Fondue with two Auvergne cheeses

For the past 10 or 12 years, Walt and I have been making a nice hot cheese fondue every year on Christmas Eve. Usually it's a fondue of "Swiss" or Alpine cheeses, including Comté, Gruyère, and Emmenthal. The other ingredients are white wine, nutmeg, black pepper, and kirsch (cherry brandy). A little cornstarch binds it all together so that the melted cheese doesn't separate into curds and liquid.

Today's cheese fondue will be an Auvergne variation on the Savoie/Switzerland theme. The Auvergne is a mountainous region in the center of France, south of Saint-Aignan and west of the Alps. The mountains there aren't nearly as high as the Alps, but a lot of them are very ancient extinct volcanoes. The winters in the Auvergne are cold and snowy — as is winter all over France this year. In September 2009, we spent a few days with friends in the part of the Auvergne called the Cantal and enjoyed the scenery, the people, and the cheese.

Two cheeses from the Auvergne region of France

Our 2010 fondue will be made with two Auvergne cheeses called Cantal and Saint-Nectaire. Cantal is a cheddar-like cheese that melts very smoothly and is slightly nutty-tasting. The Larousse book Les Fromages describes Cantal as demi-dur — semi-hard — it's an "uncooked" cheese. It can be made with pasteurized or raw (unpasteurized) milk. I did a series of posts on our visit to a dairy farm in the Cantal last year.

Cantal Entre-Deux is a medium-aged cheese
(in-between Cantal Jeune and Cantal Vieux)

Saint-Nectaire is an smoother, creamier cheese than Cantal. The Larousse Fromages book classifies it as demi-ferme — semi-firm — and it's also uncooked. (Swiss-style cheeses are "cooked" — the milk is heated during the cheese-making process.) Saint-Nectaire is made in a village of that name in the center of the Auvergne and the surrounding countryside. Its flavor is described as "delicate, with hints of hazelnut." Some Saint-Nectaires are made with raw milk, and others with pasteurized milk.

A wedge of Saint-Nectaire cheese

The main difference, technically, between Cantal and Saint-Nectaire is that the Cantal milk curds are cut and pressed twice during the cheese-making process, and the Saint-Nectaire curds just once. Otherwise, the two are made with the same milk in the same region, Cantal being just south of the Saint-Nectaire production area.

I see the label now says AOP rather than AOC.
New European labeling standards...

According to the Larousse cheese book, Cantal may well be the oldest existing French cheese, dating back 2000 years and mentioned in Roman texts. Saint-Nectaire cheese-making dates back about 1000 years, and it became well-known across France when it was presented at King Louis XIV's table in the 17th century.

Cantal and Saint-Nectaire are both AOC (or AOP) cheeses.

Both cheeses have the Appellation d'Origine Contôlée (or Protégée) label, or AOC/AOP. That means that to be called either Cantal or Saint-Nectaire, a cheese must be made according to strict standards that specify where the milk comes from (where the cows graze, and what on) and how the cheese-making process is carried out. You should be able to find them in America and other countries outside France. They should look and smell fresh when you buy them.

Here's a recipe for an Auvergne-style cheese fondue. The general rule for fondue is that you want between a third and a half pound of (whatever) cheese per person. This recipe is for four:

500 g of Cantal cheese (a generous pound)
300 g of Saint-Nectaire cheese (a generous half-pound)
1 or 2 cloves of garlic
1 baguette of good French bread
50 cl of dry white wine (2 cups or 16 fl. oz.)
a pinch of nutmeg
1 tsp. of cornstarch
2 or 3 tablespoons of kirsch (clear cherry brandy)
a pinch or more of black pepper, to taste

Peel the garlic clove(s) and cut them in half. Rub them around in the fondue pot to give the fondue a hint of their flavor. (If you want, you can press the cloves and add them directly to the fondue.)

