Category: Curd on the Street

Sad news out of France this week: Robert Berthaut—the man responsible for reviving the iconic washed rind cheese Epoisses—passed away on Monday, at the age of 94. For sixty year, Berthaut’s family farm has been the world’s leading Epoisses producer, and the man himself was instrumental in getting the cheese protected designation of origin status in 1991.

Epossies was first created in the early 1500s, and it enjoyed rarefied status in France for centuries after. Napoleon was partial to it. It was dubbed the “king of all cheeses” by none other than Brillat-Savarin himself. Such superlatives go on and on.

But by the end of World War II, production of the cheese had all but ceased. The war had a particularly detrimental effect on the cheese’s namesake village, where the population dropped significantly. It wasn’t but fifty years earlier that more than 300 farms had been producing the Epoisses, and now none did.

Then, in 1956, Berthaut and his wife, Simone, decided to make a few wheels in the cellar of their home. They got the recipe from his aunt. The idea was that they’d use milk from their own cows and just have the cheese for themselves. But it turned out well—really well—and they began selling it in the small grocery they ran. It developed a reputation in town, and then word spread as tourists coming to visit the Epoisses castle would discover the cheese and tell tale of it back home. It wasn’t long until Robert and Simone shifted the focus of their lives to the production of Epoisses, and, thanks to them, the cheese was rescued from obsolescence and has since regained its status as one of France’s most celebrated wheels.

And well it should—Epoisses is straight up delicious. It is washed in a local brandy, marc de Bourgogne, and made according to very exacting milk standards and make processes. What results is a runny, smeary, custardy paste contained within a sticky orange rind, which is itself housed in a cylindrical wooden shell, so as to encourage the gooey cheese to maintain its shape. Pop the lid off and you’re going to get smells to roasted peanut skin. Cut back some rind, go right in with a spoon, and you’ll get flavors of rich lardo and salty, yeasty, slightly fermented bread. It’s hard to argue against Brillat-Savarin’s assessment.

And after 60 years, Fromagerie Berthaut remains far and away the world’s primary Epoisses producer. Our hearts go out to the town of Epoisses and the Berthaut family. We’ll be thinking of them this week and celebrating Robert by popping open one of his signature wooden cylinders.

Every day for the last three weeks, my evening routine has been the same: I get home from work, pet my bichon for five minutes in complete silence, and open up my computer to continue cracking away at a mystery that has been eating at me. At the center of the mystery is a Swiss man named Walter Räss, and I am determined to find him.

Walter is a cheesemaker. He lives in northeast Switzerland, in the small village of Tufertschwil, where he runs a cheese dairy. Walter began by producing Appenzeller, some 25 years ago, and he got very, very good at it. One day, his brother-in-law imported a herd of Jersey cows to Switzerland, as brothers-in-law are wont to do, and Walter was asked to produce a cheese with their milk. This was tricky. Jerseys produce milk that is higher in fat content than the Brown Swiss breed native to the Alps. Appenzeller is made by skimming the lower-fat Brown Swiss milk. Instead, Walter left the Jersey milk unskimmed and added rennet that he made himself, along with some yogurt-based cultures developed by his wife Annelies. Once formed into wheels, he left his cheese to sit in the cellar.

As the cheese aged, its flavor moved from ‘eh’ to ‘hot-diggity-dog.’ It had the aroma of cooked custard, the flavor of butterscotch and slowly roasted hazelnuts, and a lingering, almost fruity finish. He called this cheese Challerhocker, which translates roughly to “sitting in the cellar,” just as the cheese itself did.

Imagine yourself as a child again, reader. You are young and hungry, and you are also Swiss now, so you’re probably doing something like abstaining from war or becoming multilingual. Your town cheesemaker has been aging a new cheese, something he promises to be wonderfully tasty, as he’s using the milk of a cow that’s never seen this type of country before. You’ve been waiting patiently for the cheese to mature, and now you’ve gone to check on it and found it has fully done so. “Hooray,” you exclaim. Or, “Urrà,” in Italian, because you can. And then you run to the window of the cellar to proclaim to your town, which has never sent someone off to a combat zone, that the day has arrived. Imagine how happy and beaming you must be. You live in peace, sometimes you dream in Portuguese, which is probably pretty cool, and now your cheese is ready. What glory might you be radiating? What pure joy and glee might be evident upon your face for all your fellow citizens to see?

You are invited to close your eyes and picture that scene.

Go on.

Does it, perchance, look something like this?

