Cook Like A Cheesemonger: Funky “Fondue-tiflette” Potatoes

by Jared Kaufman 

 Serves 4

It’s cold out there, people. Let’s take a cue from folks in the European alps, who know a thing or two about snowy weather, by making this cheesy potato dish that blends Swiss fondue with French tartiflette — hence “fondue-tiflette.”

 (A note for the sticklers among us: Tartiflette recipes typically call for reblochon cheese, a funky washed-rind softie that’s difficult to find in the U.S. due to laws that restrict the importation of young raw-milk cheeses. But don’t confuse this for time-honored tradition — tartiflette was only invented back in the ’80s, as a marketing tactic to sell more reblochon!)

 This recipe captures the spirit of tartiflette by bringing together strong cheese with potatoes, wine, and herbs, but also with the luscious and silky texture of a good cheese fondue. For my cheeses, I chose Risler Square Raclette, a traditional Swiss melter; Fontina Val d’Aosta, the real stuff from up in the Italian alps; and some classic Taleggio. For the firm cheeses, you could also use Ogleshield, Challerhocker, or our newest cheese, Marbré des Alpes; for the soft cheese, saltier options like Époisses, Red Hawk, or Grayson would also be delightful.

 If you’re not a fan of pungent cheeses, don’t turn your back on me now! The flavors mellow out as the cheeses melt, and, when combined with the potatoes and wine and herbs, they morph into a tangy, sweet-and-savory, belly-warming meal. Trust me on this one.

From France 44:

• Two ⅓ lb. chunks of funky melting cheeses, such as the ones listed above

• ⅓ lb. washed-rind soft cheese, such as the ones listed above

• ½ c. duck fat

• ¾ cup dry white wine, such as Loimer Lois Grüner Veltliner

• Whole-grain mustard, such as American Spoon Whole Seed Mustard or Delouis Fils Old Fashioned Mustard

 From your pantry:

• 2 lb. russet potatoes

• 2 T all-purpose flour

• 2 cloves garlic, grated

• 1 tsp. chopped fresh thyme, plus more to garnish

• Salt to taste

Instructions:

1. Begin your potatoes by scrubbing them clean, then cutting them into 1-inch cubes.

2.            Cook your potatoes. In a wide pan over medium heat, heat the duck fat until one test potato sizzles when dropped in. Add the potatoes and fry until they’re crispy and golden-brown. This might take awhile, so…

3.            Meanwhile, prep the cheese. Grate the firm cheeses into a bowl. Cut the soft cheese into small cubes (½ inch should do the trick) and add them to the bowl with the hard cheeses. Toss with flour to coat.

4.            Make the fondue sauce. Into a saucepan or small Dutch oven over low heat, pour the wine. When it begins to simmer, slowly add in the cheese, small amounts at a time.

5.            Stir the cheese constantly to help it melt evenly. (The firmer cheeses will likely melt more quickly than the softies, so you can help things along by gently breaking up the pieces that remain.) Once it comes together, it’s ready to use immediately, but you can set it aside if you need to finish other components.

6.            Once the potatoes are just about crispy, add garlic, thyme, and salt to the pan and toss around to coat. Continue frying for just a minute or two longer. Remove to a paper towel-lined plate.

7.            Time to assemble! Arrange the potatoes on your serving plate and pour the fondue over the top. (The fondue should be hot! If you had to set it aside in step 5, be sure to gently heat it back up on the stove — while stirring constantly — before you assemble.) Drizzle some whole-grain mustard on top, garnish with thyme, and serve with a nice glass of the white wine.

Raclette Roundup!

by Austin Coe Butler

Raclette takes its name from “racler,” which in a dialect of French Swiss, means “to scrape,” and many hundreds of years ago, when the cowherds who made this cheese would gather around a fire on cool Alpine summer nights, they would warm the cheese against the fire and scrape it, browned and bubbling, onto their bread. As we head into another bout of bitter cold, we are promoting three Raclette-style cheeses, because what better way to indulge yourself on a winter’s night than with some broiled Raclette cheese?

