Cheese: Roquefort

This may come to a surprise to many Americans, but the world of cheese has more than just two flavors: white and orange.  The color coding is easy, the white goes on pizza and the orange goes on tacos; they can even be mixed together and already shredded for convenience.  Sometimes we dare to put some jalapeno or dill in it, but into the garbage it goes at the first sign of mold.  Only the brave dare to cut the mold off the 8 ounce block, and often, only if no one is watching. 

On the other hand, there are the French.  They inject their cheese with mold.  In fact, the molder the better; it’s a sign of quality.  That’s right, I’m talking about Roquefort.  It is perhaps the best known and most feared French cheese in the United States.  Roquefort is a type of blue cheese, and is made from raw milk of a specific breed of sheep (Lacaune).  Yes, it is an unpasteurized cheese.  I know there is a heated debate about the health factors of this type of cheese, and I don’t want to get into that, but I do want to expand the repertoire of what we Americans call cheese.  I’m not getting on a high horse, I too like white and orange cheese, but there is so much more to it than just that.

Think about it, this cheese had a documented history dating back to 1070 and has strict laws on what the sheep eat, where they can graze, and how the cheese is fabricated.  This is the same time of the Byzantine Empire, the completion of St. Mark Cathedral in Venice, and the foundation of the city of Marrakesh.  That is what we call eating a part of history.

In production, the cheese is injected with Roqueforti Penicillium, a mold, and left for three weeks to develop the spores.  This is where the “blue” comes from.  Then, it is aged in special caves for at least 3 months.  And remember this rule with most cheeses: age = flavor.  Roquefort was the first cheese to be given the title Appellation d’Origine, or label of origin in 1925.  Now, it’s status has been elevated to  Appellation d’Origine Protégée, or ‘protected label of origin’.  This means no cheese can bear the name Roquefort if it is produced outside its specific region or it if doesn’t follow its rules of fabrication.  Basically, that moldy product is carefully and lovingly handled from sheep to plate, and I don’t know if that can be said about the cellophane wrapped orange food stuff.  How cool is that? 

This is France, and I love cheese, so expect the subject of cheese to revisited from time to time.