Handed in on time!

So there it is – the completed manuscript for my first book, The Cheese And I. It's coming out in September and I'm so excited to see the finished product. 

I have to confess that I was a little disappointed that the whole book condensed into such a small file size that it would have fitted three times (with room to spare) onto a floppy disk. All those words!

Anyway, now that’s in the trusty hands of the good people at Michael O'Mara books, I’ve begun touring France and checking out some of my favourite cheese producers. The reception can get a little sketchy in the mountains so apologies if I go off radar a bit. I’ll do my best to keep you posted on what I’m up to. I've got my camera with me and will be snapping away, so watch this space for more pictures and cheesy titbits.

Leaving Lyon (sniff)

These last 10 days have been emotional.

Lyon, it’s been awesome - I'm going to miss you.

I have now officially left the Lyon shop, nearly a year to the day when I started, and handed over the keys to our Lyon flat. Our time in Lyon is officially over.

It’s been a blast but it’s time to move on and so I'm back for a short stay in London to finish up the book and finalise organising my “summer of cheese”. I'm planning a tour around France visiting some of my favourite producers and learning about what makes their cheese quite so special.

Lyon has been brilliant and I've met some fantastic people. This post however, is a specific mention and thank you to my favourite cheese shop team at Fromagerie Mons – Etienne Boissy, who have all done so much to help me find my way in the cheese biz (and put up with me when I was massively stressed in competition training).

I've had a great time working with you and thanks for the send-off!

From left to right:
Sabrina, Bénédicte, Etienne, Me, Victor and Severine

More exciting news

Ok, you might have noticed that I haven’t been blogging much recently - Sorry about that, but I do have an excuse though, so please bear with me.

I am very happy to announce that my current distraction from blogging is that I'm writing a book - also titled “The Cheese and I”. It’s being published by the lovely folks at Michael O’Mara Books and is due for an Autumn release this year. It’s going to be fairly autobiographical, talking about how I went from accountant to (ahem, prize-winning) cheesemonger with lots of detail on the people, problems and cheeses that I've met along the way.

If you’re interested, you might want to check out this article from the bookseller and don't worry, I certainly intend to continue blogging so watch this space.

The Bookseller picture unfortunately only shows my face, and not the much more handsome little fella that I was holding at the time. Here it is in full.

Me and a goat

Abondance

Continuing the theme of presenting cheeses from my platter, I thought that Abondance deserved an introduction. Particularly given this epic advert that has been up in most of the Lyon metro stations recently.

Abondance is a pressed and cooked raw cow’s milk cheese in the Savoie, a mountainous part of France that houses some of the French Alps.

"You're going to eat tradition" (with an implied "whether you like it or not")
Check out the official site

The origins of the cheese are tied to the work of the monks at the l’Abbaye d’Abondance who, from the 14^th century, created pastures in the Val de l’Abondance and carefully selected a breed of cows, also known as Abondance. The goal of this work was similar to that of most alpine cheese producers, essentially to find a way of storing the richness of summer grasses and plants through the brutally cold and desolate winter months. Cheese is a great medium for this, particularly the harder, cooked cheeses which age gracefully allowing storage for anything from months to years.

Abondance, a handsome beast

Sorry, 'cooked'?

Just to clarify, when I say that Abondance is a cooked cheese, I mean that once the curd has been formed from the milk in a big vat (like a big jelly), it is cut into lots of little cubes – this mixture of curd cubes and residual whey is then heated, to about 48^oC in the case of Abondance. This causes the curd cubes to tighten and shrink, expelling more liquid. Generally speaking, the lower the moisture content, the longer the cheese will age.

Abondance is considered to be a semi-cooked cheese. Other cooked cheeses include the classic French examples of Comté and Beaufort, which are both cooked to around 53^oC. As a result, Comté and Beaufort tend to reach their peaks of flavour and texture at around 15 – 18 months (although this can vary hugely) and Abondance can’t really be taken much older than a year.

