More Provencal Cheese

My goodness, it's been too long since my last post...and there's so much to tell! First, let me catch you up on the cheese news. After Roquefort, Elly and I went back to Aix en Provence where she and her French boyfriend were settling into their new "country house." I really do feel more comfortable away from all the plus posh hustle found in the center of Aix, and it gave me a chance to learn the finer points of a fabulous French lawn game called potonk, similar to bocce ball. I also had the chance to visit a local goat cheese farm and try out a few new recipes of my own the quiet countryside.

Elly and I visited a small goat operation just outside of Puyricard. Sandrine, who runs the farm with her husband and makes the cheese daily, was kind enough to allow Elly and I to watch her make the specialty of the farm and pester her with questions. We watched as she prepared a very rare and delicious ricotta style goat cheese called brousse du rove. It is made from the milk of the Rove goat, a breed that used to be found commonly in and around Marseilles. Nowadays you find mostly Saaen, Alpine and some others, but the milk from Rove goats has a special grassy quality that is super tasty. Sandrine prepared the yogurt style cheese by slowly bringing the milk up to 90°F and then adding a little vinegar to help the small curds form. Then she very carefully spooned the curds into tall, thin plastic tubes and sold them to us right away, no draining necessary. Usually the cheese is served as a dessert with jam or sugar and it was divine. The consistency was much more delicate and moist than ricotta, but much cheesier in flavor than yogurt. We took a bunch home and had some for breakfast each morning. You can learn more about the history of the cheese and the traditions of thier cheese making style here.


With no Hermes store around the corner to distract me, I was able to try out a few recipes I'd dreamed up on Bob Dylan's farm and had the perfect excuse for such elaborate creations; our friends Phil and Eddie from Chateau Brandeau in Bordeax came down for a weekend visit. You may remember this fabulous couple from my earlier posts. Eddie is a deliciously over the top Kiwi and Phil is his quiet, delightful companion from the UK. These men have the most wonderful bromance I've ever encountered and share cheeky rapport that instantly puts a smile on your face. I knew they would appreciate a little culinary experimentation, so I put together some dessert cheeses to try. The first a sugared rose petal with a dollop of fresh chevre rolled in sponge cake crumbs and topped with a healthy smear of dark chocolate. The crunchy petal with the soft cheese and smooth chocolate made for a really dynamic little bite...totally a winner. The next experiment was soaking some slightly aged chevre in various liqueurs. The first was soaked in a fruity, syrupy Minervois red wine, the second in a dry rose and the third in violet liqueur with lavender. The result was an Easter basket of colors and some lovely delicate aromas infused into the little pats of chevre. I loved the presentation but would like to try soaking them longer next time to get a stronger flavor.


That's all for tonight, but stay tuned for wine adventures in Bordeaux, an underground cathedral and a sand dune that swallows entire buildings!

Bob Dylan Broke Up With Me

Frustration. I was scheduled to stay in La Caunette making cheese for the whole month, but it seems that the fluffy, jovial, drunken god that rules my life is trying to teach me a lesson about the best laid plans. I need to let go. I need to be flexible. I need to stop being so attached to my expectations. (God, I sound like I've joined the Oprah book club...) I also need to get a better grip on the nuances of living in a foreign culture. My mantra for the last year has been this:

Let go

Let go

Let go

Let go

Let go

I still have not let go. But I'm getting better. And I'm getting slightly better at understanding the mind of average French person.

Yesterday my host, Bob Dylan's French cousin, told me that she would not be needing my help for the rest of the month. I could say that it's unfair that she was upset that I didn't help her as much as she thought I should....on the weekend...while I was in bed sick with a horrible cold. I could complain about the lack of instruction and hospitality. But instead I'm taking the lesson that I need to better at communicating my expectations and perspective, and that I'm trying my best to be graceful and kind and helpful even though I am severely frustrated. I am leaving today to go back to Aix-en-Provence with Elly to regroup. And buying a plane ticket back to California, because the cheese in my beautiful home state is pretty damn good too.

Photos from Le Bouquet

I have now officially added the term "goat herder" to my resume

The only escargot I'm likely to get here...

Daily cheese making.