Cut the rinds off the the cheeses. Cut all the cheese into thin strips, or grate it. Also cut the French bread into small cubes so that each piece has some crust on it (it will be easier to keep on the forks that way). Mix the cornstarch into the kirsch (cold) in a small bowl or glass to make a slurry.

Pour the wine into the fondue pot and start heating it up on a burner on the strove. Gradually add the cheese. Season with pepper and nutmeg. Keep the heat low and stir the cheese mixture constantly with a wooden spoon. As soon as it starts to reach the boiling point, give the cornstarch slurry a stir and pour it in. Continue stirring and cooking the fondue for three or four more minutes.

The fondue should be smooth and fairly liquid. If it seems too thin, add a little more cornstarch dissolved in kirsch or white wine. If it's very thick, heat up a little more white wine and gradually mix it in.

Set the fondue pot on the table on a heat source and give each person some bread cubes and a fondue fork to spear them with. Dip each bread cube into the melted cheese and enjoy. Follow up the fondue with a big green salad dressed in tart vinaigrette.

We are off to the market in Montrichard, 10 miles downriver from our village, to pick up our Christmas turkey. It's not snowing (yet) but the roads are supposedly icy, so we'll see how it goes. At least I have new tires! Merry Christmas Eve to all.

Turning tomme into Cantal

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Salers cheese, made in the area surrounding the old town of Salers — which is now the Parc des Volcans d'Auvergne — is always made with unpasteurized milk. The milk, unheated and unrefrigerated, is made into cheese twice a day, right after the twice-daily milking of the cows. It is the most authentic style of Cantal cheese, which has been made in the area since Roman times.

Cheese is a way of processing milk for long-term storage. You can make it in the summer, when the cows have an abundance of grass to graze on, and you can keep it in a cool dark place — a cellar or a cave — all winter. It will improve in texture and flavor for many months. The land in the Auvergne region was always too hilly and wet to be much used as farmland, but it was and is nearly perfect pasture land. Cheeses have always been valuable commodities in trade with other regions as well.

Une vache de la race Salers

Cantal cheese, which is mostly what you find in France outside the Auvergne region, can be made with pasteurized or unpasteurized milk, and can be made year-round, either in commercial dairies or on farms. Often dairies purchase milk for Cantal cheese from co-ops, so it comes from several different farms. Cantal is the generic form of Salers cheese, which is made seasonally on farms using raw milk from one herd of cows. That's not to say that "generic" Cantal cheese is not delicious — it is, or can be. In order to use the name, farmers and dairies must adhere to certain requirements and methods for its fabrication, too, but the rules are not as strict as for the Cantal label as for Salers label.

Evelyn took this nice picture of Cantal and Salers cheeses
at the outdoor market in the old town of Salers.

New sanitation and hygiene rules are changing the way French cheeses are made. But traditions remain, and Salers Tradition cheeses, and even just plain Salers cheeses, are proof of that. Modernization is inevitable — on n'arrête pas le progrès — you can't stop progress — but some principles and practices are time-honored. Even U.S. regulations provide that raw-milk cheeses are authorized for importation into the U.S. if they have been aged for at least 60 days. Pasteurization is a good thing, but it's not necessary or even desirable when the milk is going to become aged cheese.

Cows in a pasture near the Château de Saint-Chamant

Salers cheese is aged for a minimum of 90 days. Cheese called just "Cantal" can be sold after just 30 days. That's called Cantal Jeune, young Cantal. Between one month and three, the cheese is called Cantal Entre-Deux, or medium-aged. And beyond three months of what is called affinage, it is called Cantal Vieux — old Cantal. It can actually be aged, or dried, for much longer.

I asked Eric Lafon about affinage, which you might call "maturation" or ripening — keeping cheese at the proper temperature and humidity so that it improves with age — "finishing" it. I asked him if he aged his own cheeses or if a third party was involved. He said he sold some cheese to affineurs — specialists who ripen cheeses before putting them on the market — but mostly he does it himself. Where? He said the assocation of Salers cheese producers has bought an old de-commissioned railway tunnel in the area from the national railroad, the SNCF, and all the producers can store cheeses in there for ripening.

