In this installment
Setting the Swiss scene
L’Etivaz Cheese
Antique Gruyère Cheese
Antique Emmentaler Swiss Cheese
Basic fondue recipe
Setting the Swiss scene
Cowbells clanging. The cows in Switzerland really do wear bells when they’re out in the fields. Big, bold oval-shaped iron bells hanging from four-inch-wide, brown leather bands that strap around the cows’ necks. Each bell has its own conspicuous clang. The cows who are the best milkers get the biggest bells to wear. It’s funny. They seem to know they’re the best of the bunch, and they like it. The Swiss are convinced you can spot them simply from their somewhat stuck-up swagger as they meander up the mountain. Cocky cows. Herd owners choose the bells, and their respective clangs, carefully. Why worry about tuning the tone of a cowbell? Well, when you have to listen to bells all day long, you’d better pick a pitch you want to listen to. A good herder buys bells that will blend into beautiful bovine music as the cows climb. The cows wear bigger bells when they’re on the way up to the Alpage, and smaller ones out in the fields.
Looking up from the villages in Switzerland, you’ll see that some parts of the mountain are covered with thick forests; others with nothing but clear, green pastures. These pastures are known as the Alpage. Where did the Alpage come from? One person I asked shrugged and said,”It’s just been there a long time.” I kept asking everyone I met, and the best answer I got was that medieval mountaineers cleared the forests to create pasturage for their herds. Their legacy is the Alpage.
L’Etivaz Cheese
This is the story of a cheese I’d never heard of until the spring of 1994. Though still a rarity outside its home region in Western Switzerland, it’s become one of my all-time favorites. I look at L’Etivaz (pronounced leh-tea-vah) as time travel for taste buds: the closest we’re going to get to the true taste of Gruyère–the way it would have been made a 100 years or so ago.
The secret cheese of Switzerland
If you aren’t already aware of L’Etivaz, don’t worry, you aren’t alone. For the most part it’s remained an undiscovered dairy delight–an exceptional but unlisted number in every cheese book I’ve ever looked at (and I’ve looked at a lot of cheese books). Even in Switzerland, hardly anyone’s ever heard of it. So, the obvious question here is, “how could such an amazing cheese remain almost unheard of amongst a constellation of other stellar, internationally-renowned Swiss cheeses?”
First and foremost, it’s because L’Etivaz is not a part of the ultra-effective operations of the Switzerland Cheese Association. The Swiss do such a sensational job of getting the word out about their big name cheeses—Gruyère, Appenzell, Emmental, Raclette, etc.—that the few that aren’t officially affiliated are pretty much unknown outside their home villages. Why exclude such a sensational cheese from your resume? The answer is, they didn’t. Instead, in sort of a dairy version of the “Mouse That Roared,” the folks who make L’Etivaz left the rest of their cheese-making peers behind to do things their own way.
To get this into the appropriate context, let me tell you that of all the cheesemaking countries in the world, Switzerland stands head and shoulders above every other nation in setting strict codes to protect the quality and consistency of its traditional cheeses. Pulling out of the government- supervised Gruyère program because it’s not strict enough is like moving out of Montana because it’s over-populated.
And yet, as extreme as it seems, the families of L’Etivaz felt very strongly that the government code was just too loose: lenient to the point that it was destroying the authenticity and quality of the traditional mountain cheese they had grown up with. Though many of them had stuck to their traditional cheesemaking guns in spite of that perceived laxity, their efforts were going unnoticed. For years they’d sold their cheeses off to a nearby cooperative, which uncaringly lumped them in with everyone else’s less traditional, less flavorful fare. Unhappy with the disrespect shown to their carefully crafted cheeses, they took matters into their own hands— literally as well as figuratively. Much as the Amish pulled back from the modern world to protect their values and way of life, so too the L’Etivaz makers left the Swiss government program and set up their own.