Personally I prefer this cheese when it’s matured - the best part of a year old, such as the piece in these photos - but it is available as young as 3 or 4 months old where the rind will be much paler and the pâte significantly less craggy looking.

Well aged Abondance, showing off its fissured pâte.

In this well-aged piece, the pâte has dried and fissured but the flavour has also developed significantly, imbuing the natural fruity, hazelnutty quality of the cheese with strength, piquancy and a slight bitterness (which refreshes the palate). Watch out though, with some examples of the cheese at this age, it can develop a very strong stinging finish on the tongue.  

This complex flavour, coupled with a relatively soft pâte give a perfect cooking cheese, that is ideally suited to the tops of gratins and the classic après ski fondue.

Another factor that separates this cheese from the Beauforts and Comtés is the treatment of the rind during aging, typically rubbing with water or a water and vinegar mix to develop flavour characteristics commonly found in the soft, washed-rind cheeses such as Epoisses and Langres (more on Langres coming soon to a computer screen near you). This is generally where that bitterness comes from.

The dark brown rind can take on an almost red tinge when well matured

The name Abondance, and the methods through which it is produced have been protected under the French AOC system (Appellation d’Origine Contrôlé) since 1990. If you can find it, you should really be looking for the rarer Abondance Fermier, which is essentially produced through the same process, but mechanisation is largely prohibited.

Parmesan

Parmesan (as the French call it), or to give it its full name Parmigiano-Reggiano DOP, was another of the cheeses that I put on my competition platter. It’s a stunning Italian cheese that I imagine almost everyone reading this will have come across in some form or another.

Parmesan showing off its brittle texture

In the UK, we tend to use it almost as seasoning, grated onto pizza, or shaved over a salad. But there’s more to it than that, this is a fascinating and unusual cheese that’s well worth a more in-depth look. I could go into huge detail as to how it’s made and aged etc. but there are already some pretty good resources on this on the web, so I would invite you to have a look at these videos.

So, how should you buy parmesan? As I've said before, if you can possibly avoid it, you really shouldn't be buying cheese from a supermarket. Try and find your nearest cheese shop, it is well worth the effort to forge a lasting relationship with an expert, the rewards are greater than Nectar points can ever be.

Parmesan's marked rind

You should look for parmesan in the biggest squarest lump that you can find/afford, it’ll last well in the fridge but the issue, as always, is that a cut cheese dries out. The cheese, for me at least, is always better when freshly cut, the texture will have a crumbly, and is almost effervescent in the mouth; the flavour will be fresher as well. That’s why the best parmesan you will ever taste is prised from the centre of a wheel of parmesan opened just instants ago. It’s worth noting that as soon as a cheese is cut, the wonderful flavour compounds that have been building up over the years of affinage will be released in a short burst that’s almost criminal to miss.

I included Parmesan on my cheese platter because its taste and texture border on unique in the cheese world and it deserves to be treated as a cheese in its own right, not just as a dust on top of what might otherwise be a bland pasta dish. My recommendation is that the next time you have cause to open a bottle of champagne, you buy a reasonably well aged piece of Parmesan (around a couple of years old) that hasn't been allowed to dry out too much and you prise it apart into small bite size chunks at the last possible moment. Paired with the champagne, or a good dry sparkling wine, it truly comes alive.

Any leftover chunks (unlikely though they might be) go well in in a salad, and don’t forget that the rind can be added to the mix to impart a soup or risotto with a richer savoury flavour – just drop it in to the simmering stock.

I wanted to finish with a brief aside on opening and cutting a wheel of Parmesan. The whole cheese is a bit of a beast, weighing in at around 40kg and it tends to have quite an oily rind making it difficult to manoeuvre. 