A couple of the Lafon family's farm-made cheeses

Before it matures, Cantal cheese is called tomme (or tome) fraîche — fresh cheese. It is bland, as Evelyn has said, because it hasn't yet been salted. It's used in cooking. Aged Cantal is for eating as it is sold, on a plateau de fromages — a cheese platter. Tomme is for melting, including in the Auvergne specialties called aligot and truffade. Both are potato dishes. You can melt aged Cantal too, and it's very good, but for the purist it's a shame to eat Cantal other than in its natural state.

Les fourmes — the forms in which Salers
and Cantal cheeses are pressed

So how does the fresh tomme become Cantal or Salers cheese? After ripening for 12 to 24 hours, the tomme is run through a grinder and mixed with salt. After a few hours the salted mixture is packed into cheesecloth-lined molds and pressed for a couple of days. Then the fat cylinders of cheese are ready for ripening in the cave or cellar. As it ages, the cheese develops a crust that gets thicker and thicker as the cheese dries out.

Eric Lafon removes a cheese from the mold
and turns it over for further pressing.

I don't know how easy it is to find Cantal in the U.S. I have the impression that French cheeses are not always kept under ideal conditions as they are shipped and stored for sale over there. Because turnover is slow, they are often too old by the time you by them, and past their prime. But if you choose carefully and have a good cheese vendor, you can find good ones. I used to buy very nice cheeses at a shop on 24th Street in San Francisco's Noe Valley.

In French terms, virtually all the cheeses you find in supermarkets in the United States are "industrial" cheeses. Very few "artisanal" cheeses, made the way Salers style cheese is made, are to be found — except imports. For information, we paid between 10 and 13 euros per kilo — 5 or 6 €/lb. — for the cheeses we bought at the farm and in the farmers' market in the old town of Salers.

A map of the part of Auvergne we spent our time in,
around Mauriac, and Salers
Click on the map to enlarge it.

One regret I had about our visit to the Conches dairy farm at Saint-Chamant was that Eric Lafon didn't have any of his butter for sale when we were there. After they curdle the milk, they separate the cream from the rest of the whey. With that cream they make butter twice a week and sell it in their store, on the premises. It had all been sold the day we were there.

The Lafon family also sells most of the cheese they make right there in their own shop. Can you imagine how much cheese they make annually? Thirty tons! That's 30,000 kilograms. That's two 40 kg cheeses a day, 365 days a year. They have 50 cows, and each cow gives as much as 10 liters of milk every day.

By the way, Eric Lafon is also the first deputy mayor of the village of Saint-Chamant.

Here are a few links to sites with information about Cantal and Salers cheese, all in French:

• Les Fromages AOP d'Auvergne, with a map of the Route des Fromages;
• A description of Salers cheese-making as practiced by a dairy farmer near Aurillac;
• a site called www.salers.org, with a lot of information about the cattle, the beef, and the cheese.

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Making cheese morning and night

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On dairy farms that produce the cheese called Salers [sah-LEHR], two batches are made every day. The first cheese is made in the morning, after the morning milking. The second is made in the evening, after the afternoon milking. Each time, the milk from the traite is brought in and made into cheese immediately, without ever having to be refrigerated. That seems to be one of the keys to how good it is — refrigerating the milk would alter its qualities.

French A.O.C. (Appellation d'Origine Contôlée) and European A.O.P. (Appellation d'Origine Protégée) rules require that Salers be made that way. They also require that it be made only during the months when the cows spend their days out in the pastures — April 15 to November 15 — and graze exclusively on the local vegetation. Along with grasses, the pastures are also full of wild aromatic plants that flavor the cows' milk and give the cheese its unique taste. The grasses and plants the cows graze on also give the cheese (and the whey) a nice yellow color.