While most of the cheese world was choosing industrialization, these folks opted for isolation. In 1932, seventy-six families who farmed the land around the town of L’Etivaz withdrew from the government-managed Gruyère program to create their “own” cheese. In doing so, they declined the significant government subsidies afforded to officially approved cheesemakers in Switzerland. In the process, they made a clear choice for integrity over income. The L’Etivaz makers set up an exceptionally strict code of production, oriented toward preserving tradition and authenticity.
The code of production
The cheese must be crafted completely by hand. No mechanical means of any sort are allowed. No chemicals can be used at any point in the process, from field to finished cheese. Essentially, L’Etivaz is an organic cheese.
The cheesemaking may take place only when the herds are up in the Alpage—between 3,500 and 6,500 feet above sea level. This altitude adjustment ensures that the cows are eating from an amazing array of wild herbs, tiny mountain flowers, and assorted green grasses. Wild spinach, for example, grows all over the Alpage and both Swiss cows and Swiss people eat it often. The cheese can only be made in a demarcated region around the town of L’Etivaz. Each family can only make cheese from the milk of its own herd. No buying of milk is allowed.
Perhaps most noteworthy to our modern American sense and sensibility, the code requires that the heating of the milk may only be done over open wood fires!
L’Etivaz is a limited edition in every sense of the word.
There’s no way to add additional cheesemakers to the group because all of the Alpage pasturage in the approved zone around the town is already being used. Among them, the L’Etivaz families own around 2,800 cows, primarily Simmenthal and Tachete Rouge breeds. The best cows produce about thirty-five liters of milk a day—enough for six pounds or so of cheese. In total, the families craft about 14,000 wheels a year, or about two-hundred each. Officially, L’Etivaz may be made from May 10 through October 10. But in actual practice, the season is often shorter, since many of the mountain pastures are still too cold for the cows to be grazing outdoors in the first and last months. Since they’re only making cheese about four months a year, that gives you, on average, two wheels per family per day. The largest of the L’Etivaz group, with a “huge” herd of seventy cows, still makes a mere five wheels a day.
The L’Etivaz rule dictating that each family may make cheese only from the milk of its own herd ensures that every wheel is true farmhouse cheese—there’s no blending or buying of additional milk. For better or for worse, each family then has been handed total control over the quality of its own cheese: They raise the animals, they manage the herd, they protect their pasturage, and they cook and cut their own curd. It also means that, unlike government-regulated Gruyères—which are all about 70 pounds apiece–the size of the L’Etivaz wheels will vary noticeably from one to the next. Since each family has only a certain amount of milk each day, some wheels are inevitably larger, others smaller. Most run between 20 and 80 pounds. The circumference also varies some, but most cheeses are large flat discs about four inches high. All have a brushed, light brown natural rind on the outside, marked with the L’Etivaz seal to show authenticity.
The production of L’Etivaz is rustic.
But it’s by no means sloppy. Each maker keeps a careful logbook in which they record each day’s yield of milk, the weather and any other details of note. The making starts with milk from the previous evening, which is partially skimmed and then left to stand in a cool room overnight. It never gets very hot that high up in the mountains, making refrigeration unnecessary. The next day, the maker mixes in whole (unskimmed) morning milk, carefully arranges wood for a fire (very little in Switzerland is done haphazardly) and then lights it.
There’s little about L’Etivaz cheese that would be considered “normal” by late 20th century cheesemaking standards. Making cheese over open wood fires is extremely unusual—almost unheard of—in this day and age. Even the Cretan mountain cheesemakers I’ve watched in action—working in far less sophisticated places than the Swiss Alps— heated milk over a propane burner. I will say that while open wood fires sound sort of romantic, it can get almost unbearably smoky in the cheesemaking room.
