounced over time. As it ages, it gets more intensely dry and sharp, though it's never crumbly. (Except, sadly, when you've left it out uncovered too long.)

When the cheese was made by shepherds, the story goes, they often would dry it by the smoke of their evening campfires. Today, Idiazabal retains that flavor through a more modern process of light smoking over beechwood.

PAIRINGS: Robust red wines from northern Spain, such as Priorato and Navarra, go perfectly with Idiazabal. Aged varieties also make good grating cheeses, over gratin or pasta.

Tilsit

The story of Tilsit is a tale of European nomadism.

The style was invented by Dutch who were living in East Prussia, which was then part of Russia, but today is Lithuania.

Then some Germans started making it as Tilsiter, which became the model for a superior Swiss version.

Got all that? Good. Now, let’s look at the variety that ended up being made in Denmark, via a trading route across the Baltic Sea.

Danish Tilsit is a semi-firm cheese, made in loaves. The paste is yellow and pockmarked with small holes. It’s aromatic and intensely flavored, although the German Tilsiter is even bolder. If you’re familiar with Havarti, think of Danish Tilsit as its more interesting sibling.

Tilsit’s nice with cold cuts, or melted on to a tuna sandwich.

Cheese prices on the rise

Bad news from dairyland, fellow cheese lovers: Prices, already rising in the past year, seem likely to go still higher.

The dairy press (yes, there is such a thing) is awash with news of soaring prices. Now, if you own a herd or two of milk-cattle, perhaps that's cause for celebration. But for those of us on the consuming end of the cheesemaking process, the news is maybe not so good.

Ah well, you get what you pay for in life, I suppose. So if the cost of cheese is making you cringe, my advice is to grin and bear it, and economize elsewhere. Maybe you can save money on gas by taking the bus.

Milk, cheese prices heading higher

Beaufort

The Savoie is a breathtaking mountain region sandwiched in a corner of France between Switzerland and Italy. It’s the sort of place where winters are long and deep, and animals in the pastures outnumber people in the villages.

Beaufort, an ancient style that was already being eaten when the Romans were here, is one of three great cheeses of the region (the others are Tomme de Savoie and Reblochon). It’s sometimes difficult to find in the United States, and always pricey. It’s worth every bit of effort and expense.

A kissing cousin to Gruyère, Beaufort is big, in taste and the 80-pound wheels it’s pressed in. Its purest version, labeled d’alpage (of the pasture), is made from the milk of Tarentaise cows, which graze at high elevations (above 6,000 feet). This raw-milk cheese is higher in butterfat, and creamier and more robust than either Swiss Gruyère or Comté.

The best milk is produced in August and early September, after the cattle have spent a summer dining on magnificent Alpine flowers and grasses. It is matured for at least four months in humid cellars, and the rind is brine-washed during aging.

PAIRINGS: In its youth, Beaufort has a mildly fruity nose and taste, which deepens with age into a complex mix of nuts, toffee and caramel. It goes well with big, rustic red wines, such as Rhones. It also makes a great component of salad, with lettuce, sweet nuts, and mustard vinaigrette. If you’re feeling flush, use it in fondue or other melted-cheese preparations.

Interested? Here's a source to buy the French stuff. Or, if you're in the mood for a U.S. edition, try this one, made by an American artisan paying homage.

The Death of Camembert

Shocking news from France: A pair of large cheese producers are turning their back on centuries of tradition, not to mention good taste, to introduce pasteurized(!) milk into their versions of Camembert.

According to the New York Times, cheese purists are aghast, and I say rightfully so:

Citing health concerns, the two companies, Lactalis and the Isigny Sainte-Mère cooperative, which together made 90 percent of the traditional raw milk Camembert in Normandy, began earlier this year to treat the milk used for most of those cheeses.

In doing so, they were forced to sacrifice their A.O.C. status (certifying the cheese as authentic Camembert), the first time in French history that Camembert producers voluntarily did so.

But they also have asked the French governmental food board to grant that status to their new Camemberts, arguing that the processing they use — either filtering or gently heating the milk — does not sacrifice the traditional taste and character of the cheese.

(Traditional producers) beg to differ, claiming that the move is a ploy by the dairy giants to make more cheese and profits while destroying a crucial part of French heritage.

To read the full story click here (registration required).

Fontina d'Aosta

The Val D’Aosta is a cold, mountainous place, where France meets Alpine Italy, separated by the towering, mysterious Mont Blanc.

Historically remote, it's a region whose people still often speak a guttural dialect that sounds like a mad cross between French, Italian, and German.

On the steep slopes beneath Mont Fontin is where they make true Fontina. The cheese is produced in an array of sizes, from a traditional 20 pounds or so to more than 40. It’s made from raw cow’s milk, and the ripening process takes approximately four months.

It’s a semihard cheese, with a firm and supple texture. Some imitators, such as a Scandinavian variety that bears little resemblance, have a shiny paste. The difference is immediately recognizable when you taste the Italian variety, by the full flavor of nuts and grass.

