I like how cheese stubbornly doesn't want to be an industrial tasteless odorless crap. Camembert is well known to be mostly controlled by industrial, meaning most Camembert even here in France are industrial crap (there is a AOP/DPO "Camembert de Normandie" which is better and at least forbids pasteurized milk).
Slice the Camembert horizontally and put it in the wooden container it comes with, add garlic, olive oil and thyme, bake for about 15min. Goes great with a lot of stuff.
To be honest, I was born and spent my first 23 years in Normandy, never quite could enjoy the real Camembert. I prefer the supermaket ones with less aggressive taste.
Ofc I moved to China and now all I can eat is Brie.
Order some https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubing from Yunnan on Taobao. For western cheese try https://www.metro.com.cn/en/home who sometimes do good deals on wheels of Gouda, fetta, blue cheeses, etc. Don't buy the small highly marked up stuff from specialty retailers, they're always a ripoff. A couple of importers on Taobao too, for specific products. They are a good source for Indian, Southeast Asian and Middle Eastern ingredients too.
To be fair, cheese in most countries are industrial odorless crap. Or if there's some good one, there's often not a lot of diversity. France and Italy are probably the 2 countries where cheeses are "stubborn". If people know other countries with great cheese culture, I'd be curious to know though.
"Keep an eye out for" better fits your intention. "Watch out for" implies potential danger or a need for caution. "Watch for" might work but is more for use in an active situation that changes.
TLDR: milk is produced in closed system now, meaning dust from the barn doesn't get in it. They added 1 part per thousand of hay dust to the milk, and all the holes came back
Reminds me of a book I read more than a decade ago. The Culture Code. By Clotaire Rapaille. He argued that 'the French Code for cheese is ALIVE. The American Code for cheese, on the other hand, is DEAD.'
I don’t have the book handy, but here is a quote from the web:
> I started working with a French company in America, and they were trying to sell French cheese to the Americans. And they didn't understand, because in France the cheese is alive, which means that you can buy it young, mature or old, and that's why you have to read the age of the cheese when you go to buy the cheese. So you smell, you touch, you poke. If you need cheese for today, you want to buy a mature cheese. If you want cheese for next week, you buy a young cheese. And when you buy young cheese for next week, you go home, [but] you never put the cheese in the refrigerator, because you don't put your cat in the refrigerator. It's the same; it's alive. We are very afraid of getting sick with cheese.
As a french, and also cheese lover. Yes, cheese is absolutely alive.
And one thing I love about "real" cheese is variation. Depending on the season, conditions,... and chance, you get cheese that is different. Not always great, sometimes I am disappointed, but there are other occasions where the result is so good that it is well worth the occasional disappointment. Industrial cheese is boring, it is never bad, but it is never good either.
As for being sick. I never got sick with cheese, despite eating cheese on a daily basis. And I have eaten cheese that is way after its "use by" date, cheese with the "wrong" mold, cheese strong enough to numb the tongue after eating a tip of a knife worth, cheese I forgot until smell alerted me of its presence,... and all that raw milk. I didn't try the kind with maggots yet though.
I know that cheese borne diseases exist, but overall, for how alive it is, cheese is surprisingly safe. In fact, that's the big idea with cheese. It is full of bacteria and molds that we know are safe, and these tend to outcompete the pathogenic ones.
I only buy old cheese because it is more intense.
It is rather hard to perform the "affinage" of the cheese without a controlled environment (Roquefort is "affiné" in natural caves in which you have several exits that you can open or close depending on the temperature and hygrometry of the caves, that's part of the AOP).
I never got sick eating cheese, but that's actually possible Salmonella, Listeria, E.Coli, Tick-borne encephalitis virus (and you could die from it, in rare occasions).
Yes, the US FDA has tight restrictions on unpasteurized milk and cheeses, and France does not. Some French cheeses are straight up illegal in the US because they're raw and not aged long enough i.e. reblochon.
Im French, and when I was 16, I went to New York and was traumatized by the border checks on both ends opening all my luggages in front of everyone (and every other French person had to do it) to make sure I wasnt carrying frigging supermarket cheese nobody cares about. They specifically check French people for these crimes, I was told, because we seem not to realize we're threatening the US with our crappy Camemberts.
Well over 10 years ago, I went through a phase when I was into ripening cheese. I'd get a round of brie and put it into the bookshelf in my cubicle at work, for weeks. Very tasty.