Fresh milk each morning and evening

The little molds for fresh chevre

The Cat Ate My Quiche

I arrived last week at a new farm in a little town called La Caunette. Our new home, Le Bouquet, sits at the foot of the Pyranees, just a short drive from Narbonne and the beautiful beaches of Southern France. We had finally arrived at our destination for the trip: a goat dairy. Our host, Melissa, came to get us at the train station, greeting us with a kiss on both cheeks. I kid you not, her Bob Dylan fro actually had a caterpillar crawling in it; this woman was a true farmer.

Le Bouquet has a small herd of goats (about 30) that are milked twice per day and this is the mainstay of the business. Melissa inherited the farm from her parents and, amazingly, runs the whole operation by herself. She's a tough broad, and I gotta give her props for the huge amount of work that she manages all by her lonesome. It takes a lot of commitment to work a 12 hour day, 7 days a week and live by yourself with a herd of smelly goats. She really seems to enjoy it, and has managed to make a vital business from cheese-making.

My respect for her is the upside. The downside is that our relationship is characterized by mutual bafflement. I have never thought of myself as a particularly high-maintenance person, and since I started traveling and staying on farms, my expectations for daily comfort have drastically reduced. But somehow, I still seem to come across to this kind farmer as hopelessly posh. My daily shower was interpreted as extravagant. Heating milk for coffee in the morning is greeted with a raised eyebrow and a quick glance at the propane tank. I have never felt so bougeois in my entire life.

The entire WWOOF program is predicated on a basic agreement of three things:
1. You come and work
2. You are fed
3. You receive a place to sleep and bathe.
I have had no trouble with adapting to the lifestyle of my hosts...until now. We arrived on Monday and by Wednesday had eaten, literally, the same thing for every meal: the same loaf of bread, the same block of cheese, the same pot of plain, cold pasta, the same bowl of salad. Not that there's anything wrong with that...I just was in the mood for something, say, warm or perhaps, not pasta. Melissa went to the farmers' market on Wednesday morning to sell her cheese and left Elly and I in charge of making our own lunch. I got super resourceful and made a lovely quiche with whatever I could find; a bit of flour we found in the pantry, some leftover cheese from the evening before, a few eggs we had collected from the hen-house, a bit of mushroom and onion we scrounged from a bin and voila! delicious quiche.

Melissa came home and looked a little skeptical. I could see that she thought this was a bit of a production for an afternoon meal, but I was really ready to have something tasty and sat down to munch. I thought myself very clever to have made two so that we could have a bit for dinner as well and was congratulating myself for being so thrifty. It felt like a small victory. But I really had only won the battle not the war. This quickly became evident when I went into the kitchen post-lunch to clean up. On the counter was the bloody cat, hovering over my perfect, tasty, live-affirming quiche. She had eaten big bites out of the whole thing and I thought I might break into tears on the spot. Here's the thing about staying on farms: your whole world is reduced down into the most basic elements. You do not have movies or parties or social circles or any of the other things that make life so full and busy and rich from day to day. All you have is a full day of hard work and the promise of a bit of relaxing and eating in the evening. These basic elements take on a new meaning since they are literally ALL that you have to look forward to each day. So when that damned cat ate my quiche, I felt like someone had sucker-punched my new puppy.

And here's the real kicker: Bob Dylan served it for dinner anyway.

Pyranees, Attempt #1

We really did try to make cheese in the Pyranees, but let me tell you, it was not in the cards. After Elly and I left Chateau Brandeau last week, we went directly to our next farm...our first cheese-making farm! But that's the thing about traveling with the WWOOF program, it's a gambling man's way to see the world. We wanted to bet on this "traditional," "rustic" operation as an idyllic spot, high in the mountains, perfect for learning the old-fashioned way to craft fromage. We really were betting on the wrong horse, though. When we entered the house of our new hosts, it was like stepping back in time 100 years, but not in a romantic way.