The curds are pressed, cut into chunks, and pressed again
several times over about an hour to remove as
much of the whey, le petit lait, as possible.

Other A.O.C. rules specify that Salers cheese can only be made in a well-defined geographical area, that being the the département du Cantal. The milk must not be pasteurized, and Salers cheese must be made on farms, not in dairies. There are about 80 dairy farms that make Salers. They and other producers also make Cantal cheese, which is only slightly different — Salers is Cantal that's made on farms and only in summer.

The whey is run through a a centrifuge to spin off the cream,
which is used to make butter twice a week.

What the rules don't state is that the milk used for Salers cheese must come from cows of the Salers breed. Salers cows will only give milk in the presence of their calves. At milking time, the calf is brought to its mother and it begins to suckle. Then the calf is pulled away and the milking machine attached. When most of the milk has been taken, the calf is allowed to finish feeding. All that is a lot of trouble for the farmers, I think.

As a result, most of them have herds of cows of other breeds, especially Montbéliardes. Those are, I believe, the cows with splotches of brown or black on white in the pictures I posted yesterday. Montbéliardes give a lot of milk, don't need to have their calves present during the milking process, and produce milk that they say is very similar to the milk given by Salers cows.

Eric Lafon cuts the pressed curds into big chunks, turns
them over, and presses them again. You can see the
blue plastic booties on the guy in the background.

Farmers who do maintain the tradition of using milk exclusively from the red Salers cows have the right to put the appellation « Salers Tradition » on their product. Salers cheese made with milk from other breeds is called just Salers — or Salers-Salers, for some reason I have yet to figure out. It might be because the word Salers is stamped into the rind two times on the big round cheeses. There's an example on this web page. None of this is very clear to me...

The wooden tub that the milk is poured into for the curdling operation is also important in the Salers cheese-making process. It must be made of wood, and the wood is normally chestnut.

Evelyne and Eric Lafon continue cutting and rearranging the
curds for pressing. It takes an hour to press out all the whey.

One of the questions I asked when we were watching the cheese being made was about the timing of the addition of a starter culture — ferments lactiques — to the milk. Eric Lafon, who with his wife, son, and brother make the cheeses at Roziers near Saint-Chamant, said there is nothing "added" to the cheese at all. The microbes that cause the fermentation are present in the wood of the tub that they use in the curdling process.

He said a laboratory in Bordeaux had confirmed that to be the case when European authorities wanted the Salers producers to use stainless steel vats instead, and then add cultures during the cheese-making process. The laboratory's conclusion was not only that the wood carried the cultures, but also that the resulting cheese is both delicious and a healthy food. So even though the facilities where the cheeses are made are modern and well equipped, the wooden vat is both traditional and essential to the process.

Here's the result, called tomme fraîche. It's cheese you can
cook with, or you can press it some more and then age it
for at least three months to get Salers cheese.

Twice a day the cows are milked and twice a day a big "drum" of Salers cheese is made, from spring to fall. At the Conches dairy farm, Eric Lafon, his brother, his wife Evelyne, and the Lafons' son all know how to milk the cows and make the cheeses. They take turns. What do they do in the wintertime? They make Cantal cheese rather than Salers.

And what are the differences? For one, the cows are fed hay rather than being free to graze on fresh grasses and other plants out in the pasture. And the A.O.C. rules for Cantal don't require that the milk be processed into cheese after each milking. The morning milk, for example, might be refrigerated and then added to the evening milk, before it's all made into cheese. Cantal cheese can also be made with pasteurized milk, and in dairies rather than on farms.

Meanwhile, spills do happen. That's why there's
a tile floor, a garden hose, and a big drain
in the middle of the room.