My boss Etienne having opened a Parmesan the
traditional way with his Parmesan knives

Traditionally it’s opened with a set of specialist knives with flat 10 cm long blades, inserting and wiggling to find the natural weaknesses in the cheeses, this splits the cheese leaving a very uneven surface, giving a great idea of how the curds hold together to form the finished cheese. This opening method is considered to respect the texture of the cheese.

In the Mons caves and shop however, we do it differently. We use a very long, extra thick cheese wire to cut the cheese neatly in half, the benefit being a much lower surface area to lose humidity and flavour, with the advantage that it is easier to wrap closely once cut to further reduce undesired loss of water. Pulling a thick cheese wire through a block of solid cheese is no easy business and requires both muscle and technique - it took me a while to get the hang of it.

It’s with a certain nerdy pride that I framed the badge of the Italian affineur from the first Parmesan that I managed to open myself. It’s now sitting on the mantelpiece.

Parmesan trophy

Tartiflette

A while ago now I held a cheese evening celebrating winter cheeses (see the 'Events' tab for more on these). The purpose of the evening was to show off the cheeses that are at their seasonal best in the colder months and a few ways to make cheese a more central element in a meal, rather than just a quick (and all too often over-looked) course between main and dessert.

Individual Tartiflettes

As part of the evening, I decided to serve my interpretation of Tartiflette, a well-loved French dish that marries hot gooey cheese with potatoes to create the food equivalent of a snug woollen jumper and slippers. Perfect for when all is cold, wet and miserable outside, or you’ve done sufficient exercise to merit such a calorific treat. Although one could easily believe that this après-ski staple has all the hall-marks of a French family classic, the recipe was actually created in the 1980s by the ‘Syndicat Interprofessionnel du Reblochon’ as a means to sell more of the key cheesy ingredient, Reblochon.  

Reblochon is a small flat creamy cheese from Savoie protected with AOP status. Its rind is washed during the ageing process to create a more complex flavour and develop its beautiful orange rind. The cheese came into existence as a rent dodge for farmers renting land in the region. The farmer would halt the milking process before the cow’s udders were empty so as to pay rent on a smaller quantity of milk (rent would have been proportional to the milk obtained). Later the farmer would use the rest of the milk to make a small cheese. Brilliantly, “reblocher” is the verb for this process.

Browning the onions in the tasty bacon fat

In essence, tartiflette is potatoes drenched in a creamy lardon, onion and wine sauce, with Reblochon added to the mix and layered on top. The whole thing is left in the oven or grill to melt and brown the cheese.

Everyone has their own favourite way of preparing this meal. I asked my fellow cheese professionals at the shop for their recipe, they all had their own way of doing it, and they all thought that theirs was the best….

Most of the recipes out there involve presentation in a large sharing dish. Sharing like this is no bad thing, but I wanted to go for something a bit more formal in presentation, so I created this version of the recipe for individual servings in ramekins.

Ready for some wine and cream...

One thing that I ought to point out is that the photos here are of a practice run in which I used Reblochon. On the evening, I replaced the Reblochon with Abbaye de Tamié instead which is a rather similar, monk-made cheese that has a much more robust (and fairly pungent) flavour – it’s an amazing cheese and if you’re a fan of Reblochon, well worth looking up.

When you’re making this you may find that you have sauce left over, in which case, grab some bread and mop that savoury goodness up immediately. If you have sliced potatoes left over, you can pan fry them for brilliant sauté potatoes.

Reblochon disk shortly to be cut in two

Individual Tartiflettes (serves 4)

4 Ramekins

1 clove of garlic

2 onions, finely sliced

200g smoked lardons (or streaky bacon)

750g waxy potatoes (skins left on)

A good bottle of white wine, slightly sweet and not too acidic. Preferably Vin de Savoie