Our first red flag was the smell of the house. One of the blessings and curses of inhabiting my body is a very sensitive nose. When I entered our hosts' home that day, my nose was screaming, "There is a male goat sleeping under my new bed and he smells like all the worst parts of a barnyard and a brothel!" I thought that I might gag. Our second scarlet banner was what appeared to be a hoard of sick, screaming children running rampant through the house. There were actually only three of them, but sometimes children have the singular ability to appear to be in all places at once, their tiny voices around you on all sides at once, the affect multiplied by each child added to the mix. Our third giant flashing red light was the filth. I have seen some dirty places and am not easily deterred by a little bit of untidiness, but when I used the bathroom, I can honestly say that the last time it was cleaned was sometime last century. I thought to myself, "It's okay, I can just use the little creek outside to wash up every day;" I could not imagine anything akin to cleaning of one's self happening in that room...my brain said, "Error, error! Clean cannot happen in this room." The fourth pillar of fire in that dark night of our discontent was the cheese making operation itself. When we went outside (mostly to escape the stink), we saw their animals, sheep mostly, all of whom looked like they were in deep negotiations with the Grim Reaper. They all looked so sick and ill-tended, I just wanted to open their little pen and yell, "Be free, little sheep! Get out of here while there's still time!" Elly also saw the cheese making molds floating in a muddy hole next to the creek, covered with green fur. I felt like I was getting food poisoning just hearing about it.

And that's when we decided: no amount of trying or attitude-adjusting is going to make this into an educational or pleasant experience. So, in our very broken French, we politely explained that we would like to go back to the train station, "nous sommes desolee," and apologized for wasting their time. The family was actually quite nice about it and offered to drive us back down the big hill to town so we could find a train to somewhere, anywhere but there. It was at this moment that I had a moment of self-doubt. After all, the family was well-meaning and clearly kind...they were going to take us back to the station and not make a big stink about it. Maybe I had judged too quickly. Maybe I could learn to appreciate with the randy goat odor living under my bed, maybe I would commune with nature in unexpected ways each morning while I bathed in the shivery creek. Maybe I was just being a prissy American.

And then this happened:
The daughter of our hosts was mother to two of the three aforementioned sick and crying children. She was going to take us down to town to catch a train. She simply asked that we watch her children for a moment while she made a phone call. She indicated that her youngest, referred to simply as "bebe," was outside and could we please keep an eye on him for a moment. Elly and I went out to the garden to check in on him, but he simply was not there. We started wandering further and further in circles around the house calling, stupidly, "bebe, bebe!" The kid was nowhere in sight. It was then that I had a mild panic attack, and in the flash of a second I saw with sudden clarity the scene unfold before me: the swift creek by the house, the little child washed downstream, the angry French family blaming us for this tragedy, the imprisonment in the Bastille. At this point the other child wandered out of the house and I swoooped her up, clamping her tightly onto my hip, and thinking, "I am NOT losing this one." I kept asking the little girl, "Ou est ta frere? Ou est ta frere?" She had no idea. I ran down to the creek. Then I hear the mother and grandmother join the fray, screaming "bebe, bebe!" in voiced of clear and awful distress. At the exact moment that my panic was starting to rise up out of my chest into my throat, I heard a cry of relief from the mother. I looked behind me and saw her by the car, holding her child. She explained that before she went into the house to make a phone call, she had put the child into his car-seat, but had simply forgotten she'd put him there. "J'ai oubliee...." she kept saying.

And then I knew with complete clarity that leaving was exactly the right thing to do.

So Elly and I ended up back at the train station a few hours later and considerably more shaken. It was still early afternoon, so I stayed at there to figure out our train options for the day and Elly wandered up to the Tourism Office to try to figure out some lodging for the night and use the phone. She returned with a very small French woman who owned the kindest eyes I've ever seen. Karine was from the Tourism Office and had offered to have us stay at her house for the night while we sorted out our next step. At first Elly and I were a little apprehensive, mostly because of our awful luck just hours before, but this woman was so sweet and nice, we thanked her and got into her little station wagon. She took us to her house, introduced us to her husband Jerome and her son Theo and stuck a beer in each of our hands. Her little house was beautiful and she made up a bed for us in the guest room. Karine is the single most hospitable person I have ever encountered in my life. She shared her homemade foie gras and saucison, refilled our glasses with wine, and insisted that we treat her house as if it were our own. She offered to let us stay longer if we liked to enjoy the Pyranees, and we sat on her porch in the warm evening air, admiring the view of the snowy mountains in the distance. Elly and I decided to go back to our home-base in Aix the next morning and Karine deposited us at the station in the morning, helped us speak to the fellow behind the counter and actually cried when we got on the train. I wanted to put her in my suitcase and take her with me. Because of Karine, I know that this is simply my first attempt as discovering the Pyranees....she's like a promise of gold buried in the hills.

