I think I forgot to tell you – the school offers extra classes that you can take after hours for an extra cost. One of the classes that I signed up for was a cheese and drink pairing class, and it was last night (the other is chocolate – it’s next week). It was so awesome, so in addition to hosting you all for breakfast, dinner, and desserts, I now also need to plan a cheese night. Life is tough. Also, I took zero pictures, but I pulled some from the web so the post wasn’t all words.
We started by talking about the different categories of French cheese, of which there are eight. Each country categorizes cheese differently. In France, it’s based mostly on how long it’s aged, how the rind is formed, and if there is any melting involved in the process (they actually have a whole category for Fondue, but other cheeses are melted before they are aged, too). The only ingredients in cheese are milk, lactic ferments (the bacteria responsible for aging it), rennet (which is a natural substance from the cow’s milk that helps it coagulate), and salt. If it has anything else in it, it’s not considered cheese in France; so if you add herbs, it’d be a “spread” but not cheese.
We talked about the idea of “terroir”, which is that each region has it’s own identity when it comes to food, and that is determined by the type of grass in the region (which is what the animals eat), the climate, etc. The same breed of cow from one region can produce a totally different cheese than a cow in a different region, even if everything else is the same. The same concept applies for wine, beer, etc.
We also talked about how to make a good pairing. In summary – it mostly depends on what you like. But… he gave us a few ideas. A cheese that is really creamy (i.e., not aged very long) usually doesn’t have a strong taste, so you want to pair it with a drink that has a stronger taste, like a sparkling champagne, a cider, a fruity beer (a pumpkin beer?). Cheeses that have a really strong taste can either be paired with a lighter flavored drink if you want the cheese to be the star or a really strong drink if you want to highlight both – you’ll need something that can stand up to the strong taste of the cheese. For example, a bleu cheese could be paired with a stout, a port wine, or an IPA. Finally – he mentioned that you should mostly avoid pairing red wine with cheese unless it is a really light red wine. The tannins in red wine are much stronger than in white, and that combined with the cheese creates a metallic aftertaste in your mouth. He also mentioned that it’s perfectly okay to go from drinking red wine to white, because white is more acidic and is actually a better palate cleanser. I guess I should mention that this guy owns his own winery here.
He told us that the rind is meant to be tasted. It is natural (similar to how a film forms on the top of raw milk or a pot of cream that you have heated), but sometimes the cheese maker washes the rind with different things to adjust the taste. Sometimes it makes the cheese taste better, sometimes it doesn’t.
Then.. it was finally time to try the cheese. He is doing a bunch of other wine classes where they try normal wines (which, unfortunately I am not taking because they are on the weekends and I have other travel plans), so we tried some weird stuff in the class. Here is what we tasted:
- Chaource cheese (a soft cheese with a natural rind) with a cider from Normandy. Cider here, by the way, is very different from cider at home – it is less sweet and I really liked it. The cheese was creamy and delicious, and the rind was a good addition. This was my favorite overall pairing.
- Comte cheese (similar to Gruyere – a pressed and melted cheese prior to aging) with yellow wine. Yellow wine is just white wine that is aged in oak barrels for over six years. It is not good. It smelled like scotch and had a pretty strong taste, though it was only 13% alcohol.
- Munster cheese (soft cheese with a washed rind) with an amber ale. The munster was the stinkiest cheese I have ever smelled. The rind of this was the only one I didn’t like – it was terrible. If you took the rind off, the cheese was quite creamy and much milder than the smell, but it was very hard to get over the smell because it was just stuck in the room. The beer was really good, though (more on that in a minute).
- Roquefort cheese (a bleu cheese) with a sweet red wine. I loved the Roquefort and it is only made about an hour from here. The red wine was just too sweet for me – I probably would have paired this with a stronger white.
It was a delicious evening and I can’t wait to go to the market on Saturday so we can pick up some cheeses. Also – I’ve decided that we are going to visit Camembert in Normandy while we are up there. It is a really delicious creamy cheese.
More Croissants, Please! 