One time I had a mild fever that I'm sure was from eating the stuff, but recovered overnight.
I'm Asian, so I don't have a stake in this Euro-American "conflict" personally.
What I can tell you is that I religiously avoid cheeses made in USA, because they generally taste horrible. Cheeses from continental Europe are generally fine.
I think it's worthy of a note that Europe is extremely dry and cold as inside of a refrigerator. Someone in Europe might not keep cheese artificially refrigerated, but nor would one keep it in a shower room.
Europe spans 37 degrees latitude and has a lot of climactic diversity. It's not "extremely dry and cold, like the inside of a refrigerator." Countries in the north temperate zone have four seasons.
> the fungi that have accumulated multiple deleterious mutations in their genomes over years of vegetative propagation become virtually infertile
If they've identified the genes that led to the bacteria becoming infertile, then they should be able to reverse the genetic changes.
> “Genome editing is another form of selection. What we need today is the diversity provided by sexual reproduction between individuals with different genomes.”
That kind of reads like nonsense, or phobia of genetic engineering.
The only reason sexual reproduction would be required is if the original strains are not fit any more due to new selective pressures in the modern environment.
But then you run the risk of changing the properties (flavor) of cheese since it's constantly mutating. So your 2010 Brie might taste different than 2030 Brie from the same brand.
In research this was solved by making stocks of your strain once you're happy with it and freezing it at -80C so you can keep going back to it.
> But then you run the risk of changing the properties (flavor) of cheese since it's constantly mutating. So your 2010 Brie might taste different than 2030 Brie from the same brand.
God forbid something new and interesting might happen! Hopefully it isn't food poisoning though. History has shown that as soon as we learn the market optimizing mechanisms behind something, we find a way to make it boring (movie sequels, reboots, MCU anyone?)
> Until the 1950s, Camemberts still had grey, green or in some cases orange-tinged moulds on their surface. But the industry was not fond of these colours, considering them unappealing, and staked everything on the albino strain of P. camemberti, which is completely white and moreover has a silky texture.
I'm sure most of you don't want to hear it, but the dairy industry is brutal for cows, in many ways far worse than the meat industry. Cows are forceably impregnated repeatedly to keep milk flowing, and their calves are taken from them and slaughtered for veal. Some breeds are so large they can barely move, often being milked in their last moments while laying prone. Then they are slaughtered like meat cows in the end.
I wasn't looking to promote cheese alternatives, but rather point out the cruelty of the industry.
In any case, cheese is difficult to replicate due to the nature of the proteins in milk. There are companies that have made casein in bioreactors that will hopefully soon put products on the market.
Until then, there are other alternatives, but don't expect them to have the same flavor and texture. Some of the best ones are not trying to be a facsimile. There's the Vegan Cheese Co that maintains a worldwide database of vegan cheeses, and here's the list from their yearly awards:
Are your discerning charcuterie board lovers open to new flavors, or are they going to demand 1:1 indistinguishable replicas of specific dairy cheeses?
My favorite locally produced moldy nut cheese (Omage) does not have a flavor or texture like any dairy cheese I've tasted. IMO, dairy cheeses taste more different from each other than vegan versions taste from the dairy cheese they are mimicking (usually by using the exact same cultures).
With all the modern biotech we have, and the speed at which you can breed microorganisms, I don't think we should shrink from the challenge of domesticating new microbes from wild sources, and we should celebrate any new interesting flavors that come from it. Tradition (i.e. DO dairy cheese) is peer pressure from dead people.
Those consumers who also don't buy heritage tomatoes or apples because of the irregularities in appearance, will be the ones who lose out. Sounds like there are still plenty of opportunities for cheeses, just not in a uniform delivery.
Uniformity and standardisation are a plague. Years ago there was an article here describing how Switzerland destroyed much of its rich cheese heritage because a powerful cheese lobby wanted everybody to standardise on Emmentaler and Gruyere.
I can only say I cannot notice this destruction. I can count about 20 types of cheese in my Swiss fridge right now (ok not all Swiss) and none is Emmentaler or Gruyere. In my village we have a cheese shop with about 200 sorts, and every chain offers a few dozens at the minimum. Again, not all Swiss, but plenty enough types some of them even regional. So if there was any push on standardizing, I would say it largely failed. But I'll definitely search for that article/initiative, I'm very curious now.
