The soul of cheese

An Austrian pro is eager to take the mystery out of Camembert, Gouda and other good things that dairy cows and proper aging can deliver, Mike Peters reports.

Her boss calls her "the cheese sommelier". That noun is generally reserved for a wine professional, preferably a French one with a grand manner and a grander vocabulary.

You get none of that - except the professional part - with Christiane Ruckerl, 27, who became entranced with the huge variety of cheeses while working at the Michelin-starred Restaurant Steirereck in Vienna. That 45-year-old eatery is famous for its trolleys, especially the cheese carts jammed with 60 cheeses from a list of about 150, depending on the season.

"You can say cheese is a simple product made from milk," says the staff specialist at the Kempinski Beijing hotel, "but it has its own soul and comes in hundreds of different types and shapes." Popular in Europe for centuries, cheese is intriguing more and more well-traveled Chinese, and the Austrian expert's job is to help them enjoy it.

"It's not about teaching like it's an academic subject," she says after a recent cheese-and-wine tasting event at the hotel, where she will host another event on Friday. "If we can bring a smile to people, that's all we want."

That means finding out not what's "good" but what you like. Ruckerl says you can set up a simple tasting to explore both different cheese types and how they mesh with wines.

To demonstrate, she prepares a platter of five cheeses - "none too extreme-tasting," she says, ranging from a mild soft cheese to a fairly robust hard one. She invites us to taste each in turn, starting with the mildest, and with each to taste two different white wines - a sweetish riesling and a drier white - to compare how they work with each cheese.

"Wines for this should never overpower," she says. "After a moment with the wine on your palate, you want the cheese flavor to come back to your mouth."

Alongside the cheeses there are grapes and nuts, though Ruckerl says a little bread - a fresh French baguette or slices of rye - are the best accompaniment for letting the cheese flavors shine through.

We start at the mild end, with a soft French cheese of the natural white-mold type with a thick rind. It's nutty and creamier than it looks.

Next is Reblochou, a raw-milk cheese that's soft and smeary - "not fluffy like Brie", she says. "Raw-milk cheeses are made with milk that has not been pasteurized, so you can always taste the animal more than the herbs and the hay they've eaten." Some say the rind is just there to add flavor and not to be eaten on these cheeses, while others like to eat the thin, softer parts that are not at the thick outside edge.

Unfortunately the importing of raw-milk cheese is restricted in China, but Ruckerl hopes that will change after future negotiations and demonstrations that such food can be transported in safe conditions.

Fresh-milk cheeses offer a rich array of well-defined flavors and aromas, with depths of complexity. "When I think of the piquant tanginess of a raw milk blue, or the grassy, herbal depth of a raw sheep's milk cheese," croons another expert, the cheese blogger at the US grocery chain Whole Foods, "I often say that savoring a great raw-milk cheese feels like a walk in the woods."

Because of the animal nature of raw-milk cheese, Ruckerl says, some people like to eat bacon with such cheeses, but "that doesn't make sense to me". A better choice, she says, is olives - but black ones, not vinegary green ones.

Third on the platter is Taleggio, a saltier cheese ("but still more of an introvert") from Lombardy in Italy. "It's cured in natural caves that produce white and blue mold - there's no raw milk here, so you are not going to taste the cow," she says, grinning. We're finding the sweet riesling works best with this one, and she notes that it would nicely pair with a fortified wine, like madeira or port, and with oily foods.

Cheese number four is Morbier, distinctive for the thin black layer of black ash that divides it horizontally in the middle. Cheesemakers traditionally get to the end of the day with a small amount of curd that is not enough to make an entire cheese. In the French village of Morbier they prevented waste by pressing the leftover curd from the evening milking into a mold, and spreading the ash over it to protect it overnight. "That keeps out the oxygen, so the ripeness stays high," says Ruckerl. In the morning, the cheesemakers add a layer of morning milk and finish the cheese. The layers are quite different, she notes: "The evening milk is more spicy, because the cows have been eating herbs and grasses during the day. The morning milk, on the other hand, has more fat." The result is rich and creamy, with a slightly bitter aftertaste.

The finale is Plangger, a handcrafted "mountain cheese" from the Tyrolian Alps of Austria. It's much nuttier than any previous selection, and sweeter thanks to six months of curing. "Like people, it gets calmer with age," says Ruckerl with a laugh. The cows that produce it eat only fresh grass and hay - no silo grass, which quickly becomes partly fermented in storage, she says.

"Quite fragrant," she says as she digs in with a cheese knife. "And for me, a taste of home."

Contact the writer at michaelpeters@chinadaily.com.cn

Valerie Osipov contributed to this story.