For me, the answer is no. When I was a happy child, I looked quite precious. I bet you did too. I did not look like I was rapt in demonic possession or blood lust. But apparently I have been reading this child all wrong, because the only thing he’s possessed by is the wonder of cheese and the only thing he’s lusting for is a slice of nutty, roasty Challerhocker. That is the story behind this child, known as Challerhocker Boy, who appears on the label of the cheese.

And that is what has kept me up each night, the dog nipping at my pants leg, the groceries remaining uncooked. What is this supposed version of happiness? Who does it belong to? How can what is claimed to be such glee in fact look like such terror? Each night I comb the internet for answers until I fall asleep on my keyboard, sending out a stream of zeroes into infinity. And each morning I wake up exhausted, confused, and no closer to the answer.

And then yesterday, one of my coworkers could not keep from commenting.

“Hey pal, you’ve been looking a little rough lately,” she said. “Everything okay?”

I told her about Challer Boy and my fraying pant legs and how I am no closer to any answer and, therefore, to any sleep.

At which point she said, “Well you should talk to Glenn Hills at Columbia Cheese. They import Challerhocker exclusively and Glenn knows Walter really well. He might have some answers.”

There is an obvious question, and you may be asking it yourself right now: After so many evenings of research, did it not ever occur to you to get in touch with the supplier?

Reader, the answer is no. I am tenacious, and determined, and a tried and true turophile. But I don’t critical think real good. Nevertheless, I am scheduled to speak with Glenn this weekend. Progress, it seems, will finally begin to be made. Stay tuned next week,  as we continue this investigation into the inner life of the Challer Boy. We will find out what is happening behind those eyes, behind that tomato-shaped face, behind what are unequivocally the most unadorable dimples I have ever seen. And we will get there together.

Read Part II

Read Part III

This is a cheese we call Preamble:

This is also Preamble:

Here, too, is Preamble:

And this as well is Preamble:

Okay, that last one is musician and producer Pharrell Williams, who is not a cheese. But you see the thread: none of these things look like the others. So how can all of them be Preambles (except, again, for Pharrell, who, so far as we are aware, is not made of coagulated milk)? The answer is that Preamble is not a cheese. It is an idea.

         

Have a seat. If you need, take a moment to put the contents of your mind back together. We promise it all makes sense. Let us explain.

Our flagship store is on Bleecker Street in the West Village of Manhattan, but our offices are across the East River in Long Island City. This is also where we have our cheese caves, a network of custom-built, highly-controlled aging rooms, each one designed for the a certain type of cheese. We have a room for alpine cheese. We have a room for bloomy cheese. We have a natural rind room. We have one for washed rinds. And we have a drying room as well. That’s a decent amount of real estate and a whole host of unique climates, which allows our Caves team, lead by Cavemaster Peter Jenkelunas, to play around with different types of aging. When we are doing R&D on a new cheese, we need a way to classify it. So, how do you categorize a cheese that is not yet a cheese? We use the word Preamble.

That first photo? That’s Preamble 1.0. The others are Preamble 2.0, Preamble 3.0, and Preamble Pharrell.0. When PJ and team hit on a creation they like, we make it available as a limited-release test batch. Perhaps you’ve gotten a few emails in the past month for these releases. When you do, it’s always worth striking while the iron is hot, because Preamble cheeses have a way of proverbially flying off the shelf.

You may have noticed that the non-Pharrell cheeses are all of similar shape and size. That’s because those three all began as the same cheese: Little Hosmer from Jasper Hill Farm. They sent us down a batch and said, “Go wild.” And so PJ & Co. did. Version 1.0 is dressed in flowers and hops. 2.0 is washed in mead. 3.0 is soaked in mead and then wrapped in grape leaves. While they naturally share similar properties, each of these Preambles is distinct and unique.

Will every Preamble begin as a Little Hosmer? Hardly. We’re just getting started with this program—you can expect to see Preambles of all different shapes, sizes, textures, oversized felt hats, and so on. So be sure to keep an eye out. In fact, we have a release lined up for Monday that you can get your hands on if you act with conviction and swiftness.

We’ll be bringing you more notes from the caves here each month, so stay tuned.

Til then, keep calm and remain

Cacio e Pepe is the essence of Italy—it’s pasta, it’s parm. And it is simple and stunning.

Our Executive Chef, David Elkins, has worked in some of the most prestigious kitchens in the world, and he’s sharing his personal recipe for the dish. Check it out:

Quick, easy, insanely satisfying, and 100% authentic Italian cuisine. We hope you enjoy this recipe as much as we do.