In not convinced its consumers refusing to eat varied heritage tomatoes. I frequent five different farmers markets and they sell like crazy. Most people can be easily conditioned and persuaded to but anything. Hence consumerism.
I blame big food corporations for trying to homogenize, sterilize, pasteurize, and genericize the taste/appearance/chacteristics of food to the equivalent of white bread. Society just trudges along with it with extremely low awareness as to how much better it can be.
I was in Paris this past summer for the first time in a long time. In fact, it was my first time out of the US in a long time. I was stunned/disappointed by the fact that even in high-end produce stores, all the apple varieties were pretty much exactly the same ones we have in the US. Gala, Fuji, Red Delicious, Golden, Granny Smith, etc., the familiar line-up. The whole time I was in Paris, I did not encounter an unconventional apple type, and I went to many produce and grocery stores during my time there. I assumed that produce monoculture wouldn't have hit France as hard as it's hit the US... but no, it seemed just as bad there.
Wrong season, the best time is really september, october.
Even in Paris, it should be relatively easy to find Belles de boskoop and reine de reinettes which are delicious.
Otherwise, any farmer’s market in Britany and Normandie will have plenty of interesting apple varieties.
The problem though is that those more unconventional cultivars tend to only be available seasonally.
I can't speak to the grocery stores, but I did briefly work on an apple farm in Calvados. They had two dozen different kinds of apples, not one of which I'd ever heard of.
(I did once get a very lame baguette at a Monoprix once. Blew my mind that the French tolerated it.)
One possibility is that you were there out of season. We've gotten very good at preserving apples for all year, but they are harvested only for a month or so. It takes industrial climate control to make them taste good after about December.
in the US, especially at "organic" grocery stores such as Whole Foods, you can typically get various weird apple cultivars -- although usually newly-developed rather than traditional. worth checking out if you like apples.
I can't speak to french apple grocery store selection, but I wonder if you should maybe go to a different grocery store in the US. In my area (SF Bay Area) at the most common grocery chain (Safeway) there are probably 8 or so varieties of apples on sale and they often rotate. I would say that they always have the common ones that you describe (Red Delicious, Gala, Fuji, Granny Smith), some less common ones that are there 80% of the time (Honeycrisp, Pink Lady) and then some more exotic ones that rotate (this time they had two I had never tried before - Pazaz [I had to check twice to make sure they didn't say Pazuzu] and Sugar Bee). The Sugar Bee's were incredible - firm, crispy, juicy and sweet with just a small hint of tartness. Beyond just the bulk loose apples, they had a bunch of weird apple "products" that were either packaged up or sold in a bag. The weirdest ones were apple "bites" which were just tiny little apples - no variety specified.
In my experience, the average US grocery store has a vast selection of produce and I see the pattern with apples (standard base varieties, with some rotating specials) across most categories of produce - citrus, cucumbers, peppers, root veggies, etc.
So in short, I dunno, I actually feel like there's a massive variety of agricultural products in the US. Certainly way more than in Switzerland, the country in which I've been to the grocery store the most outside of the US. Coop has like 3 kinds of apples, Migros was a bit better and had some interesting Kanzi apples which I had not seen in the states.
In most of france produce markets are where you'd go for this, but you're rigidly tied to the seasonal production. So you can get all kinds of apples! In september and october. And no apples at any other time.
I'm not sure this applies in paris though, I suspect it does not. It's such a big city it's likely the markets are similar to american ones, being targeted & priced at affluent upper middle class professionals. IDK though I have spent very little time in paris.
I was just in Paris. One of my favorite French cafes got replaced with a Popeyes. :/
My fat american butt eventually relented a few days later and I bought a single breast from them. It wasn't even good Popeyes. Tasted like either they dont know how to make a good crispy piece of chicken or Europe gets sent the scraps.
I'd love to buy more heirloom tomatoes. The flavor is great. The problem is that often they're like 3 USD for a single large tomato in my supermarket :(
It's a crime against humanity how much food is thrown away because it's "not appealing" enough to the eye when we have so many in this world who go to bed hungry.
I hope someday there's a society we've managed to build that's good enough to look back on the 20th and 21st centuries with the judgemental glare we rightly deserve.
>>It's a crime against humanity how much food is thrown away
How much of it is actually thrown away though? It's my understanding that the "ugly" looking vegetables are just used to make sauces, canned produce, ready meals etc etc. No one is throwing out perfectly good tomatoes just because they are ugly - they just get turned into something else.
