Saint-Florentin

A wonderfully saggy, slumpy cheese this, cheesy cream oozing out at the bottom. It looks as if it has got tired and just given up on life.

But as the guy on the cheese stall told us, it's 'un fromage de caractere'. It combines a sweet creamy honey flavour with the smell of silage or manure; shocking.

I think any relationship with this cheese is a love-hate relationship. In this, it's a little like a really good old Belgian gueuze or red ale - you take a mouthful of Rodenbach or Boon or Duchesse de Bourgogne and for a moment your tongue tells you it's just vinegar, and you ask yourself whether beer is really meant to be like this, before the other flavours catch up and you realise you're drinking a classic. Duchesse is one of my favourite beers in the world and yet I still have that little moment of doubt, every time.

Love-hate. Not just love it or hate it, though no doubt some people will hate it, but love and hate; or at least, love coupled with a fearful respect.

Technically, it's a cheese neither pressed nor cooked, and with no rind, hence the marvellous slumpiness - the inside is chalky, the exterior actually verging on the liquid, at room temperature. It's from Burgundy, which has 'previous' for 'characterful' cheeses, in the form of Epoisses. And I'm told it's a traditional cheese that is on its last legs, as most local farmers now can't be bothered to make it, and sell their cheeses to industrial fromageries instead; which may be why a couple of web sites I've looked at mention Saint Florentin as being creamy, light, and suitable for desserts, which the cheese I have in front of me right now certainly is not.

An excellent resource

When I'm drinking a new beer I like to taste it, if possible, unprejudiced; I don't look at the book beforehand. But afterwards, I like to make comparisons with other people's tastes, so beer advocate or pint picker are wonderful sites to visit - sometimes answering that question one so often asks oneself, "I know this aroma (or flavour), I'm sure it's.... it's.... it's on the tip of my tongue, but what is it?"

The world of cheese, unfortunately, doesn't seem to have any such sites. What's up there is very fragmented - and also shows up some major national differences, every time an American or Brit says that Brie, for instance, is "too goaty", "too strong," and "stinky". Which to anyone who lives in France and eats cheese is nonsense. Okay, Brie is stinkier than Kraft processed cheese slices - but what isn't?

However there is one very useful resource out there. Wikipedia is sometimes useful, but only in French - and even in the .fr version, some cheeses only get stubs (or ebauches, rather). So I go to Androuet's 'Cheeses of the world' to get my information. It must be good, as I've been eating and writing my way through French cheeses for a good while now and it still has names I've not heard before. In French, English, and a good few other languages, which is helpful.

It has a good search function - you can search by name, country, region (of France, so that's useful when we travel), mild to stinky (which they call 'characterful'), season, type of milk, or even the wine you want some cheese to go with.

And it's remarkably comprehensive, though I'm not sure they've road-tested every description (and they don't have Norfolk Dapple, which personally I think is one of the best English cheeses I've ever eaten). There are 495 French cheeses, 134 from the UK, and over 100 each frmo Spain and Italy. Alas, coverage in the Netherlands and Germany is skimpier, though they have 9 different Norwegian cheeses and yes, that includes Gjetost.

They even have two cheeses from Afghanistan. I think it's unlikely I'm going to taste either of those very soon.

Chaource v Banon: a tale of two cheeses

I'd been waiting for autumn. Autumn brings long golden evenings. And on the market in Ezy I always have to wait till Autumn to get my Banon, a tight little puck of goat's cheese wrapped in its chestnut leaves, at the cheese counter. And Mont d'Or, too, cheese for eating with a spoon dipped into its liquid centre, till all that's left is the rind, redolent of the pine strips that bind it.

(And by the way, if you're eating Mont d'Or, and you love the resiny scent of the rind, don't say 'ça sent le sapin'. That refers to the pine out of which coffins are made. You say it when your rich old aunt starts coughing - though perhaps not in her hearing, not if you want to inherit - or you might perhaps say it when someone's boss starts getting suspiciously friendly....)

This autumn I decided I'd have a cheese-off between two of the great cheeses; Chaource and Banon. North and South. Fresh and aged. Cow and goat. Chalk and, er, cheese.

Chaource is from the area near Troyes, in the Champagne-Ardenne region; made of cows' milk, gently crumbly, with a light, white rind.

Banon is from the south, from the rocky pastures and garrigue of Provence. It's made of goats' milk, and dipped in eau de vie before wrapping. It's creamy, but quite hard. If you bite into a Brie, the cheese seeps and slides and the teeth marks disappear, like words written in the sand just above the low tide line; but if you bite into a Banon, the mark stays.

Now I'm never entirely sure I like Banon. I love it, but do I like it? There's something incredibly concentrated about this cheese. It's not stinky or goaty - it's just very, very concentrated. Very there. It's as if all the taste of a cheese seven or eight times bigger had been taken and put in this tiny disc of cheese.

I never bother eating Banon with bread. It doesn't need it. I just take a thin segment, and eat it, very, very slowly.