Once the heat is sufficient to start, the maker swings the milk-filled kettle over the fire, where it begins to warm. He then adds rennet and starter cultures to begin the separation of curd and whey. The curd is allowed to slowly set up ’til it’s about the texture of soft tofu. When the cheesemaker feels the proper firmness in the curd, he starts cutting it, using a steel wired “harp,” the traditional tool of all Swiss cheesemakers. The cheesemaker cuts the curd, over and then across at right angles, ‘til the pieces are the size of small pebbles. The curd continues to “cook” at 135 ̊F, until most all of the whey has been expelled, enhancing the smooth, close texture of the finished cheese.
When the curd is ready to be removed from the kettle, the maker takes a large piece of cheesecloth from the sink, wets it in the whey, then ties it to a thin, flat, flexible metal strip. The next step is one of the most incredible things I’ve ever seen in cheesemaking. The maker rolls up their sleeves, then stick their arms into a barrel of ice water. Moving quickly, they take hold of the metal band at each end, and plunge their arms nearly up to their shoulders straight down into the hot (remember that’s an open wood fire it was sitting above) kettle, and slide the band under the collection of curd sitting at the bottom. The curd mass is captured in the cloth which is then tied off in a knot. In truth, my arms still tingle every time I think of it.
The knot is slipped the knot over a heavy iron hook attached to a chain hanging from the ceiling. Then the hook is hand-cranked until it’s suspended, dripping with whey, over the kettle, like a baby cheese hanging from a mythical cheese- stork’s beak. The curd is allowed to drain for a few minutes before being winched over to a wooden table where it was lowered into a round wooden cheese mold. The curd is pushed and kneaded until it fits nicely into the form. The cheese is placed into a small, hand-operated, metal cheese press for another day to expel additional whey. Although it is a “Swiss” cheese, L’Etivaz is not made to have holes. The propionic acid added to other Swisses to open the “eyes” (as the holes are known) is missing in this one. Instead, the paste of the cheese is firm, but smooth. Though the odd wheel may wind up with a few small holes, those cheeses are considered less desirable. The best-tasting cheeses are, apparently, those with cracks running the length of the cheese, caused by an excess of butterfat. Although those wheels are visually less appealing, their flavor is the richest of all.
The following morning, the new cheeses are removed from the press, then left on the counter to continue draining naturally. They are turned every four hours or so for the first few days, then submerged in a brine bath for an additional day or two. Later they’ll be hauled down to L’Etivaz caves, where the co-op takes care of the rest of the aging, anywhere from six months on up to two years or beyond. Each cheese is marked so that everyone knows who made it. A family may choose to keep up to 10 percent of its own cheese each year for personal use, and the rest is sold by the cooperative to lucky places like Zingerman’s!
L’Etivaz is everything I love about great food.
It’s a superb “sandwich” of phenomenal flavor and incredible history. It is a product that owes its existence to the near-fanatical passion of the people who make it: rebels with a cause, committed to maintaining their heritage in the face of ever-growing pressures to industrialize. But above and beyond all else, what makes L’Etivaz more than just a good story is its flavor. Driving, a day after leaving L’Etivaz, eating a bit of the cheese in the van en route to our next stop in the Franche-Comté, my friend Randolph (the man who made Neal’s Yard Dairy in London what it is) remarked on its exceptional flavor. “Am I imagining this?” he asked, as much of himself as of us. No one answered. Five minutes further up the road, he started up again out of the blue.”No. I’m not dreaming. This is great cheese!” (That’s high praise from one of the best- trained cheese tasters in the world.)
One sliver will tell you that a well-aged wheel of L’Etivaz is something special: exceptionally buttery with just the slightest hint of spice; surprisingly sweet–and not at all salty or bitter; somewhat less fruity than a comparably-aged Gruyère. Smooth and sensual, it fills your mouth with flavor and finishes with a tiny wisp of wood smoke–the mark of the open wood fires over which it is made.
Antique Gruyère Cheese
Traveling through the Gruyère (pronounced gree-air) region of Switzerland a few years back, I had the eye-opening experience of realizing that what I had long considered to be a single cheese–Gruyère– was in fact many cheeses. The Swiss appreciate a wide range of Gruyères: young, aged, mountain, summer, winter, Gruyère from small village cheesemakers and Gruyère from large commercial dairies. Depending upon its season, source and age, the flavor and texture of the cheese are significantly altered.