Fromagerie Tours

I may not have made this particularly clear until now, but the entire point of my travels in France is to learn the art of cheese making. While I was in Hawaii I fell in love with goats. There was a herd at my farm on the Big Island and my host taught me how to make basic fresh milk cheeses from the excess of our milkings each day. Perhaps it is my Aries nature, perhaps it's just their charming personalities, I'm not sure, but there is definitely something about goats that appeals to me. After Elly giggled through watching me milk one morning, we began to hatch a plan: go to the land of good cheese, stay on some farms and learn the art of making delicious French cheeses.

So now here I am in France for the summer. Our first farm happened to be on a winery (mostly because it came so highly recommended), but Elly and I told our hosts at Chateau Brandeau about our intentions for the trip, and they kindly set up some tours of local fromageries for us during our stay in Bordeaux. Last Sunday we went to the farm of their friend Regine. She has a small herd (70 goats) and handmakes her own cheese each day, mainly a fresh milk cheese in the Saint Marcellin style. Each day she and her husband milk the animals in the morning and then take them out to pasture for a few hours in the afternoon. Goats are very smart and easily trainable, so much so that they will stay within calling distance of their herder, not straying off and needing a fence or herding dogs to keep them close. Regine was trodging through the rain, leading her herd back into the barn when we arrived, and keeping dry under the most enormous umbrella I've ever seen. She said that she had sat under that huge umbrella the past few hours, calling to the goats every now and again to stay close, and reading a book in the soggy pasture.

Regine was also kind enough to show us her fromagerie (cheese making room) right off the kitchen in her chateau. We donned little disposable booties over our shoes, and, in half-French/half-English, she explained how she saves a little bit of the milk from the day before to start her culture, then forms the solidified curds into molds for the cheese. Most of her product is sold fresh the next day, but some she leaves to age in the cooler, maturing into a nutty, slightly firm disc of deliciousness after a month or so. In her cozy kitchen she let us sample different varieties, encouraging us to eat it with honey, sugar or jam. Some she had just made the day before and it was wonderfully creamy, with a little herby-freshness at the end.

The second fromagerie we visited was a less down-home and more modern. Fromagerie Van der Horst is a family operation which specializes in gouda. The patriarch is a Dutch immigrant who came to France in 1951 and started the business. He has passed down his recipes to his sons, who took over the operation in 1975. Unlike Regine, it is a cow's milk fromagerie and the Jersey girls were housed in a barn right next door to the tasting room.

Elly and showed up in the morning for our tour and were greeted by a very nice lady with absolutely no English. We know enough to get by in most situations, but this lady had us stumped. I thought that she was asking us "Ou est-que vous livre?" which in my head sounded something like "Where is your book?" This did not strike me as a question at all relevant to the situation, and Elly decided to reply that we were from Chateau Brandeau. This did the trick and we were introduced to a lady whose name sounds a whole lot like "livre." (Upon returning to Chateau Brandeau we asked Fearn and Andrea how to say this lady's name, but, though they both had met her several times, neither of them could pronounce it either; this made me feel like slightly less of an idiot.)

So "Livre" gave us some sanitary white clogs and took us into the big, state-of-the-art cheese making room to show us the ropes. She had taken milk from that morning (700 litres!), put it into a huge stainless steel vat and added a culture that made the milk separate into curds and whey. After a whole lot of mixing, the curds started to form up and she carefully and slowly drained and separated the solids from the vat. The next step was to transfer the curds into molds and press even more liquid out with a giant lever. Then the wheels were dipped into a brine bath to form the rind and allowed to age.

The cheese cave was a sight to behold: rows and rows of gouda wheels drying and aging to perfection. They were all sitting there, molding on the outside, but turning delicious and creamy on the inside. It was all dark and cool and peaceful and smelled heavenly. It was like a cheese sanctuary with mediating gouda wheels. Most of the cheese is sold after 3 weeks, but there are some varieties that are allowed to age for 3 or 6 months. The six month cheese was pure nirvana, nutty and full.

Elly and I bought a sampler platter of our favorites to take back to lunch at Chateau Brandeau and gave ourselves a self-guided tour of the barn. The baby cow were so friendly; one kept trying to lick my face like a puppy. Another took a shine to Elly and was licking and sniffing her jeans. A third was mysteriously attracted to my leather handbag and would have eaten it if I hadn't ran away. This gave me a little pang of guilt...like somehow my fashion choice was encouraging cannibalism. Poor little fella didn't know that the attraction was simply a misplaced camaraderie.