Eric Lafon told us that he actually follows the same process year-round, making a fat cylinder of cheese in the morning and another in the evening, after each milking, even in winter. The Conches farm has a herd of 50 Montbéliarde cows. He said he normally does the morning milking, and the day we were there he came in once the milk was curdled and took over from the man in the black shirt, who I assume is his brother. More tomorrow...

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Following a truck, encountering a herd

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We dropped Walt off at the gîte, I said, on our way to the Conches dairy farm at the place called Roziers near Saint-Chamant. Actually, we didn't drop him off. As we turned off the highway onto the lane that leads into the village center, we found ourselves behind a very big, and very slow-moving, truck that was hauling, I believe, some kind of backhoe or harvester on a flatbed trailer.

Since we were going nowhere fast, I pulled over to the side of the road and Lewis stopped his car behind me. I got out and Walt got into the driver's seat in the Peugeot. I went and explained to Lewis, Evelyn, and Linda what we were doing: I would ride with them straight to the dairy farm and Walt would go back to the house with Callie, who was stressed out after a day in the car on curvy roads.

On the road from Riom to Saint-Chamant, trying
to get there in time for the 6:00 p.m. cheese-making

By the time we got everything settled, the big truck had moved on. I hoped we had seen the last of it. We drove into town, past the houses, hotel, and grocery store, up to the church. We turned left out of the village, feeling confident now that we knew the way. We had gone there early that same morning to see about the milking and cheese-making tour, but had been foiled.

Here I am, through a rain-spotted windshield, asking
the dairy farmer's son about being able to observe the
cheese-making process later in the day. Evelyn's photo.

The road out of the village and out to the place called Roziers or Rosier (it's not on all maps) is again very narrow and slightly winding. And it passes through a deep and dark wood. As we penetrated into the woods, there was the truck, ahead of us. It was going the same way we were. And it was still slow-moving. It was impossible to pass on the narrow, curvy road.

There was one more left turn before we got to the dairy farm, so I figured that would be our chance to get out from behind the truck and make some good time. Well, no luck. The truck turned left right in front of us, onto a road that was, if anything, even narrower than the one we were leaving behind. Zut ! But then, the truck suddenly pulled over onto the left shoulder of the road and stopped. We thought he wanted us to go around him, and wanted to thank him for letting us by.

The herd, coming our way

Even I couldn't see around the right side of the truck, and I was in the passenger seat. Even so, Lewis, the driver, slowly pulled around it, carefully avoiding running into the ditch. We didn't get far before we realized there was a herd of cattle coming down the road ahead of us, and toward us. That's why the truck had pulled over and stopped. All we could do was get the car as far to the side as possible and wait for the cows to pass. This was taking forever.

Getting up close with the cows. You can see the slow truck
in the rear-view mirror. Thanks to Evelyn for the photo.

You'll notice that these were not Salers cattle, but some other breed. Well, we finally arrived at the cheese-making facility, a modern building with a big gravel parking lot and a lazy dog in front of it. There was a picture window in the cheese-making room and we could look right in. The man stirring the vat of curdling milk gestured for us to come on in, pointing to the door on the left.

Stirring the curds and whey

The four of us trooped in. There were two other people there watching the process. They were a young couple from Poitiers, probably on their honeymoon. The cheese-maker was stirring and cutting the curds — le caillé — that had been separated from the whey — le petit lait — by the addition of rennet — la présure. Rennet is extracted from the first stomach of a calf. It plays an important role in bovine digestion, and in cheese-making.

The whey is pumped out of the barrel, leaving the curds.

Our shoes were very dirty after our trip out into the pasture to watch the milking a couple of hours earlier. The floor of the cheese-making facility was white tile, and it was wet. It had just been washed down. We were making ugly black footprints everywhere we stepped. As the whey was being pumped out of the barrel, the cheesemaker invited us to come outside with him. He turned on a garden hose and told us to wash off the soles of our shoes in the stream of water. We did, and got most of the crud off our shoes.