It’s extremely flexible with other foods. Serve it with salami and hams, dense dark bread, or fruits of all sorts. It’s also a great cooking cheese, as it melts very well.

In Val d’Aosta, they make a delicious melted concoction out of it, called fonduta valdoastana. It’s like a Swiss fondue, but in addition to cheese and wine, it includes butter and eggs, as well as truffles on occasion.

Fonduta is also an individual dish, not served family-style as the Swiss do. Besides crusty peasant bread, try it with raw vegetables as an accompaniment. (In Spring, blanched asparagus, green or white, makes a divine dipper.)

Jack

The United States is the land of immigrants. People, culture, food—so much of what’s here has roots over there.

But America can lay claim to Jack, a cheese style invented by Scottish immigrant David Jacks, who lived in Monterey, Calif. at the close of the 19th century.

The original Jack is a mild, youthful cheese made of pasteurized cow’s milk. It’s soft, with a slight lemony tang to it. Frequently, it’s spiced up by the addition of jalapeño peppers, which are added early in the production process.

Dry Jack is a more mature version. It’s aged for seven or more months, which produces a yellow, sharp cheese.

In neither its youthful nor aged form does Jack offer a heady swirl of taste and texture. But so what? It’s straightforward, just like its homeland.

Brillat-Savarin

Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, a 19th century gastronome, was sort of the Ur foodie. As the first modern writer on cookery to gain global fame, his culinary observations have influenced generations of food writers.

It’s no wonder he was honored by having a cheese named after him. After all, Brillat-Savarin was the man who once wrote, "a meal without some cheese is like a beautiful woman with only one eye.” Quips like that earn the lasting affection of cheesemakers the world over.

Henri Androuët, a cheesemaker as well as the owner of one of the most famous fromageries in Paris, created Brillat-Savarin in the 1930s. Today, his son Pierre carries on the tradition, along with just a couple of other producers.

This is a triple-cream cheese, as luscious as you can imagine. In the initial curd-forming stage of production, warm, viscous cream is added to the milk to boost butterfat content to 75% or higher. It is always served young, just past the curd stage without much ripening at all.

However you like it, just indulge in this one, if you can find it. And stop worrying so much about your arteries.

PAIRINGS: This is a dessert cheese, par excellence. Rich, sweet, creamy, it works best with the juiciest, sweetest berries and melons you can find. Many people like to balance it against Champagne or other sparkling wine. I would go in the other direction--serve it with a sweet white dessert wine, like a late-harvest Riesling.

Livarot

In Normandy, not so very far from where the Allies landed, sit two famous cheesemaking towns.

One is Camembert, well known the world over. The other is Livarot, home to a thousand-year-old cow’s-milk style that is justly beloved by the French, though perhaps not so well known in the United States.

It feels very much like a farmer’s cheese, with an enormous aroma and a rustic, semisoft texture. In fact, most production today is commercial, but to exacting standards. Result: a product that’s bolder than Camembert in every way—taste, smell, texture—but which retains a certain earthy elegance that would be rare in a hand-made farmhouse cheese.

Livarot comes in little disks, with an orange rind that’s been brine-washed during aging and wrapped with five red strips of paper (called laîches) to hold the shape. The distinctive cross-cut pattern that emerges resembles a French officer’s stripes, giving Livarot its nickname, “La colonel.”

Despite its rustic provenance, the cheese can be moody. Serve it too young, and it may seem relatively disinteresting. But if it ripens too long, it becomes inedibly stinky (if it smells like ammonia, it’s a goner).

PAIRINGS: Livarot and Calvados, the Norman apple brandy, are a traditional match. Hard cider is good too, or bieres de garde, the full-bodied, slightly sweet French country ales like Jenlain. Fruits like apples and pears are likely matches, as well.

Click here to buy some.

Munster (Alsace)

At least since the 7th century A.D., monasteries and abbeys across Europe have been producing cheese. Some of the most delectable and important styles owe their provenance to the religious orders. French Munster, whose name shares its etymology with the monks, is one of them.

Make no mistake, this Munster has nothing in common with the domestic, industrial U.S. variety. The latter is a dull, white cheese, so mild as to be tasteless in comparison to the real stuff. Nor does it have anything to do with Muenster, a equally uninspiring German variety.

True Alsatian Munster, on the other hand, is one of the world’s great cheeses. It is a dark, rich yellow in color, with a strong flavor and an aroma that announces itself like Homer Simpson after a chili festival.

The cheese is made in small rounds, with a thinnish rind. It’s one of relatively few cheeses that ripen outward—that is, the deepest interior of the round matures first. When young, the paste is rather supple, and its general texture becomes creamier as it ages.

Real Munster has a strong barnyard smell to it, with a smelly rind that leaves a finger-licking order on your hands when you eat it. It has a big, beefy, and densely nutty flavor.

PAIRINGS: In Alsace, whence Munster hails, they sprinkle spices on the cheese before eating it. Fennel seeds, or cumin or caraway, are most common. That’s a bit too regional for me, but I do like to have it with dark bread and dark beer.

Click here to buy.

