Comté Country: Part I

I might as well have been awakened by a cowbell, that’s how pastoral the scene appeared.  Rollercoasting meadows with on the fringes ripped-up clods of earth, the grass their scrabbed-out green fur.  The sky an infinity of blue. 

Bobillé and his wife live in Chapelle d’Huin amidst this splendor, have for many years.  And while I’m sure they know it’s nice, I doubt they’ve much time to think about it.  Making cheese, after all, is rather on the extreme side of time-intensive activities.

Bobillé wakes up every day at four in the morning and drives to fourteen farms in the neighborhood, collecting milk.  The farms have between 20 and 80 Montbéliard cows each, and Bobillé carefully notes how much each stop adds to the tank; at the end of the year, the profits will be divided proportionally amongst the farmers.

Unlike Swiss dairy farmers, whose ties to their milk are severed as soon as it pours into the vat, cowherds in the Jura have a vested interest in tasty cheesemaking: better cheese fetches higher profits for them to share.  They are the ones responsible for hiring a cheesemaker, who alchemizes their milk into cheese, but ultimately, the quality of a cheese depends on the quality of the milk that makes it, so they make sure to treat their cows nicely.

Alpage Comté means cheeses made in summer, when the cows browse alpine pastures for the 580 species of flora available for mastication: grains, legumes and wildflowers, medicinal plants and aromatics.  Typically a Montbéliard’s summer diet includes 150 different things; in winter, the cows eat hay and grains, producing cheese less nuanced.  They’re still a class apart, though—when asked whether the cows ever eat silage the man overseeing deliveries cries out “Never!”  He looks horrified.

So, to make Comté:

Heat cold milk to 31 degrees.  Add animal rennet and rest the milk for half an hour.  Throw both starters (one mesophilic, one thermophilic) and a bucketful of whey from the day before into the mix, and wait another half hour. 

Cut the junket with a cheese harp until the curds are grain-sized, mashed to a fine gravel.  Keep a good fierce slosh going as the curds break down, and when the temperature hits 55, heave into the vat what looks like a fat vacuum cleaner. 

Suck curds and whey into molds that look like big springform cake tins, hovering above a metal tub.  The upper part of the molds are pierced with holes that let the whey escape into the tub while the curds sink to the bottom (the whey is centrifuged and the cream kept, the rest disposed of).  Bobillé scoops the spume on top (‘le nuage de fromage!’) with what looks like a dustpan, or clears it with his forearms, or sprays water around it until the mess of foam has died down.  He puts a metal screen and plastic disk on top of the draining curd to prepare it for pressing, and a casein label identifying the cheese.  The molds roll onto the palm of a mechanical arm that lifts them up, down, sideways and backwards so he can slide them into place for pressing. 

Another vat is a half hour behind, and as he pumps the second vat empty, a brush attachment scrubs the first vat clean, Bobillé and his wife sprinting around like steroid ballerinas.  “On est un peu comme les Parisiens, ici,” says Bobillé.  “Full speed!”  In his white rubber apron, he looks like a butcher wilted by a sprinkler on his way to work.  Curds cling to the wet hairs on his arm.  In diminutive, precise hand he writes in a ledger the temperatures at various times, the results of scheduled litmus tests.

The vats are copper with matte rubbed steel exteriors.  Unlike artisanal cheese vats in Britain, there is no drain at the bottom, so to reach in with the vacuum pipe he dangles over the edge, his wellies flipping up over his cap as he leans in to catch the last dregs at the bottom.  “Faut pas l’ecole laitiere pour devenir fromager,” he says, grinning.  “Faut le cirque!”  He guffaws, then scrapes the edge of the vat with what looks like a credit card to get the last lactic traces off.

I wander into the farmshop room next door and look at the promotional Comté posters on the wall, made years ago by the regional council.  A woman comes in and buys eggs and Comté.  Only one client comes in for raw milk, though.  “Most people buy theirs from the supermarket,” Laetitia explains.  (She does, too.)  But traces of pride in the old ways still remain.  “L’art du fromager est comme le travail au levain naturel,” utters the poster.  It lists 83 descriptors of the aroma, subdivided into categories: animal, spicy, lactic, fruity, roasted, vegetal.  We have a bite of a cheese made in May 2004: creamy, rich, marmitey.

Laetitia makes gratins with Comté, loves it with fruit.  “J’affectionne le Comté,” she says. I like that turn of phrase.  On the way to the fort, in the car, she rings up the local butcher.  She dials a wrong number.  But the person on the other end happens to be her cousin.  “Small town,” she says, by way of explanation.

Fifty years ago everyone farmed, says Laetitia.  Today only six farms (or about ten families) live off the land, about 4% of the population.  Most of the region’s inhabitants are frontarliers, people who work in Switzerland but live in France, which is cheaper.  In Pontarlier itself the only industry is a Nestlé cereal-bar factory and a pneumatic valve plant recently acquisitioned by Americans. 

END OF PART I.  STAY TUNED FOR MORE...

Comments

[steven jenkins]

I love your stuff.
I import to Fairway aged Comte; not all that aged, though, eighteen months. It's a cheese I take home. I only take home like six or eight cheeses of the 400 or so we keep around.
But lately I've been so enjoying my aged Comte that I've been writing down the nuances of it I am able to articulate: Leather, chocolate, nutmeg, toast, beef broth, apricots, grilled onions, cafe au lait, tobacco, warm potatoes, hazelnuts, caramel . . .

[azurenath]

I was amazed at the flavors that could be found...not to mention how interesting it was to observe the difference between what Philippe and Claude look for when they taste Comte and what Randolph, my boss at NYD, thinks about when he's tasting cheddar. Randolph is judging cheese in order to pick his selections for the shop; Philippe and Claude taste in a much more qualitative way. Very different approaches, but both taken to a level of expertise wrought from experience that does your head in.