            Spring Brook Reading Raclette is an American Raclette made in Reading, Vermont, from raw Jersey cow’s milk. It is milder than its Swiss forebears but just as dreamy to melt. (We use it on and in a number of our melts, sandwiches, and prepared foods like our Raclette pappardelle.) The supple, creamy texture and buttery flavor make it an excellent entryway into the realm of Raclette.

            Risler Square Raclette is real-deal Swiss Raclette made by Käserei Oberli Rislen in St. Galen, Switzerland. It is notable first for its shape (square), second for its smell (“barnyardy” is being bashful), and finally for its flavor (with a sharp tang and long, funky finish like ramps or Bärlauch that still have some dirt on them). Outside of lounging around in a Chalet wearing a turtleneck and a pair of Finken in the Alps, this is as close as you can get to the veritable experience without the fear of altitude sickness.

            Montgomery’s Ogleshield deserves an explanation as it is an exceptional cheese though unfamiliar to many. You most certainly know Jamie Montgomery’s Cheddar, a titanic, standard-setting West Country Farmhouse Cheddar that is rich, robust, and grassy. Ogleshield was originally called Jersey Shield, since it is made from Jersey cow’s milk and the wide, circular shape resembled the Yetholm-type shield an archaeological investigation on Jamie’s farm turned up among the remains of a bronze century fort. But the problem with Jersey Shield was that the warmth and humidity of the English summers made this cheese spoil from the inside and bloat with gas until it exploded! It wasn’t until William Oglethorpe, who had spent time in the Swiss Alps making cheese saw the wheels of Jersey Shield and suggested Jamie brine them. Brining cheeses allows preserving salt to penetrate them to their core in a way that surface salting cannot. Large cheese like Gruyère and Comté, Emmental and Parmigiano Reggiano are all brined. Jamie repaid Bill by bestowing his name on the cheese, and thus Ogleshield was born. If you are ever in London’s Burough Market, you can find Bill Oglethorpe at his market stall Kappacasein serving his scrumptious grilled cheese sandwiches or ‘cheese toasties” as the Brits say, a mix of Montgomery’s cheddar, Ogleshield, and an assortment of alliums griddled to perfection, or scraping luxurious waves of broiled Ogleshield over boiled potatoes with a scrunch of black pepper and cornichons to garnish. This cheese also deserves an uncooked place on a cheeseboard where the fudgy texture and notes of savory roasted peanuts and vegetal, fresh pea tendril shine. Whenever one of our mongers samples Ogleshield just to remember what it tastes like, they undoubtedly say, “I love this cheese!”

            Don’t have a Raclette machine? Don’t worry! You can always broil slices of cheese on a sheep pan and swoop them up with a wide spatula and blanket whatever you desire. Raclette is great in fondue, Tartiflette, or the rarer Welsh Rarebit. No matter how you are serving these cheeses, broiled and scraped over potatoes, melted into scrambled eggs, or savored at their ambient temperatures alongside a bottle of Gillmore Mariposa País, these cheeses offer the depth and breadth of Raclette with something for everyone to love.

The Pairing: Ogleshield

On a hill in Cadbury where the castle of King Arthur perhaps once sat, the Montgomery family has been making cheese for three generations. Although famed for their farmhouse cheddar, the dairy makes an unexpected style of cheese from an unexpected heard of cows, at least for an English dairy. Montgomery’s Ogleshield is a raclette-style cheese. It’s made with Jersey cow’s milk and like many British cheeses, Ogleshield is grassy and earthy, but its washed rind gives the cheese a distinct boldness, reminiscent of beef stock. Ogleshield stars in this week’s pairing along with Mairposa, a delicious Chilean red made of 100% país grapes.  

