sorry to keep loading this blog up with cheese stories but i wanted to update a previous post with some new information to explain why something i tasted at a local restaurant was not at its best... to be fair it's not the restaurant's fault, it's the FDA...
new food and dining site being launched called CHOW.com has shed some light on the problem of the epoisses cheese i tasted a few weeks ago... this little culinary item seems to be the world's most wanted...
finding this cheese in europe, it would only be aged about 30 days, and the american FDA has actually banned any sale of this stuff before it's aged 60 days.
"Young raw-milk cheeses are illegal in the United States because they are swimming with bacteria that—theoretically, anyway—can make you sick or even kill you. Listeria is the primary offender, but health officials also fret about E. coli and salmonella. Of course, it’s these very bacteria—and the gooey conditions in which they thrive—that constitute the soul of transcendent cheese. “Cheese is a natural, living animal,” says Joe Manacusso, the cheese buyer for Citarella in New York City. “It shouldn’t be treated with heat and plastic the way it is in this country. That compromises the product. Yes, there is a small factor of contamination from raw-milk cheeses, but the French have been eating this way for hundreds of years without much consequence.”
so this explains the umm, ewww's that emanated from our table that night at Cheuvront... given the extra long aging process to save us all from ourselves and our own palattes, the shipping time from wherever this variation had to come from, no wonder i said it must have been past its prime...
illegal cheese at CHOW.com
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment