Pechegos: a Tarn valley goat's cheese



Pechegos - washed rind goat's cheese from the Tarn valley

 The past few days have been turning increasing autumnal, with the early morning air being cold enough to want a scarf.
Blackberries have ripened, plums are around by the bucket load -tender Victorias, rich and delicious Opals, and the first, small damsons.
Apples too, pink fleshed Discoverys are now joined by Falstaff, Worcester and Blenheim Oranages at the farmers' market. 
It will still be a good month until the real glut of apples hits, joined by quinces, game, pumpkins, root vegetables and spice. 
When it begins to get a little colder, as far as cheese is concerned, I like to eat something robust. More earthy, savoury and meaty than the creamy, delicate cheeses of warm summer days.
Something with a washed rind and big, bold flavours.
Pechegos was the perfect cheese this week, a washed rind cheese from the Tarn valley in the Languedoc-Roussillon, made using raw goat's milk from local herds grazing the limestone hillsides of the Tarn.
Like the famous Mont d'Or (or Vacherin if you prefer), this cheese is encased in a band of spruce, which imparts a sappy flavour of the forest to the cheese, and holds together the soft, melting paste.
Pechegos is ripened for 6-12 weeks, so cheeses being sold now will have been made with milk from the herb rich pasture of mid-summer, resulting in cheeses with deep, full flavours. 
Over the ripening period, Pechegos is washed in brine, to encourage the development of Brevibacterium linens, giving the cheese a moist, sticky, orange rind and the typically meaty flavours of a washed rind cheese.
The finished cheese is quite unlike any traditional French goat's milk cheeses - soft, almost runny, rich and buttery, bold, meaty flavours, not unlike wild mushrooms or truffles.
Made by a sole producer, Le Pic (a small co-operative producing a range of both modern and traditional style cheeses), Pechego is seasonally available from Paxton and Whitfield, La Fromagerie and Androuet.


Bouchette cendree, a small, ashed
goat's cheese from fromagerie Le Pic.



Reblochon de Savoie

Cheese makers in the Savoie and Haute-Savoie in eastern France produce some of the best cheese in the world. Magnificent hard cheeses, weighting between 35kg and 100kg, such as Beaufort, Emmental, and Comté as well as much smaller, individual cheeses, Reblochon de Savoie and Chevrotin des Aravis.

The Aravis is a high mountain range, running from the eastern edge of the Haute-Savoie to the northern borders of the Savoie. In the centre of the Aravis is the Thônes valley, where farmers and cheese makers have made cheese since the 14^th century, when the local herdsmen were taxed by the landowners according to how much milk they produced. In order to escape paying the full tax on his cows, the herdsman would always leave some milk in the cow’s udder. One the taxman had gone, and the cows were relieved from their remaining milk, cheese was made. This second milking was known as reblocher, meaning “pinching the udder again”, hence the cheese was named Reblochon. Novel stories like this are common for almost all French cheeses, which makes them so historic and interesting.

Today, hundreds of small scale cheese makers make Reblochon up and down the Thônes valley, sometime using milk from herds of just a few cows. Milk fresh from the cows is kept warm and very slowly acidified. Calves rennet is stirred in and once the curd is set, it is cut into small cubes and stirred in the whey before being scooped into muslin lined moulds and weighed with a metal disc. This ensures the cheeses are close textured and evenly shaped. At the point, the producer lays a small casein label on top of the cheese. Look out for this when buying Reblochon. Green labels identify a fermier cheese, made by hand, using milk from a single herd. Red labels are applied to industrial cheeses made on a larger scale in dairies using milk collected from numerous farms.

Once the cheeses have been dipped in brine made from salt and whey, the cheese maker sells his cheeses on to the local affineur, who looks after the cheeses for the next 5 weeks. Each affineur has his own secret methods of transforming the fresh, white curd into the aromatic finished cheese. He will keep the cheeses in cellars or caves deep in the mountain side where they will sit on spruce-wood shelving, and be repeatedly wiped with a sponge soaked in brine. On these shelves, surrounded by cool, still air, the cheeses grow delicate rinds. Pink, orange, grey and white moulds, yeast and bacteria settle on the cheese and break the firm, sweet curd down to a creamy, almost melting cheese.  

When you cut open a perfectly ripened Reblochon, the interior should hold itself together, but begin to run as the cheese warms up. The flavours are buttery and rich with floral, nutty qualities. Sometimes the cheese is quite earthy and farmy, but is always an absolute pleasure.

Chevrotin des Aravis is made in exactly the same method as Reblochon, but uses milk from local goat herds which roam the herb filled, rockier pastures above where the cows graze. Chevrotin are typically half the size of Reblochon, but has the same creamy texture.