Ogleshield is sold to us by Neal’s Yard Dairy, the gold standard for British and Irish cheeses. Neal’s Yard has championed the success of British and Irish cheese since the late 1970’s. From selection  to aging and selling, Neal’s Yard balances tradition and innovation, working with stunning dairy farms around the Isles to create unique, flavorful, iconic cheeses which get shipped around the world. Of the many incredible farms supplying wheels to Neal’s Yard, Montgomery’s is a standout both for their cheddar and Ogleshield. 

A product of risk and experimentation, it took trial and error before Ogleshield became the cheese we know it as today. Jamie Montgomery usually uses his Friesian (Holstein) herd for cheesemaking, meaning Ogleshield is the first cheese made from Montgomery’s Jersey heard and the only cheese sold at Neal’s Yard to be made of 100% Jersey milk. Jersey milk is sweet and creamy and known to make great melting cheeses. When the experimentation began, the new Jersey cheese had a natural rind. A Neal’s Yard cheesemaker, who studied cheese traditions in the Alps, suggested that a salt water wash might improve the cheese’s maturation. Ogleshield was born. With the washed rind and meltable Jersey milk, the Montgomery farm found themselves with a West Country version of raclette. 

We’ve paired this beefy, grassy, raclette-style with a frankly delicious red wine from Chile. Mariposa is made of 100% país grapes, introduced to Chile by Spanish colonialist priests sent to set up missionaries in the New World. Some país vines are around 100 years old, but Mairposa comes from 40 year old vines and is made by a husband and wife dedicated to sustainable, minimalist winemaking. This red is fruity and smooth, with a little bit of red berry tartness on the finish. In many cases, the fruitiness of a wine draws out similar notes in the cheese. In this pairing, the opposite happens as Oglesheild’s grass notes amplify the background notes of minerality and earth in the otherwise fruit-forward red. Enjoy Ogleshield melted for a raclette dinner or simply snack on a wedge at room temperature. Either way, make sure you grab a bottle of Mariposa and enjoy the two together.

Beillevaire Cheese

Three by Beillevaire

by Austin Coe Butler

Beillevaire (bay-VAIR) is an exclusive distributor, dairy, cheesemaker, and affineur (cheese “finisher” or ager), named after Pascal Bellevaire and located in the Marais Vendéen on France’s paludal, southern coast outside Nantes. Bellevaire was raised on his parent’s dairy farm in Marais Vendéen, and his life’s work has been transforming that humble family dairy into an esteemed exporter and producer of some of France’s best cheeses. This week, we are promoting three remarkable cheeses by Beillevaire: Ossau-Iraty, Somport, and Marbré des Alpes.

Ossau-Iraty is an iconic, ancient ewe’s milk tomme made in the Basque Country of the Pyrenees. It is an ancestral cheese to the Basque people, who have been inhabiting Europe and making this cheese longer than any other living European peoples on a timescale where the rise and fall of empires is the passing of a shadow to them. (Some estimates date the origin of this cheese to over 4,000 years old). Ossau-Iraty’s flavor is rich and caramel-sweet like roasted chestnuts. It has just a snap of sheep tang without tasting gamey, making it an excellent gateway into the world of sheep cheeses. If you’ve spent any time with our mongers, they’ve undoubtedly sent you home with a wedge, as it is a staff favorite.

Somport is more of a rarity, and while often compared to Ossau-Iraty it is made from goat’s milk. Beillevaire sources their Somport from just four small fermier (farmhouse) producers in the Aquitaine, France’s southwestern corner. Its flavor is brashly goaty and deserving of those gregarious animals it descends from with an aroma of damp, rich soil and crimini mushrooms. While its texture can be firm, recently our wheels have been supple and yielding in texture, with a delightful semi-firm bounce. We paired Somport with Broc Cellars Got Grapes? a few months ago, and while that wine is sold out for the moment, any juicy red blend would pair beautifully with this cheese.