> because it's "not appealing" enough to the eye when we have so many in this world who go to bed hungry.
Throwing or not throwing away the food would make no difference in the lives of the people going hungry. The people going hungry are going hungry not because of a dearth of food, but due to issues such as war or political or family instability.
> It's a crime against humanity how much food is thrown away because it's "not appealing" enough to the eye when we have so many in this world who go to bed hungry.
Evidence for this? Any at all? Because I can’t imagine someone getting caught in the act of frowning in disgust which then immediately causes a shop owner to toss out that and similar-looking produce in the hopes that no one else will be disgusted. And how you would cook up such a causal connection is beyond me.
What actually happens—and which just trivially follows from good old “economics”—is that perfectly good food is thrown out because you make more money by eliminating supply that can’t be sold. (Maybe also food regulations, I don’t know.)
It’s actually transportability and shelf life that were the original drivers - looks were a follow-on trend. The former of course translate to price - which I can’t argue with people for being motivated by.
This is one of those cons of adapting to modern life so much, we forgotten how to pick fruits and vegetables basically. Our understanding of whats good is surface level things like what looks good or having no clue if food's actually gone bad vs not pleasing to the eyes
Its also why ugly food industry took off and companies like misfit markets or imperfect foods have billions of dollars in business, who've created a market for ugly looking perfectly edible food
Readit News
Personally I've never been a fan, except when barbecued.
Ofc I moved to China and now all I can eat is Brie.
The link below lists only the protected ones.
https://tradicional.dgadr.gov.pt/en/categories/cheese-and-ot...
But yesterday we bought one in Esteron that finally tasted how it's supposed to taste.
So it still exists, but as with anything popular, it dies from tragedy of the common.
http://smbc-comics.com/comic/craproot
HN-celebrated Tom Scott did a video on it last year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=evV05QeSjAw
YouTube links are a terrible way to transmit information.
I don’t have the book handy, but here is a quote from the web:
> I started working with a French company in America, and they were trying to sell French cheese to the Americans. And they didn't understand, because in France the cheese is alive, which means that you can buy it young, mature or old, and that's why you have to read the age of the cheese when you go to buy the cheese. So you smell, you touch, you poke. If you need cheese for today, you want to buy a mature cheese. If you want cheese for next week, you buy a young cheese. And when you buy young cheese for next week, you go home, [but] you never put the cheese in the refrigerator, because you don't put your cat in the refrigerator. It's the same; it's alive. We are very afraid of getting sick with cheese.
And one thing I love about "real" cheese is variation. Depending on the season, conditions,... and chance, you get cheese that is different. Not always great, sometimes I am disappointed, but there are other occasions where the result is so good that it is well worth the occasional disappointment. Industrial cheese is boring, it is never bad, but it is never good either.
As for being sick. I never got sick with cheese, despite eating cheese on a daily basis. And I have eaten cheese that is way after its "use by" date, cheese with the "wrong" mold, cheese strong enough to numb the tongue after eating a tip of a knife worth, cheese I forgot until smell alerted me of its presence,... and all that raw milk. I didn't try the kind with maggots yet though.
I know that cheese borne diseases exist, but overall, for how alive it is, cheese is surprisingly safe. In fact, that's the big idea with cheese. It is full of bacteria and molds that we know are safe, and these tend to outcompete the pathogenic ones.
I never got sick eating cheese, but that's actually possible Salmonella, Listeria, E.Coli, Tick-borne encephalitis virus (and you could die from it, in rare occasions).
Dead Comment
One time I had a mild fever that I'm sure was from eating the stuff, but recovered overnight.
I love the underlying tone to this. The French are a civilized people who care about the age of their cheese.
While the country bumpkin Americans lack the sophistication and knowledge of cheese age.
I mean, really?
What I can tell you is that I religiously avoid cheeses made in USA, because they generally taste horrible. Cheeses from continental Europe are generally fine.
If they've identified the genes that led to the bacteria becoming infertile, then they should be able to reverse the genetic changes.
> “Genome editing is another form of selection. What we need today is the diversity provided by sexual reproduction between individuals with different genomes.”
That kind of reads like nonsense, or phobia of genetic engineering.
The only reason sexual reproduction would be required is if the original strains are not fit any more due to new selective pressures in the modern environment.
But then you run the risk of changing the properties (flavor) of cheese since it's constantly mutating. So your 2010 Brie might taste different than 2030 Brie from the same brand.