Pouring the curds by the bucketful onto the press

Then a woman appeared and brought the four of us each a pair of blue plastic booties to put on. I thought about how we were allowed into the cheese facility without having to put on white jackets or hairnets. In the U.S., it probably would have been different. The cheese-maker was constantly washing down the floor with a hose, and there was a drain in the middle of the room to take the wash water away.

We put our booties on over our shoes as the cheese-maker started removing the milk curds from the wooden barrel and putting them into a big apparatus, on a bedsheet-sized piece of cheesecloth, where they would be pressed, cut, and pressed again several times to extract the rest of the liquid they contained. It's all done by hand.

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The milking in the pasture

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We called the Rodde familiy dairy farm, and Mme Rodde (I assume) told us to hurry on over if we wanted to see the afternoon milking. It started at 3:00 p.m. We were 5 miles south. When we got there we knew we had found the right place, however, because there was a big sign. At the Chamalières farm, I don't think we saw a sign at all... but then we also didn't go into what looked like the sales room to talk to anybody there.

Of course the Rodde family's sign is a little misleading, or at least off the point. It says that Jean-Pierre Rodde produces beef from Salers cattle. We weren't interested in beef, but in milk and then cheese. We stopped and parked, and then Mme Rodde (I assume) came out of a storefront building across the road and told us we needed to drive another mile or two up the road to see the milking — la traite, in French.

Salers [sah-LEHR] cattle produce both milk and meat.

The cows are milked outdoors, in the pasture. Mme Rodde (okay...) said we should drive on past the green barn up the road on the left and then we would see the herd and the milkers. You'll hear the cowbells, and the men shouting, she said.

If we had been driving in the opposite direction,
we would have spotted the herd right away.

Well, we didn't see or hear anything. We drove right by and went too far, but we realized it after a mile or two and turned back. On the way back, we could clearly see the herd of cows, and we realized that must be it. Driving by in the other direction, the herd and the milkers had been hidden behind a hill, and we hadn't thought to look back over our shoulders as we drove past.

It was kind of muddy where we parked the cars.
No surprise, I guess.

This time, we parked our cars across the road from the pasture where the herd was gathered, in front of a long building that must be where the cows are kept during the cold months of winter. Where we parked was kind of muddy, and we stepped carefully when we got out of the cars. It wasn't too bad. Dark clouds were gathering on the horizon, so we all scrambled to get our rain gear out of the trunks of the cars.

Is this man shouting?

We were still hurrying because the milking was already under way. We didn't hurry for long, however, because we had to step carefully as we crossed the 50 or 75 meters of pasture we needed to cross to get close to the cows. The field was littered with cowpats... cow pies... pasture pastries. And since it had been rainy for a couple of days, they were wet and slick.

A bucolic scene. Or should that be "a bovine scene"?
And look at those big cowbells.

There was some mooing but mostly the cows were quiet. They weren't moving around too much, so the bells they wear were fairly quiet too, compared to the music the bells make when the herd is hoofing it across a field. There wasn't much shouting either, as far as I can remember. Mostly, we heard the tractor engine, which powered the electric milking machines that Mr. Rodde and his cowhands were using.

A video I made at the milking. That's my voice,
the bells, and the tractor engine.
3 September 2009

Yesterday I read on Wikipedia's French site that one of the quirks of Salers cows is that they will only give milk in the presence of their calves. Well, in a wooden corral, separating them from their mothers, were gathered dozens of reddish brown calves. Once in a while, one would be let out of the corral and go to its mother to nurse.

Here you can see the milking machine hooked up to a cow.

Do calves "nurse"? Maybe they "suckle." I assume the calves know how to identify their mothers, and vice-versa. Maybe a quick suckle by the calf is sometimes needed to start its mother's milk flowing. This particularity of the breed may explain why much of the milk used to make Salers cheese is not actually the milk of Salers cows, but another breed. More about that later.

The calves were in a corral near the cows.