Editor’s note: A few years ago, some of our team took a cheese tour of Italy. One of our team members, Andrew Perlgut, wrote about the experience, and we are re-publishing his post from September, 2015.

My journey to the Italian countryside, somewhere between Reggio Emilia and Parma, began 4 years ago—before any of the aging, gorgeous wheels of Parmigiano Reggiano had begun their life as milk, before the cows had eaten the lush grasses growing nearby, before Riccio and his team heated the milk, added the rennet and salt, cut the curds, formed the wheels, and then brined them. My journey began before all of that, in a dimly lit conference room upstairs at Murray’s HQ, with a dozen of my coworkers.

On that afternoon four years ago, as we filed into the room, over thirty different plates of Parmigiano-Reggiano were arrayed across the room. We were given simple instructions: pick the best one.

Parmigiano-Reggiano, the King of Cheese, is PDO, or protected designation of origin. That means that, to make it, you must follow a strictly codified recipe and live within a very specific geographic area.

With aged cheeses, the goal is to get as much moisture out of the curds as possible, so that there is no spoilage during the aging process. Removing moisture is a multistep process, involving salting, heating, and cutting the curds. The salt works through osmosis, pulling liquid out of the curds while introducing sodium back into them. The heat causes evaporation. Cutting the curds smaller and smaller removes any pockets in which moisture might hide in.

Parmigiano-Reggiano starts by combining skimmed milk from the previous evening with whole milk from the morning’s milking. From there, the new, partially-skimmed milk gets pumped into giant copper vats. The vats are heated, rennet is added, and the milk begins to separate into curds and whey. The curds are then cut, the vat is heated again, and the curds are hooped together. No cheesemaker who produces PDO Parmigiano-Reggiano can deviate from this process in the slightest, which is what guarantees that remarkable consistency you notice from one piece of Parmigiano-Reggiano to the next.

So, if all parm should taste the same, why did we go through that tasting exercise 4 years ago? Because, while the PDO helps to guarantee that the cheese you are getting conforms to certain requirements, there are other factors at play in the cheesemaking process: the specific feed of the cows, minuscule variations in temperature and time between cheesemakers, the length and conditions of the aging process, where the cows happen to be in the reproductive cycle, etc. All of these pieces, when put together, can lead to noticeable differences. So we tasted through the 30 different options, and we narrowed them down.

And then a few months later we did it again.

By repeating the tasting, we got to try wheels from different parts of the year and with slightly different ages. We tasted wheels that tended toward the nuttier side, we tasted wheels that were overwhelmingly fruity, and, if my tasting notes are to be believed, we tasted wheels that had a distinctly broccoli-ish flavor.

Each subsequent tasting helped narrow down the options until we ultimately determined a favorite. It had the perfect balance of nutty and fruity, salty and sweet, savory and umami. Then we reached out to the farm that produced it, locked in their entire production, and officially had what you now know as Murray’s Parmigiano-Reggiano.

For a cheesemonger, the first time you crack open a wheel of Parmigiano-Reggiano is always a memorable experience. I remember my first perfectly. I was helping to train some new cheesemongers in Cincinnati and was told to show them how to crack open parm. No problem! The most beautiful thing about cracking a wheel of parm is this: milk, at most 16 hours old, goes through the cheesemaking process, and once that wheel is put into its mold, the milk on the inside begins a two-year residency on a shelf. When a cheesemonger cracks a wheel, that milk is seeing the light of day for the first time in over 730 days.

Four years on, I finally got to walk into the making room where our Parm is crafted. I’ve cracked many wheels of Parm, but this was going to be my first time seeing that milk in liquid form.

The first room we walked into, the cheesemaking room, was hot and humid and bustling with activity. We walked through it and into the refrigerated milk room, where the milk comes in each evening to sit and await the next morning’s milk.

Back into the humidity and heat, and we got to meet Riccio and watch him and his team make Parmigiano-Reggiano. The walked us through the whole process as they went, from heating up the milk and adding the rennet to cutting, gathering, and pressing the curds.

After settling into their final shapes, the wheels take a 20-day bath in a salt brine to help further reduce internal moisture and bring the saltiness of the cheese up to the levels that we know and love.

And then, they wait. For two whole years. We can call this their growing up phase, when they are reaching a point of being mature enough to assume the throne as the King of Cheese.