I ended up getting another cheese, and before I go into what I actually got, what is La Tomme de Chevre de Pays and why was little Remy waxing philosophical about it? And why was it so hard for me to find it?
Tomme - Tomme-style cheeses are the ones with a grey-brown rind, making it look sort of 'rustic' or 'weathered' and I typically think of them having a soft and creamy texture - think brie or camembert. This is not the actual definition, but since I'm more layman than cheesemonger, let's just call this a working definition because it'll help you out 90% of the time.
Chevre - means Goat in French, so it's made of goat blood. Just kidding. It's made with goat milk (obviously).
De pays.- means "from country" in French. So typically, a tomme would use the region after its name (e.g. "Tomme de Savoie" or "Tomme de Beaujolais") and since 'Pays' translates to 'Country', Remy was looking for a Tomme cheese "from country", which as you can see, doesn't make sense and so that might also explain the weird looks like received when I was asking the cheesemongers if they had "Tomme de Chevre de Pays" because that doesn't exist!
I ended up getting something called "La Tomme de Richelieu". It's a tomme from Quebec and it had that milky, farm, nutty flavour with a soft melt-in-your mouth texture. The rind was really sticky and strong smelling so that threw me off at first. Not sure if it was because I had it in my bag for awhile. The price came to $55/kg. (for perspective, cheddar cheese is typically something like $10/kg).
On La Tomme de Richelieu
Created 12 years ago by Fritz Kaiser, Le Tomme Haut Richelieu was an invention of necessity. The fromagerie had received more goat's milk than it needed to make its soft cheese Chevrochon. Wanting to preserve the milk by making a cheese that would have a longer shelf life, they made a goat's milk version of their semi-soft cow's milk cheese.
No comments:
Post a Comment