TASTES: Camembert

By Erica and Kara

Background
This week, we tasted a Camembert cheese from Butler Farms (Whitehall, WI). We sampled this cheese at the farmer's market a couple weeks ago and decided that we needed to buy a wheel at some point. Camembert wheels are by definition very small--only about 4.5 inches in diameter. In fact, this small size is the only factor that distinguishes Camembert from Brie, whose wheel can range from 9 to 15 inches in diameter. When it comes to cheese, size matters--the smaller wheel size means that Camembert takes a shorter time to ripen (about 3 weeks as opposed to 4 or 5) and has a higher concentration of flavor.

Besides the different sizes, Camembert and Brie are made by the same process. After the rennet is added and the milk curdles, the curds are ladled into their molds and allowed to drain. Then, after about a day, the cheeses are put in a "salting room" where they are, as the name suggests, salted. Additionally, they are coated with a particular strain of mold, Penicillium candidum, and allowed to age for a few weeks. The creamy texture is thought to be a product of the ladling technique, and bitter notes are a result of the amino acids ornithine, cadaverine, and citrulline. Nowadays, the rind is always white, but before we had the technology to tightly control the molds used in cheeses, the rinds were often spotted, grey, or blue. One legend is that Camembert was originally a blue cheese whose recipe changed over time into what it is today.

There are many other myths surrounding this beloved (especially to the French) cheese. One myth is that the cheese was invented in 1791 by Marie Harel, a farmer, and a priest from Brie whom she saved from the guillotine. Regardless of who first produced the cheese, it wasn't transported around Europe until the 1800s with the invention of the wooden box by Ridel, a french engineer (who knew that an engineer was needed to come up with the idea of a circular wooden box?). Camembert became the darling of France, and it was doled out to French soldiers during World War II.

The French have a particular snootiness when it comes to Camembert because it was not granted AOP protection until 1983. The AOP (Appellation d'Origine Protégée, or The Nomenclature of Protected Origin) decides if a product is copyrighted to a particular geographically location. Thus, today, Camembert made in certain areas in Normandy is called Camembert de Normandie, and many Frenchmen contend that regular old Camembert is not the real deal. In fact, if you buy Camembert in the U.S., as we did, you are not tasting "real" Camembert by any measure. Camembert requires raw milk, but in the U.S., if raw (unpasteurized*) milk is used in cheese, the cheese must be aged for at least 60 days. As noted above, Camembert is only aged for about 20 days. Thus, most creameries in the U.S. use pasteurized milk in their Camembert production.

It follows that, alas, the Camembert from Butler Farms that we tasted did not use raw milk. And, unlike to the traditional Camembert, it was made with a combination of cow milk, cow cream, and sheep milk. In the future, we hope to find a Camembert made solely with raw cow milk. PeRhaps then we will gain the respect of the French.

Sources:
www.thenibble.com
www.cookthink.com

*Pasteurization is a heating process that slows down the development of certain strains of bacteria to prevent disease.

Camembert Ingredients:
- sheep milk
- cow milk
- cow cream
- p. candidum
- rennet
- salt

The Taste:
Smoooooth is the operative word here. Unbelievably, perfectly, tremendously smooth. Creamy velvet. The cheese also tastes and feels luxuriously fatty, in the best sense of the word. Licking it (which we did, unfortunately not until after we turned off the camera) feels like liking a stick of butter or a hunk of lard. It's the sort of sensation that confounds the gustatory and the tactile... "Mouthfilling" might be the word.

Although it's hard to move beyond that initial impression of silkiness, there are other aspects of the Camembert experience: a subtle cow-y aroma, a buttery flavor, and a certain sourness and bitterness that rise up gradually at the back of the tongue. The sour and bitter tastes come mostly from the rind (and the amino acids, apparently - see above). We thought it tasted a lot like Brie - which was spot-on, according to our research! Kara thought it would go well with something sweet... maybe some honey. We ate it with water crackers, which allowed us to appreciate the slow and subtle unfolding of this cheese's flavors.

Our big downfall was to cut and eat the cheese too soon after taking it out of the refrigerator, which took away from both the texture (it was even much more cloud-like at the Farmer's Market) and the taste (which got stronger as the cheese started to warm up). Amateurs we remain!