Marbré des Alpes is Beillevaire’s Morbier inspired cheese. While you may be unfamiliar with Morbier, you likely know the cheese it was born from–Comté. Morbier was traditionally made with what little curd was leftover from making Comté. It was not enough to make much of anything with, but cheesemakers are by necessity not ones to waste. They would scrape the soot from the bottom of the cauldrons the milk was heated in and sprinkle the soot over the curd to prevent it from forming a crust and protecting it from insects. In the morning, the cheese would be topped off with a bit of fresh curd, pressed, and then washed with brine. This delicacy was reserved by the cheesemakers for their own private consumption as the reward for their labors. Nowadays, cheesemakers create the wheels in one day and use vegetable ash as a nod to this cheese’s history, which continues to gives this cheese its distinctive “marbling.” Beillevaire’s Marbré des Alpes comes from Désaignes in the southeast Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region. While young wheels of Marbré are buttery and mild, the more mature wheels we have are surprising and delightfully piquant flavor and spicy aroma.

The Pairing: Bandaged Bismark

by Sophia Stern

Open the fridge in a typical American household and you’ll probably find cheddar in the cheese drawer. Most of us know cheddar as a rindless rectangle wrapped in plastic. However, cheddar’s original form is pretty unfamiliar to American cheese culture. Traditional English cheddar is made in huge cylinders and gets snugly wrapped in a cloth bandage. For this week’s pairing, we’ve chosen a domestic cheddar inspired by this tradition, but with several other distinct features. Not only is Bandaged Bismark clothbound and cave-aged, it is also made with raw sheep’s milk and aged beneath the streets of Brooklyn in New York City. 

In what was once a 19th century brewing cave, Benton Brown & Susan Boyle now run Crown Finish Caves. Crown Finish is a cheese aging facility operating 30 feet below Bergen Street in Brooklyn. The cave is loaded with wooden shelves, stacked to the brim with around 28,000 pounds of aging cheeses. Except for a few Italian cheeses made from water buffalo’s milk, most of the cheese at Crown Finish is made on farms in Vermont or Upstate New York. Experienced dairy farmers with land and facilities make fresh wheels of cheese, known as green cheese, and send the wheels down to Brooklyn where Brown, Boyle, and their small team attend to the laborious process of aging their collection of different cheeses. 

Bandaged Bismark is a reflection of the Northeast’s rich dairy traditions. This cheddar starts with sheep’s milk from an Amish dairy farm in Upstate New York, which is then sent to the cheesemakers at Grafton Village Cheese in Vermont. At Grafton, the accomplished cheddar makers turn the New York sheep’s milk into cheese. Once ready for aging, the young wheels are sent down to Crown Finish, where they descend below the streets to be clothbound and aged on wooden shelves for four to six months. The bandage introduces a complex flavor to the cheddar, capturing the microbiology of the cave and imparting flavors of earth and minerality. The sheep’s milk itself is buttery and floral, with distinct herbaceous notes and a slight tartness on the finish. 

Sheep’s milk can be tricky to pair, but the cheddar of it all offered a clue. Since chardonnay and cheddar are a classic pairing, we chose Beaune 'Clos du Foulot' Monopole from the Baptiste Guyot winery. This young wine, entirely made from chardonnay grapes, has a distinct green apple acidity, along with surprisingly strong notes of butter and oak for a 2020 vintage. As the cheese is more buttery than tart, the acid in the wine brightens the cheddar and draws out the cave-aged minerality from the rind. Although cheddar and chardonnay are both familiar faces, this pairing highlights the unique features in both the wine and cheese without compromising on their classic comfort. 

