30 March 2019

C'est le fromage !




“It's the cheese!” That was an ad campaign on TV in California many years ago. Well, California cheese can be good, but if you want a wide variety of really good cheeses you have to come to France. And the old Auvergne province is one of France's best cheese regions.


While Touraine, where we live, is a prime area for goat's milk cheeses, Auvergne is, along with Normandy, one of France's prime regions for cow's milk cheeses. Some of the most famous of those are Cantal and Salers, which are cheddar-like, along with Bleu d'Auvergne and Fourme d'Ambert, two blue cheeses made with lait de vache. (The Roquefort cheese we all know and love is made with ewe's milk.)


In general, farm-made cheeses (fromages fermiers) are considered to be more distinctive in flavor than dairy-made cheeses (fromages laitiers). One big difference between France and the U.S. when it comes to cheeses is that a lot of French cheeses are made with raw milk (lait cru) — unpasteurized milk, in other words. The cheeses are more natural and tasty when the milk that goes into them has not been "cooked" in the cheese-making process.



Here are some cheeses that we bought while we were in the Auvergne and brought home to Saint-Aignan. We're still enjoying them. One of the best-known is called Saint-Nectaire, and it's made in the town that goes by that name. It's a soft cow's milk cheese that carries the European AOP label. That stands for Appellation d'Origine Protégée, and it means that there are strict controls on the methods used in its production, including requirements that the milk used come from a specific region. Saint-Nectaire is a slightly creamy cheese with a thick, natural rind.





I don't know a lot about the other cheeses pictured here, except that they are all made with lait cru de vache, and they are mostly fromages fermiers, as you can see on the labels. The first cheese above, Le Roc Affiné, is made in the Haute Loire, near Le Puy-en-Velay. The second one, L'Artisou de Margeride, comes from the Cantal département, just to the west. The Saint-Nectaire cheese in the photo above is made in the Puy-de-Dôme département, not far south of the big city called Clermont-Ferrand.



This last cheese, called La Fourme du Forez, is a blue cheese made in the Loire département, just north of the Haute-Loire and northwest of the town of Ambert, where the well-known Fourme d'Ambert cheese comes from. It's actually a fromage laitier but made with lait cru. The Forez is a separate geographical area in the Massif Central that touches the eastern border of the Auvergne province.

23 comments:

  1. We've got some blue cheese from Auvergne in the fridge awaiting a nice moment to eat it. Bought at the cheese truck in Loches market on Wednesday.

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    1. I buy Bleu d'Auvergne and Fourme d'Ambert all the time, either at the market or in the supermarket.

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    2. This is neither, but another blue from Auvergne.

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  2. Have you come across any French cheese that is similar in taste and consistency to Monterey Jack? I'm on the hunt for it for a favorite recipe.

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    1. Have you tried Cantal Jeune cheese? Or Cantal Entre Deux, which is slightly stronger in taste. The Cantal Jeune might be similar to Jack cheese. Or you might also try a Dutch Edam.

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  3. To see all these delicious cheeses, ça me donne faim! I'll always remember the marvelous taste of that Cantal cheese that a farmer near Salers gave us when I was in the maquis in 1944.

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    1. I'll never forget the day we had visiting a dairy farm in the Cantal in 2009 (ten years ago — wow!). Here's a link to the first post I did about that farm. And there are links to the other three or four posts.

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    2. That diary farm was so interesting and that whole trip was so much fun!

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  4. How do you keep your cheeses from spoiling once they're unwrapped? I have a problem with spoilage and have to trim so much away.

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    1. It could be that natural cheeses, made from unpasteurized milk and without additives, keep longer than "industrial" cheeses. You do always have to trim a certain amount of cheese away, however. We bought more cheese than we should have while we were in Le Puy. I gave some away to neighbors, but we still have some that has not been taken out of its shrink wrap.

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  5. We leave for France in 2 1/2 weeks, and I've researched farms for goat cheese in the areas we'll be. The cheese in France is unparalleled. While my favorite goat cheeses might be the Loire cheeses of Valencay, Selles sur Cher, and similar cheeses, Burgundy, the Rhone, and eastern France have plenty of goat cheese. As far as blue goes, I think that Bleu d'Auvergne is the best blue cheese in France; better than Roquefort. And it's one good French cheese that we can actually get here in a raw milk form.

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    1. Bleu d'Auvergne is probably my favorite blue cheese too. Glad to hear you will soon be back in France. Have you ever had a blue goat cheese? Years ago I found one here in Saint-Aignan, and it was excelllent, but I've never found it again.o

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    2. I seem to remember a blue goat cheese somewhere, but I don't remember where or when. When we were in the Roquefort area we bought a few blue cheeses to compare with Roquefort, and maybe that was where we had a goat blue.
      Our upcoming trip will take us to Southern Burgundy (visiting our friend again), the Doubs (where no tourists seem to go), and a short hop to Switzerland.

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  6. See, this is why knowledge is such a key part of travel. Knowing about, and understanding, the local ingredients, the labels of wine, and history of what you're seeing, completely colors travel. Without that, you're just driving around aimlessly, saying, "Oh, look, that's an old thing!" Ha!

    Ken, I still don't understand the difference between farm cheese and dairy cheese. I would understand if you said that either of those were better than grocery-story cheese, I guess, but isn't a dairy part of a kind of farm? I guess I was thinking that they would both be producing local, family made cheese, so what more do I need to know?

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    1. Judy, I think the problem is that English "dairy" and French laitier don't always mean the same thing. The cheese produced on a dairy farm is a fromage fermier. But the dictionary and this web page say that a fromage laitier is made in a factory. The milk that goes into a fromage laitier is collected from farms all over a region or even the whole country. A fromage industriel is similar, but is almost always made with pasteurized milk.

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    2. I believe there are 3 levels of French cheeses: fermier, artisinal, and industriel. I might not have the exact criteria down pat, but I believe that a fromage fermier is made on the very farm where the animals live and produce their milk. I believe that a fromage artisinal comes from a place where the milk production and the cheese production are separate. I'm not sure how a fromage industriel differs from that; maybe it's just a question of size, or maybe it has to do with the method by which the cheese is made. I'm going to try and find more info on that. We'll be visiting a number of French cheese producers next month, but I'm not sure my French is good enough to ask about these things.

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    3. Bob, the web page I linked to above gives a good explanation of all that.

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    4. The article in French you linked to is very clear and very explicit. So, if possible, I'll stay away from fromage laitier and industriel!

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    5. Thanks, Ken! That explains it well :)

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    6. If you eat cheese in the U.S., you are eating industrial cheese, in all likelihood.

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    7. There are now a lot of farm cheeses in the US; my little state of Maine either has the most cheesemakers or the most per capita. Unfortunately, I find most of them pretty disappointing. France sets a high bar.

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    8. That's too bad, Bob. I'm glad you can travel to France as much as you do.

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What's on your mind? Qu'avez-vous à me dire ?