100ml of cream

Half a Reblochon or Abbaye de Tamié

1. Pre-heat the oven to 180^oC.
2. Get the potatoes on to steam (or boil) early - they need to be pretty much cooked through when you put the dish together so it makes sense to get them going ASAP.
3. Slowly heat smoked lardons (or streaky bacon cut into small pieces) in a dry pan to render out the fat, cook until starting to crisp and then add the sliced onion.
4. Soften the onion over a low heat until it tastes sweet and has started to brown. Take your time and don’t rush or you’ll end up with a nasty burnt onion taste. This stage is going to take up to 15 minutes with a bit of occasional stirring. If the pan is too dry, feel free to add some butter.
5. Once the onions are sweet and brown and very tasty, pour a decent sized glass of wine into the pan and stir, cooking off the alcohol, then add the cream and turn the heat right down.
6. Take your cheese and use a biscuit cutter to cut neat circles out of it and then cut each of these in half to leave disks with rind on one side. Roughly chop the rest of the cheese and stir it through the now rich and sticky sauce. Test the sauce for seasoning and acidity - you may need to add more wine if it tastes a bit flat.
7. The potatoes should be just about cooked by now, and if they aren’t it isn’t the end of the world as they’re going to get some oven time. Drain them and let them cool a little, then slice them into ~4 mm disks.
8. You’re now ready to prepare the tartiflette! Kick things off by rubbing your ramekins with a garlic clove that has been cut in half.
9. Now start layering. Begin with a spoonful of the sauce then add a layer of potatoes, repeat until the ramekin is nearly full with a sauce layer on top. Now add your disk of cheese and place the ramekins in the oven for 20 minutes or so. The filling will still be hot so it’s just a question of melting and browning the cheese. Keep checking to make sure that the top isn’t burning though.
10. Serve to your guests (or eat them all yourself).

Rigotte de Condrieu

Over the next few blog posts I'd like to share a bit more about some of the cheeses that were used on my platter in the competition.

As we're reliably informed / desperately hoping, spring is around the corner, and the peak goat's cheese season is starting in earnest. With that in mind, let's start this series of posts with the small but mighty Rigotte de Condrieu. As with all cheeses, there is effectively too much to say about this cheese to fit it into a little blog post, so I’ll just give you a taster…

Rigotte de Condrieu

It’s a small hockey puck of a cheese, made with raw goat’s milk and weighing in at a minimum of 30g. The milk has to come from certain breeds of goat that trace their lineage back to the Massif Centrale and the cheese must be made on the slopes of the Massif du Pilat just south of Lyon - A fairly desolate and remote area which can trace its goat’s cheese making back to the 18th century.

The word “Rigotte”, as far as I can tell, is a derivation of “rigol” or “rigot”, which were words used to describe small streams running off of the Massif and potentially through Condrieu, a former principle market in the region. Like so many other examples (Stilton being a classic one), the cheese takes its name after the market in which it is sold, rather than the area in which it was made.

The rigotte has an ivory coloured rind that can become blue with greater age. In the early stages of its life it has a melt (slowly) in the mouth texture which hardens to become really quite brittle (like the ones in the photos).

Its taste is uncompromisingly goaty, with hints of hazelnut, and, when young, a slight acidic tang.

Hockey puck shape, perfect for
warming through and adding to salads

This is a cheese that goes well warmed through slightly in a salad, or when aged and fairly dry in texture, is excellent as an aperitif. An obvious wine match would be a Condrieu, but essentially, something white and slightly oaked, and neither too dry nor too acidic will be great.

As a brief aside, it’s worth noting that the Rigotte de Condrieu occupies a rather unusual position of being recognised under the French Appellation d'Origine Controlee (AOC) system but not the European Appellation d’Origine Protégée (AOP). The reasoning is that in the eyes of Europe the Rigotte has yet to prove that its qualities and characteristics derive essentially from its geographic environment. They’re currently working on proving that link pretty hard I believe.

The various systems of geographic protection (AOP and AOC etc…) are wonderfully interesting and bureaucratic, and really deserve space of their own to describe. I'll go into more detail about this and try to decode some of the complexities in a future post. 

The brittle texture of an aged Rigotte,,,