Roncadella Parmigiano Reggiano

by Austin Coe Butler

Between Reggio Emilia and Modena, in the lowlands of the Po River Valley where Parmigiano Reggiano came to be, the Caseificio di Gavasseto e Roncadella has been making Parmigiano Reggiano for generations. Despite the weight of tradition, this quiet caseificio does things their own way. To start with, they are led by the only female master cheesemaker, Marisa Verzelloni, who took over cheesemaking as the casaro in her 50s after he husband passed away. They make just 24 wheels a day, and they only sell their cheese and fresh butter out of their small retail shop. Roncadella turns the wheels in brine daily to ensure contact with the air, whereas most producers submerge the wheel in brine. They charge more in price than other producers, but still, people choose their cheese over others, and there’s still a line out the door before holiday shopping. And while people outside the little village have started to find out about Roncadella Parmigiano Reggiano, the coop still only sells primarily to local restaurants and vendors and never large consolidators and distributors. At the 2018 World’s Best Cheese Award, this little creamery snatched not just a silver and a gold medal, but the most prestigious prize, the Super Gold!

            Roncadella Parmigiano Reggiano has a lovely fruit aroma, a light caramel sweetness, brodo savoriness, and a touch of spice combined with milky tang to surprise you along its delightfully long finish. The sweetness of this Parmigiano Reggiano makes it especially suited for a simple pasta dish: pasta burro e parmigiano, pasta with butter and Parmigiano. Simply by adding al dente pasta to a saucepan with a knob of butter, a ladle of starchy pasta water, a generous handful of Roncadella Parmigiano Reggiano, and stirring together for several minutes, a gorgeous, glossy sauce will form for the ultimate Italian comfort food. This is actually the original fettuccine Alfredo before heavy cream was added to the dish in American kitchens. It’s important to use dried pasta when making this, as fresh pasta is too eggy for such a rich dish.

            While Parmigiano Reggiano is a fantastic culinary cheese, it is an equally glorious table cheese that deserves a crowning place on your next cheeseboard. We’ve previously paired the Cravero Parmigiano Reggiano with Flora Prosecco, and this or any other crisp, bubbly white would be exquisite with Roncadella’s Parmigiano Reggiano. Try serving it with a sliced Bosc pear and a streak of our staff’s favorite Olivewood balsamic for the perfect bite.

            If you have some of our Cravero Parmigiano Reggiano, try it side-by-side Roncadella to taste the difference. These side-by-side tastings are the best way to discover and explore the many differences, both subtle and explicit, in cheeses that are ostensibly the same. Cravero is made in the Emilian Apennine mountains by Massimo Libra and then matured by the Cravero family in Bra, which is located in Piedmont. Roncadella is made in the valley at the base of those mountains and matured the whole twenty-four months at the same location. The plants and people, animals and atmosphere, are what separate these cheeses, each expressing in its own unique way what we love about Parmigiano Reggiano.

The Pairing: Appenzeller

by Sophia Stern

January teased us with a forty degree day, but the below-double digit weeks are still long ahead of us. As a celebration of dark, cold winter nights, we’ve paired a staple cold-weather cheese with a dry Riesling from an unexpected location. This week, from the Swiss Alps, we have Appenzeller paired with a delicious Riesling from the Finger Lakes region in upstate New York. Appenzeller is as nutty and buttery as it is funky and bold. The Black Label Appenzeller featured in this week’s pairing is made of raw cow’s milk and has the distinct melt-in-your mouth feature of a classic Alpine cheese. At six months, this Appenzeller is flecked with small tyrosine crystals, offering a slight crunch throughout the cheese. 

Tradition and hard work are key to any cheesemaking process, but making cheese in the mountains takes cheesemaking to another level. Extreme cattle herding is integral to Alpine cheese. Herdsmen move the cows up the mountain, allowing them to graze pasture to pasture until they reach the peak in the summer and begin migrating the herd back down before the winter snow. Allowing the cows to feed on different pastures across a variety of altitudes gives their milk the dynamic, unique flavor that goes beyond the usual buttery, nuttiness of cow’s milk. The cow’s high variety diet, made of a multitude of grasses, herbs, flowers, and more, along with their high activity lifestyle, leads to healthy, happy cows with nutrient-dense, flavorful milk. 