Double Gloucester

Every spring in Gloucestershire, they hold a competition. It involves rolling foot-wide wheels of Double Gloucester down a steep hill, then chasing after them.

The winner is the first person to retrieve a cheese at the bottom, and run it across a finish line. That lucky fellow gets to keep the cheese as a prize.

It can be dangerous. One year, falling runners collapsed in an 18-person pileup, an avalanche of bruised and bloodied cheese lovers. Even before the ambulances arrived on the scene, news of the goofy disaster was making its way into the tabloids.

I’m not sure what it all says about cheese, but it was proof once more that there will always be an England.

This year's event took place a few weeks ago. As always, great fun was had by all. And if you're really interested, check out the action by clicking here.

As for the cheese itself, Gloucester comes in two types, single and double. The latter is more famous and far more common. It is made from whole milk (generally pasteurized) that’s been taken from a cow herd’s morning and evening milkings. The single uses half skim and half whole milk.

Double Gloucester is the richer of the two. Like a good Cheddar, it has a full, if mellow, flavor. It is never as sharp as a Cheddar, though. Stylistically, Double Gloucester is intended to be more tame. Generally, it is dyed to produce a dull orange paste.

Even in its best farmhouse versions, this is an everyday cheese, a comforting, familiar variety you’d eat when you’re not in the mood for anything overwhelming.

PAIRINGS: Double Gloucester is a classic component to a ploughman’s lunch, and it also melts well enough. I’ve made an ale-based fondue with it which was quite nice, dunking apples and bread into it.

Vacherin Mont d’Or

Ever wonder what mountain dairy farmers do when the snows arrive? In the western Swiss Alps, they make cheese.

Vacherin Mont d’Or is another of those varieties from French-speaking Switzerland that has producers on either side of the border. Thanks to some aggressive legal maneuvering, the Swiss version has become the standard, name-controlled offering (the French go by the name Vacherin du Haut-Doubs).

The vast majority of mountain cheeses use milk drawn during the spring and summer. Vacherin, however, is produced in the dead of winter. This triumph of necessity dates back to the days when the elements made milk and cheese distribution all but impossible in the high Alps during the frigid months.

The cows are fed a special concoction of cold-weather food: hay, grains, and autumn vegetation. That diet produces milk of an entirely different flavor than what a meadow yields in summertime. The Swiss use pasteurized milk, while the French still make it with raw milk.

Produced in five- to seven-pound wheels, the young rounds are tied together with the bark of an evergreen tree. The resin in the wood seeps into the cheese, adding a woodsy taste and aroma to the overarching creaminess.

Vacherin is a creamy, runny cheese. If it feels a bit firm to the touch, let it mature. When it’s ripe, it’s soft enough to eat with a spoon.

PAIRINGS: In the Alps, it’s custom to sprinkle cumin seeds over Vacherin, then serve it up with bread, boiled potatoes and a crisp, light white wine. The traditional way is to slice off the top part of the rind, then scoop out the runny paste.

Beecher's Flagship

You might be skeptical of a cheesemaker located smack in the middle of a tourist attraction, the kind of place where they sell t-shirts that say "I'm with stupid" or "My cousin went to this city and all he brought back was a t-shirt."

Beecher's does business amid the tourist swirl of Seattle's Pike Place Market. But that address is no ground for suspicion. Beecher's makes a mighty fine cheese.

The Flagship -- that's the name of the cheese -- is marvelous, rich in flavor with an aged, slightly nutty complexity. Although it's not exactly a Cheddar, it's close enough. So think of it as one.

Flagship has the sharpness of a well-aged Cheddar, but it's slightly creamier than you'd expect. (I think that's because they use a variety of different yeast cultures to make the cheese, instead of just employing traditional Cheddar cultures.)

The combination tastes like a robust cross between Cheddar some fine Swiss mountain cheese, like Emmentaler.

Note that there is an even sharper version of this, aged for a longer period of time, called Flagship Reserve. Beecher's only sells it at the Pike Place store, however. So if you want to try it, you may have to deal with some other hungry tourists.

PAIRINGS: This is a great beer cheese. Try it with a sweet brown ale or a spicy India Pale Ale. On the wine front, find a fruity Northwest Pinot to go with it.

Jean Grogne

This triple crème French cheese, made from pasteurized cow's milk, is as lush as lush gets.

It's creamy and rich, but doesn't overwhelm. Instead, it's a subtle, almost delicate, swirl of perfectly blended dairy flavors. It has an ever-so-gentle mushroomy aroma, with an ever-so-slight tangy bitterness to the taste.

Unlike many of France's most appealing cheeses, Jean Grogne is not ancient. It's a 20th century invention by the same master cheesemaker who introduced Pierre Robert.

Think of Jean Grogne as a slightly more refined version of the ubiquitous St. André, in the same style of super-rich, buttery cheeses.

PAIRINGS: Because Jean Grogne is so rich, it stands up well to fuller-bodied red wines. But don't overdo it, lest the wine robs you from appreciating some of the cheese's subtleties. Well-crafted pinot noir is one good choice, or merlot. (Sorry, Sideways fans. You'll just have to choose.)