In research this was solved by making stocks of your strain once you're happy with it and freezing it at -80C so you can keep going back to it.
Hopefully, yes.
> Until the 1950s, Camemberts still had grey, green or in some cases orange-tinged moulds on their surface. But the industry was not fond of these colours, considering them unappealing, and staked everything on the albino strain of P. camemberti, which is completely white and moreover has a silky texture.
Give me the orange camembert please.
Dead Comment
There are plenty of small cheese makers with diverse biomes and we buy from them every day.
They all have their own batch, many are unique passed from generations or affected by the animals they raise.
Nobody expect supermarket cheese to be sustainable anymore than their standardized vegetable.
In any case, cheese is difficult to replicate due to the nature of the proteins in milk. There are companies that have made casein in bioreactors that will hopefully soon put products on the market.
Until then, there are other alternatives, but don't expect them to have the same flavor and texture. Some of the best ones are not trying to be a facsimile. There's the Vegan Cheese Co that maintains a worldwide database of vegan cheeses, and here's the list from their yearly awards:
https://www.vegancheese.co/awards
My favorite locally produced moldy nut cheese (Omage) does not have a flavor or texture like any dairy cheese I've tasted. IMO, dairy cheeses taste more different from each other than vegan versions taste from the dairy cheese they are mimicking (usually by using the exact same cultures).
With all the modern biotech we have, and the speed at which you can breed microorganisms, I don't think we should shrink from the challenge of domesticating new microbes from wild sources, and we should celebrate any new interesting flavors that come from it. Tradition (i.e. DO dairy cheese) is peer pressure from dead people.
I blame big food corporations for trying to homogenize, sterilize, pasteurize, and genericize the taste/appearance/chacteristics of food to the equivalent of white bread. Society just trudges along with it with extremely low awareness as to how much better it can be.
Otherwise, any farmer’s market in Britany and Normandie will have plenty of interesting apple varieties.
The problem though is that those more unconventional cultivars tend to only be available seasonally.
(I did once get a very lame baguette at a Monoprix once. Blew my mind that the French tolerated it.)
One possibility is that you were there out of season. We've gotten very good at preserving apples for all year, but they are harvested only for a month or so. It takes industrial climate control to make them taste good after about December.
Apples are also an odd fruit because they can be kept for such a long time: https://www.foodrenegade.com/your-apples-year-old/ this makes shipping them anywhere much easier than a tomato...
In my experience, the average US grocery store has a vast selection of produce and I see the pattern with apples (standard base varieties, with some rotating specials) across most categories of produce - citrus, cucumbers, peppers, root veggies, etc.
So in short, I dunno, I actually feel like there's a massive variety of agricultural products in the US. Certainly way more than in Switzerland, the country in which I've been to the grocery store the most outside of the US. Coop has like 3 kinds of apples, Migros was a bit better and had some interesting Kanzi apples which I had not seen in the states.
YMMV ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I'm not sure this applies in paris though, I suspect it does not. It's such a big city it's likely the markets are similar to american ones, being targeted & priced at affluent upper middle class professionals. IDK though I have spent very little time in paris.
My fat american butt eventually relented a few days later and I bought a single breast from them. It wasn't even good Popeyes. Tasted like either they dont know how to make a good crispy piece of chicken or Europe gets sent the scraps.
Deleted Comment
I hope someday there's a society we've managed to build that's good enough to look back on the 20th and 21st centuries with the judgemental glare we rightly deserve.
How much of it is actually thrown away though? It's my understanding that the "ugly" looking vegetables are just used to make sauces, canned produce, ready meals etc etc. No one is throwing out perfectly good tomatoes just because they are ugly - they just get turned into something else.
Throwing or not throwing away the food would make no difference in the lives of the people going hungry. The people going hungry are going hungry not because of a dearth of food, but due to issues such as war or political or family instability.
Evidence for this? Any at all? Because I can’t imagine someone getting caught in the act of frowning in disgust which then immediately causes a shop owner to toss out that and similar-looking produce in the hopes that no one else will be disgusted. And how you would cook up such a causal connection is beyond me.
What actually happens—and which just trivially follows from good old “economics”—is that perfectly good food is thrown out because you make more money by eliminating supply that can’t be sold. (Maybe also food regulations, I don’t know.)
Dead Comment
Its also why ugly food industry took off and companies like misfit markets or imperfect foods have billions of dollars in business, who've created a market for ugly looking perfectly edible food