At that point it really started raining. We hustled back toward the cars as quickly as we could without breaking our necks or getting ourselves too mucked up. We decided to drive on back to Saint-Chamant via the little town of Riom-ès-Montagnes, where we stopped for a bathroom break and went into a bakery to buy some bread and pastries for dinner. We had about two hours to get the dairy farm for the cheese-making session — enough time.

Here we are in Riom, buying pain et pâtisseries.
Thanks to Evelyn for the photo.

And it took us about two hours to drive back to Saint-Chamant on little winding roads. But we got back to the village at 5:45 and let Walt and Callie off at the gîte. Four of us headed in one car for the Conches dairy farm, just a couple of miles north of the village, to see the cheese-making scheduled for 6:00 p.m. I'm glad we did.

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The Cantal Cheese Quest

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It was early September in the Cantal (Auvergne) and the weather was foggy, misty, and intermittently rainy. We wanted to see the volcanoes, les puys, but fog made that difficult. The day before, we had decided not to drive into the Parc Naturel des Volcans because of poor visibility at high altitudes.

On Thursday morning, we decided it was then or never. First we headed toward the village — One of the Most Beautiful Villages in France, officially — called Tournemire, south of Saint-Chamant, where we were staying in a gîte. Tournemire is the site of the Château d'Anjony, a mass of medieval towers on a steep promontory overlooking a green valley. More about that later.

Not sure you can tell how steep this roadside drop-off is...

After lunch in Tournemire, we headed out on narrow, winding roads toward the volcanoes. There were no guard rails in most places, despite the deep valleys, and there were no other cars on the road. What there was, though, was plenty of cows. We stopped and took pictures of some at one point, when the rain let up.

A typical valley in the Parc des Volcans, with fog
Click on the pictures to see them full-size

It had only been a 15-minute drive from Saint-Chamant to Tournemire. We had stopped at a farm near Saint-Chamant called the GAEC de Conches, only to be told we were too late for the morning milking and too early for the cheese-making process. Come back at 6:00 p.m., the man said. A GAEC is a Groupement Agricole d'Exploitation en Commun, a kind of small corporation involving several farmers.

We pulled over and took pictures of these cows and
calves at a point when the rain had stopped.

Now we had decided to drive more than 50 km, which would take about an hour, through the fog along the winding roads with steep drop-offs, and up to the top of the mountain called Le Puy Mary, one of the highest in the area at 1800 meters (5900 feet). Of course, when we got to the top of the Puy Mary, we couldn't see anything at all because a stiff wind carrying fog and mist was blowing. It was cold up there. And it was impressive, despite — or because of — the weather conditions.

Mountain scene we saw as we drove down
the north slope of Le Puy Mary.

On the other side of the mountain was a green valley centered on the village of Cheylade, and there were at least two dairy farms producing Cantal cheese in that valley: Chamalières at Le Claux, and La Famille Rodde at Le Caire. We thought we would try those for a view of the milking and/or cheese-making, and if they didn't pan out we would try to get back to the Conches farm near Saint-Chamade before 6:00 p.m. to see the cheese-making process there.

Looking toward Cheylade as we came down off the mountain

At Chamalières we drove up to the farm. At least three men saw us but just kind of looked the other way. One was on a tractor. I tried to talk to him but without much luck. It seemed hopeless. Lewis handed me a cell phone and asked me to call ahead to the Rodde family to see what the possibilities there might be. It was only 5 or 6 miles north.

Click on the pictures to see them full-size

Views of the valley from the Chamalières dairy farm —
all we got there was views, no tour or cheese

We were on a quest. We were determined to see a dairy farm and the cheese-making process. Cantal cheese has been made since Roman times, they say. We all like it — we had bought some from a vendor at the market in Salers. When I got Mme Rodde on the phone, she said to hurry. The afternoon milking was about to begin...

This is the first of five topics about cheese-making in the Cantal.
Here are links to all the topics: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5