The end to a French cheese tradition? | Hacker News Reader

The end to a French cheese tradition?

bbc.com

32 pointsMiriamWeiner17 comments

The French has always had an oddly low confidence in the power of the quality of their products. The AOC is not a magic incantation, the "proper" Camenbert has indeed as described survived being mass produced across the world. Now there's an adjustment to the AOC rules to allow pasteurised milk, and behold, there are already people working on a quality-label-scheme that is even more "pure" than the original AOC.

> terroir, the French notion that a product is inextricably linked to the place where it is made

are there scientific grounds for this notion?

Certainly. Traditional practices for making many fermented products -- like beer, wine, and cheese -- involve allowing the culture to start naturally, from bacteria/yeast present in the environment. Other area will have different strains of bacteria/yeast present, so the same recipe may behave differently, or not work at all, if it's attempted somewhere else.

For quite a few things, certainly so:

-Particular climate conditions can have a distinct and pronounced effect on the taste. I am not a wine connoisseur, but all the times I've had oolong tea that tastes like Taiwanese high mountain oolong, it indeed was from that region.

-As others have noted, fermented products take the bacterial culture in the air, and that certainly varies from place to place. Belgian Lambics won't taste the same as Lambics brewed in other places.

I don't think these two examples require much science to be supported.

Lambic is spontaneously fermented and can't be brewed outside Brussels or the Payottenland in Belgium because only that region has the right microflora (yeasts and bacteria): http://www.beerplanet.eu/index.php?cnt=10&paramID=1&typeID=4

Other beer sold as Lambic (such as Sam Adams Cranberry Lambic) isn't really Lambic: http://blogaboutbeer.com/the-case-against-sam-adams-cranberr...

It is probably not coincidence that both oolong tea and beer are produced through fermentation processes.

You don't think it's reasonable for a product bearing the name of its origin to be made in that place? Considering how different water and milk from different regions are it can lead to vastly differing end results. That's quite apart from industrial variations chasing the every last penny and ruining it along the way.

Most "Cheddar" is unrecognisable and incomparable to proper Cheddar for instance.

That's not what's being contended. If you claim something about your product, that claim should be true, including it's geographical origin.

But that doesn't answer the question: does Cheddar cheese made in the village of Cheddar have some intrinsic, inimitable quality that can't be achieved outside of that village?

(And industrial producers do indeed plop down large factories in certain geographies so they can churn out large quantities of bland product, yet slap a geographical origin label on it, so it doesn't even protect against that).

As I mentioned milk changes taste dramatically across regions. Well it did before the current trend for homogenisation which has hurt the taste in every region.

So I would not be in the least surprised to find that the resulting cheeses are equally variant based on region.

But that's assuming that improvements can't be made. In the case of cheddar in particular, it certainly can. Look at the 2018 World Cheese results for sharp cheddar (https://wccc.myentries.org/contest/results/?event=61&eventCl...) . English cheddar isn't even competitive and the winners are Canadian and US cheddars.

The "World Championship" organised by the Wisconsin Cheese Makers Association with Wisconsin doing so disproportionately well every year. Hmmm.

A bit like the world series then for international coverage.

The World Cheese Awards has a much more natural looking profile of entries and winners: https://gff.co.uk/awards/world-cheese-awards/

I think that this definition of terroir is romanticized.

inextricably -> in a way that is impossible to disentangle or separate

Science seeks to disentangle the complexities of nature. Engineering is the application of those disentangled complexities to yield controlled results. Maybe one day we can engineer high-fidelity replicas of terroir-bound products.

Things like wine, for instance, have thousands of years of observable behavior to support the notion of terroir. For example, in Burgundy, where the soil/climate/wind/elevation/slope/everything can affect if you can sell the bottle for > $1,000, or ~$20, even if they're only an acre apart.

Would really like to see if any of these cheese experts can tell the difference between cheese made from raw milk and cheese made from pasteurized milk. You'd need some extra blinding, the cheese maker also could not know which milk they are using.

The whole issue seems to be a battle between large producers using industrial methods and small producers using traditional methods. I think protecting the name is something they should do.

Even a non-expert can tell the difference between a raw-milk cheese and one that uses pasteurised milk when it is a cheese that is soft-ripened for a short duration. You may not agree with everyone else that the raw-milk cheese is better, but you can notice a difference.

The difference is pretty obvious actually. This isn't just a gimmick for hipsters.

Not a cheese expert but I definitely can

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