As if the traditions of mountain dairy farming weren’t enough to produce a beautiful cheese, Appenzeller is treated to a laborious and highly secretive aging process. Once the curds have been stirred, drained and pressed into their eventual cheese shape, the fresh wheels are soaked in a salt bath. This bath imparts flavor and removes extra moisture content. Once dried and aging on their wooden shelves, each wheel of Appenzeller Black Label is tended to for six months. During the six month period, the wheels are treated with a secret smear made up of 25 vague herbs, an alcoholic secret spirit, and other undisclosed ingredients. There are only two people who know the full recipe of the smear, but the flavor imparted on Appenzeller is much of what makes the cheese so loved.

To my absolute delight, we’ve paired this flavorful cheese with a delicious Riesling from the Finger Lakes. Although I personally love a sweet Riesling too, Ravines Wine Cellars’ Dry Riesling is, as you would expect, dry, but also tart with juicy, fruity notes and a minerality that keeps the wine in balance. Enjoying these two together to be transported to a warm and beautiful Alpine resort or, at the very least, to make your evening a little cozier. 

To read more about Ravine Riesling, check out the liquor store’s blog post here.

The Pairing: Chabichou

After a hiatus over our busy holiday season, the pairing is back with a staff favorite- Chabichou du Patiou. This dense, creamy, bright little goat cheese comes from France’s western countryside. In the Loire Valley, among the rolling hills, thick grasses, and along the Vendée riverways, little goats roam their pastures and farmers produce some of the best goat cheese in the world. The Loire Valley, with its long history of farming and fertile, mineral rich land, holds a reputation as the gold standard for fresh goat cheeses and Chabichou shines bright among them. 

Nomadic people, usually from the Arabian Peninsula, introduced cheeses like Chabichou to France by migrating with their goats across Europe. Chabichou du Patiou comes from an Arab tradition of cheese making, introduced to the French countryside by the Saracen soldiers who set up camp during the Umayyad conquest of western Europe. The soldiers brought livestock with them to sustain them, but as the French expelled the Saracen from their camps, the goats and cheese recipes got left behind. The goats brought by the Saracen people thrived on the herbaceous, dynamic land of northwestern France and so begun the tradition of goat cheese in the Loire Valley.  

The anatomy of Chabichou is part of what makes the cheese so special and the flavors shine. The small, cylindrical goat cheese features a beautiful, bloomy rind. The ridges of the rind look like a topographical map of a mountain range and tastes amazingly piquant. Right under the rind is a dreamy line of cream. The cream line provides a rich, buttery quality to the cheese. At the center of Chabichou, the paste is fudgier and dense, and also provides the brightest and tangiest flavor. Chabichou is a cheese that completely coats your mouth with it’s rich texture and bold flavor. Tangy, gaminess is a given of good quality goat milk, but the goats used to make Chabichou eat a diverse diet of local grasses, grains, spouts and other plants which leads to the cheese’s complex flavor of citrus and herbs. These notes are balanced by a minerality in the milk, gained from the mineral rich limestone soil of the area. 

We’ve paired this beauty of a cheese with a Sauvignon Blanc from the costal, mountainous Marlborough region in New Zealand. Rain Sauvignon Blanc has tropical fruit notes and a great texture that stands up to the goat milk. The strong lychee fruit flavors are needed with this slightly mature batch of Chabichou. The wine’s texture also plays nicely with the goat’s creaminess, rather than simply washing it away. As always, enjoy your Chabichou at room temperature and don’t be surprised by the ample creamline in this older batch. It might be a little messy, but the flavor is perfect. 

Ask A Butcher: Reverse Sear

What is a reverse sear and when do I use it?

A reverse sear is a simple method of cooking larger pieces of meat, such as cuts like the bone-in ribeye, or double cut pork chops. Rather than sear the meat then put it in the oven to finish, you first bake the meat then you sear it at the end for a beautiful finishing crust. This method was first developed by Kenji Lopez-Alt in the mid 2000s, when he wrote for Cooks Illustrated.