Chaource is completely different. Actually it does have rather a nice goatiness to it, which is odd since 'no goats were harmed in the creation of this cheese' - but it's immensely fresh tasting, innocent, it's almost a spring-time cheese. You could eat it with cheese - it belongs to the same family of taste as ricotta, fresh without being really creamy. It's incredibly easy to eat far too much of it. The tall cylinder of a typical Chaource is deceptively large; in fact we get through one in a couple of days.

I'd expected to find Chaource lightweight compared to Banon. But it's not without its own character - and there are days when I need this lovely cheese to bring a little sunshine into my life.

Chaource is like a Vivaldi concerto. Banon is like the Liebestod.

Such variety. Such huge divergences. Any wonder that when someone asks me 'What is your favourite cheese', I'm lost for words...

The pie chart... but not as we know it

In England we call them pie charts.

We're good at pies. "Who ate all the pies?" is a regular football chant, though I hear that at Norwich some fans now chant "Who ate all the boeuf bourguignon?" since Delia Smith is a director. We make Melton Mowbray pork pies (one of our few specialities carrying PGI status), we make Pukka Pies (available in all good chip shops), steak and kidney pies. Pies are England.

But the French don't do pies. And they don't do pie charts.

The French version is called a camembert.

Why not a Brie, I don't know...

Industrial cheese - what's wrong with it

There's cheese and there's cheese. In particular, there's real cheese, and industrial cheese.

Of course industrial cheese is cheaper. But I was surprised to find how much cheaper and nastier it can be, and how much tinkering goes on to produce regularised products for supermarket shelves.

For a start, the small cheese producer works with the milk that is produced each day. For Morbier, milk from morning and evening milkings was always kept separate, divided by a small layer of ash to keep the morning milk clean - that's the grey line in the middle that is characteristic of this cheese. The milk then generally goes straight into the cheesemaking process, as it is - it's the quality of the milk that dictates the taste and texture of the cheese. And that milk comes from a small area, possibly from a defined breed of cow, possibly only from summer pastures. All these factors dictate its character.

The industrial producer on the other hand can take milk from anywhere by the tankerload. The milk is heat treated, usually pasteurised, and can then be separated out into milk and cream. That enables the producer to select a particular fat content (as shown in a page about the Fromagerie de la Brie). It also irons out the character of the cheese, tending to make it less individual.

Some factories use chemical additives to prevent the milk going off - sodium nitrate and hydrogen peroxide are known to be used in some cheeses (though I am not clear whether these are allowed in France; chapter and verse from anyone knowledgeable would be welcome). Other chemicals are added to enable the production of low fat cheese; and artificial colourings are used to keep the colour of the cheese consistent. Artificial flavourings may also be used. So industrial cheese isn't just a larger scale version of artisanal or fermier cheese - it's an artificial product, no different from Cheesy Wotsits or Pot Noodles really.

Pasteurisation has been a particular battleground in France since the Camembert battle between modern industrial producers and the old guard. The old guard won that one - the authorities decided that to get its AOC, Camembert had to be made with raw milk.

Now then; price comparison. A good artisan or fermier cheese will cost somewhere between 2 and 5 times as much as an industrial cheese (that top end is for real rarities, and the occasional more expensive goat's cheese or very old Mimolette). It won't be as good. Is it worth making the economy?

How much do we spend on cheese every week? Fifteen euros perhaps, at most? So if we saved half of that, it would be seven euros a week. 364 euros a year. The cost of a decent long weekend away.

Actually, I think real cheese is worth that much. Although, perhaps, not to cook with; for that I do use industrial cheese.

Artisanal versus Fermier

I've often seen the labels 'artisanal' and 'fermier' on French cheeses, and I suppose like many English consumers thought vaguely that they guaranteed 'authentic' production, and never given it much more thought. In fact, the two labels mean very different things.

'Fermier' is made of milk from a single farm, and the cheese has to be made on the same farm. Obviously, no farmer-cheesemaker is ever going to produce a huge quantity of cheese, so these are cheeses made on a small scale, and if you're after the taste of the terroir, fermier cheeses surely deliver.

'Artisanal' is generally made by small units, up to 10 employees, but the milk can be bought in from any dairy farm. Most often, artisanal producers use cheese from local farms, and sometimes work closely with local farmers. So the link with the terroir is not broken, but it's a bit looser than with fermier cheeses.

The stinky cheese trick

I love a strong cheese, but the problem is that sometimes, with time they develop to become just too strong, almost burning your tongue. Then, a lot of people are tempted to throw them away.

However, there's a little trick I've been taught by my Ugly Frog (that is, my significant other, who still has to turn into a prince). Simply use an equivalent amount of butter - and miraculously, the strength of the cheese seems to disappear while the other flavours remain.

I have a number of recipes for potted cheese which take a strong cheese such as Stilton and mix it with butter, and I've always thought they were just there to make a more spreadable cheese. But now I'm wondering if they are English ways of achieving the same result - moderating the raw power of an older cheese while retaining the most of the flavour?