The Swiss keep cows like we keep dogs. Every country home seems like it’s got a couple of heifers in the back of the house; two, three, or even ten cows per family is quite common. And the sight of milk cans leaning up against the sides of the houses is as normal as the noon-day sun. One of the many things I have always been in awe of with farmhouse cheese is that each day’s production is unique. With wine you have a yearly vintage; with cheese you have a daily vintage. For example, the production of farmhouse cheddar only makes 10-12 cheeses in one batch from a single day’s milking. This means that those 10-12 cheddars will taste similar. Gruyère style cheeses take it one step further. Each cheese IS its own batch. Therefore, every Gruyère is unique, even if it’s made in the same place on the same day.
How to make Gruyère-style cheese
The basic recipe for Gruyère-cooked curd begins with about 130 gallons of fresh milk, which is a combination of the previous evening’s milking that has been skimmed of cream (Swiss Gruyère is not skimmed) and that morning’s milking. The milk is poured into a copper vat (some bigger creameries now also use stainless steel). The starter is added, then the rennet. The milk is then left to coagulate, which results in the milk looking like a big bowl of milky-jello, known as curd. The curd is then cut into 1/2 inch pieces, left to sit momentarily before the “cooking” stage begins. Beginning to gently stir the curd, the temperature is raised by a few degrees every 2 minutes, until it reaches about 113 ̊F. Then the temperature is raised by a few degrees every minute ‘til the curd reaches approximately 131 ̊F. By this point the curd masses in the bottom of the vat, the cheesecloth is slide under the curd, the corners of the cheesecloth are attached to a hook and the curd, now nestled in the cheesecloth, is lifted out and drained of whey.
The cheesecloth-wrapped curd is now placed in a large wooden mold, which looks like a huge spring-form cake pan and left to settle for up to two days, during which it is turned (flipped upside down) and pressed frequently. The cheese is then rubbed with salt or immersed in a brine bath for a few hours. The new cheeses are turned four times on their first day, then they take a 24-hour brine bath. After that, they’re turned, brushed, and rubbed down with sea salt and water every day. The salting creates essential molds on the rind. The rind on Gruyère-style cheeses (as with all cheese) is key in creating the texture and flavor of the cheese. From that point, the cheeses are moved into another room where they’re kept at a slightly colder 62.6 ̊F, washed and turned three times a week, then rubbed with a small amount of salt. Less frequent brushing allows a slimy skin, known as the morge, to develop on the outside of the rind.
This continues for about three months, when, as with most European cheese-making, the cheese is handed over to an affineur (aging facility) that is responsible for the maturing of the cheese. A few cheeses are held back and aged exclusively for the dairy’s shop. These are moved into a third room, slightly colder still, where they are washed and brushed twice a week. During the maturing process, each cheese is turned, rubbed and lovingly taken care of until it is sold (which can be anywhere from 8 to 24 months into its life).
The Gruyère you are tasting today is Antique Gruyère which with extra long aging–well over a year–gives this rare Alpine antique an exceptional full flavor. It’s got an incredible nose, and a dry, yet creamy on the tongue, texture. Imagine the flavor of the Gruyère you know now, but ten times more delicious and infinitely more interesting: smooth, with the spiciness of a great Rhine wine.
Antique Emmentaler Swiss Cheese
The Swiss make a lot of cheese! And they make a lot of cheese very well. I think Emmental (pronounced em-awn-tahl – this is the one the world knows as “Swiss Cheese”) is probably the best example of this phenomenon. It’s a real window into the insight, ingenuity and will power of the Swiss. Faced with a huge demand for their cheese, they could have easily consolidated operations, built huge factories, and churned out the giant wheels (200 pounds and more) at a quick clip. They didn’t. Instead, Swiss cheese is made in over 1,500 small dairies lining the Emme valley. Each dairy makes a wheel or two of strictly controlled, raw-milk cheese under the watchful eye of the ever-important Swiss Cheese Association.