How to Reverse Sear:

The reverse sear is our favorite way to cook any piece of meat bigger than about a pound. To execute successfully, you’ll need an instant read thermometer.

Preheat your oven. You can set your oven as low as 180° if you’re feeling patient; a temperature as high as 300° will still yield noticeable “reverse-sear” results.

Place the meat in a cast iron or oven-safe stainless steel pan and place in the oven. Temp the meat periodically and flip it each time you do.

For medium-rare, take the meat out of the oven at 115° and let it rest on a dinner plate or wire rack before searing.

Heat your pan on the stove until just smoking. For bigger pieces of meat, you can get your grill, broiler, or oven going at very high heat.

Sear the meat on all sides. You’re looking for a beautiful, brown Maillard reaction on the outside to add texture and flavor, and a final internal temperature of 130° for medium-rare.

Serve immediately, there’s no need to let it rest again.

Gruyere Alpage

by Austin Coe Butler

While we continue to celebrate the many exciting holiday cheeses and pairings we will have for the next month, we thought we would take a moment to celebrate another seasonal cheese that reminds us of the long, light days of summer, and how green our world can be: Gruyère Alpage. 

Gruyère Alpage takes its name from two very important places. The first is Gruyère, of course, a region that has now, in our administrative age, been strictly demarcated to a small region of Switzerland. But Gruyère itself takes its name from a people and moment in time. Back in the 13th century, yes, that far back, when Charlemagne was Holy Roman Emperor, he founded a corps of officiers gruyers to manage his forests, or gruyeries as they were called then. Cheesemakers in the region had to buy their fuel from these foresters to heat their milk and make cheese and, then as now, cheesemaking was not lucrative work, so a trade was agreed upon: fuel for cheese. This is how a name is attached to a place. 

And now for the Alpage. In many places where arable land is too scarce and precious to graze livestock on, shepherds have to take their herds up the mountain and from mid-May to mid-October they graze their cows in these Alpine meadows, these alpages, These alpages, are the result of glacial erosion, but they are also the result of clearing by gruyers, who, by chopping down impenetrable, evergreen pines and spruce allowed the sun to stream in and foster wildflowers and grasses to dominate. 

The centuries old tradition of pastoral transhumance, taking animals to and from pasturage seasonally, is one of the most remarkable celebrations of all those things entwined in cheese: the people, the animals, the places, the flavors, traditions, and cultures. When the cows descend from the mountains, often crowned with elaborate arrangements of spruce branches spangled with marigolds, sunflowers, and ribbons, hundreds gather to watch. The sound of their bells rings through the valley, echoing off the Alpine mountainsides, is stirring. When I first saw the tranzhumanza in Piedmont (or Désalpes in French / Alpabzug in Swiss-German), I was standing next to a German woman who whispered to herself again and again in wonderment, “Unglaublich, unglaublich….”—unbelievable, incredible, indescribable.

Our Gruyère Alpage is made by the Mauron family at Guedères north of Montreaux at over 4,000 feet. They still make Gruyère Alpage the way it has been for centuries. They still heat the milk in massive copper cauldrons over burning lumber. They still cut and strain the scalded curd through linens and into wooden forms to be tightened under presses twisted by hand. Their cows still look fabulous coming down the mountain during the Alpabzug.

Wheres our Gruyère 1655 tends to be more savory, beef brothy, and evocative of French onion soup that a broiled, blistered crown of Gruyère always sits atop, Gruyère Alpage is fruitier, more herbaceous, floral, and grassy. What immediately strikes you is the aroma of this cheese, which is reminiscent of juicy pears, sweet apples, and ripe Alpine strawberries. The initial fruity acidity gives way to bold, grassy waves of salt as you reach that allium savoriness and barnyard funkiness towards the rind. Gruyère Alpage reminds me of the best Comtés: bright, fruity, nutty, complex enough to find a kaleidoscopic array of flavors inside it.