I asked Paul Schilt, the president of the association, why they chose to make their cheese this way instead of consolidating to a handful of giant factories, like most of the rest of the cheesemaking world has done. I got one answer I expected and one I didn’t. The former: It allows for more careful, hands-on cheesemaking with higher overall quality. The latter: When you make cheese, you reduce the amount of milk by a large factor. It takes almost a ton-and-a-half of milk to make one wheel of Emmental, about 220 pounds of cheese. “With fuel prices as they are, we thought it made a lot more sense to move the milk short distances to make the cheese, then truck the wheels around, rather than vice versa.” The fact that the Swiss built an organization around the sense of these two facts: hands-on quality cheesemaking and economics, is as illuminating as any anecdote I know, and one I keep close at hand to remember where these folks are coming from.
Where they are coming from is interesting enough, but it’s where they are going with cheesemaking that makes me happy. Real Swiss cheese (watch out, there’s an ocean of imitators) is never harsh or bitter. I notice with this piece of Antique Emmental that the smoothness is pronounced. Its normal intensely sweet nuttiness has mellowed, leaving a long, swelling feeling of warmth in your mouth. This is good stuff. You can make a mean sandwich with it, or melt some for fondue or a fine mac & cheese. In terms of aging, it’s well over its mid-life crisis (it’s about 12 months old). You still usually find cheeses a lot younger than this (most Emmental is less than 6 months old). If you’re lucky, you may find some older (we’ve brought some wheels to Zingerman’s that were over a year and a half!).
Mountain cheeses like these are all perfect candidates for any dish you need to melt cheese in. Because of the way the cheese is made, it doesn’t become stringy when heated. Use it in casseroles, grilled cheese sandwiches, broiled on top of soups, cubed in salads, baked in potato and cheese tarts, and, of course, fondue.
Basic fondue recipe
Traditional fondue is basically a mixture of white wine and cheese given the added flavor of kirsch and garlic. It is perfect eaten on chunks of bread or lightly steamed vegetables, dipped directly into the caquelon (fondue pot). Fondue was a very popular dish in the 70’s, so you may find a fondue pot at a second- hand store, or tucked away in an attic (pots from this era tend to be quite brightly colored). Fondue is currently making a comeback, so any good kitchenware store should have one. Alternatively, a heavy-based saucepan used on your stove top works well–it just makes dipping a little more difficult, as you have to gather round the stove, or eat very quickly. Fondue is a very rich dish, so a little goes a long way. Do not–repeat–do not drink beer while consuming this dish. Speaking from experience, if you mix the two you will end up with a lump of cheese in your stomach for days! A light white wine works very well.
2 cloves garlic, peeled and cut in half
1/2 pound Gruyère, grated
1/2 pound Emmental, grated
1/3 pint of dry white wine
1 teaspoon cornstarch
1 tablespoons Kirsch (or more to taste)
Season with black pepper and nutmeg
In a bowl, combine the two cheeses with the cornstarch. Rub the caquelon or saucepan thoroughly with garlic. Add the wine to the pot and heat over a medium heat until hot, but not boiling. Stir in the Kirsch. Add the cheese 1/3 cup at a time to the wine mixture, stirring constantly with a wooden spoon. Wait for each portion of cheese to melt before adding the next, then stir to a smooth consistency. Continue stirring until the cheese is completely melted and bubbling gently. Season to taste with pepper and nutmeg.
Remove pot from heat and place over the table-top alcohol safety burner. Adjust the burner flame so the fondue continues to bubble gently. As the last of the fondue is forked up, a very tasty crust will be found on the bottom of the caquelon that should be divided evenly among the guests.
Serve with bread cut up into cube and lightly steamed vegetables (small potatoes, broccoli & carrots work well).