Comité Interprofessionnel Sainte-Maure de Touraine

 

C H E E S E   A N T H O L O G Y

Sainte-Maure de Touraine

By Edward Behr

appellation: Appellation d’Origine Protégée (AOP)

place: Touraine and a little beyond, Loire Valley, France

milk: goat (Alpine, Saanen, and Poitevine breeds), raw

type: small, lactic-curd (acid-curd), charcoal-dusted, soft, bloomy-rind

size: a tapering cylinder about 16 to 18 cm (6.3 to 7 in) long and about 3 to about 5 cm (1.2 to 1.8 in) in diameter, weighing about 250 gr

production: farm and dairy plant, a total of around 1,800 metric tonnes annually

related cheeses: Pouligny-Saint-Pierre, Selles-sur-Cher, and Valençay

look for: a farm-made cheese (“fermier” or similar words in French), perhaps well-ripened at three to four weeks, depending on your taste, and, if possible, never wrapped or refrigerated

taste: A definite acidity comes with fresh, clean lactic aromas and something that might be hazelnut and perhaps fresh hay.

drinks: Two excellent choices from the region are Sauvignon or a dry to faintly sweet Vouvray (100 percent Chenin Blanc). To succeed at all with a red requires a younger cheese and a wine that’s young, fruity, and light (low in tannin and alcohol); in the Loire you can find such wines from the varieties Pinot d’Aunis, Grolleau, and Gamay, sometimes in a blend, or in the form of a straight Côt (Malbec) or Pinot Noir (the red from the appellations Reuilly and Sancerre). In a completely different direction, a fresh young Sainte-Maure is excellent with Champagne.

 

The ash-coated, raw-milk Sainte-Maure de Touraine, the original cheese in a log shape, combines strong acidity with balanced salt and distinct dairy flavors. They’re led by hazelnut, to use the reflexive French description for the flavor of almost any small goat’s-milk cheese. You might also find a suggestion of hay and possibly something floral, and goat flavors, of course, although a young cheese may not taste goaty at all. After two weeks, the cheese has ripened significantly and is covered with bluish gray mold. At what to me is an ideal moment between three and four weeks, the flavor is richer and stronger, concentrated in the skin and the creamy layer beneath it, which in turn surrounds a slightly chalky core, filled with its own, milder dairy flavors. Sainte-Maure de Touraine always has a straw running through its center, to make the log easier to handle without breaking, especially while the cheese is new and vulnerable. (Today, the straw is minutely inscribed with the name of the cheese and the identification number of the producer.) Sainte-Maure de Touraine is the essential cheese of the central Loire Valley, one of the most satisfying goat’s-milk cheeses in all France, perfect at the heart of an outdoor lunch along with rillettes de Tour, fresh bread, a salad, a glass of dry Vouvray wine, and fruit.

The Sainte-Maure de Touraine appellation covers a wide, undulating landscape just 120 to 180 meters above sea level, cut by the Loire River and its tributaries and extending somewhat beyond the limits of the old province of Touraine. Other cylindrical goat’s-milk cheeses called simply “Sainte-Maure” can be made anywhere in France, using either raw or pasteurized milk. But few if any rise to the standard of the original.

Compared with most of France, the Loire Valley is particularly conducive to making goat’s-milk cheeses; the tradition is said to go back to the 700s. (During the Umayyad invasion, Arabs possibly introduced goats to the region, although the invaders’ stay was brief, and it’s not clear that they reached as far north as the Loire River.) Much of the soil is too poor and dry to grow forage for dairy cattle, but the vegetation is fine for goats, and the rivers contribute humidity for ripening cheeses.

Historical evidence for the existence of particular small farm-made cheeses is scarce, but Sainte-Maure came into being around the town of Sainte-Maure, probably before 1800. The soils in that area are somewhat acid, with sand and impenetrable clay; they suit goats but few crops apart from rye, which grows well. It gave plenty of straw to weave into mats on which to drain the cheese and to insert through its center. The cheeses, originally made for a family’s own consumption, began to be sold at the markets at Sainte-Maure and Tours. Yet until the 20th century, raising goats was a marginal occupation in Touraine, merely one component of a mixed agriculture. Improved breeds of goat begin to be introduced in the 1920s, but it was only after the Second World War, as French agriculture became more modernized and specialized, that the size of the region’s herds and the production of the cheese grow, together with demand. Then the cheeses reached larger, more distant markets, including those of Paris and Lyon.

As I write, Sainte-Maure de Touraine is made on 47 farms, but 80 percent of the cheese is made in five dairy plants, four of which operate on a large scale. Unfortunately, none of the AOP cheese is exported to the United States, because all of it is made from raw milk and aged, as a rule, for less than the required US minimum of 60 days.

Like other Loire goat’s-milk cheeses, the key to Sainte-Maure de Touraine is acidity. That alone can curdle the milk, although normally a small dose of rennet helps. The acidity traditionally comes from an addition of whey from the cheesemaking of the day before; besides being acidic in itself, the whey is full of lactic bacteria that slowly turn the milk’s sugar into more acid. The bacteria prefer cool temperatures and commonly take 24 hours to work. Nowadays, the wild indigenous bacteria are usually boosted by a commercial culture.

In making more industrial goat’s-milk cheeses, the curd is often broken and drained for a time to eliminate part of the whey, before the curd goes into a “multimold.” But that produces a heavier texture. Sometimes, especially on farms, the curd isn’t cut at all, and each mold is filled in the old way with a ladle. Machines exist that accomplish a version of the same thing, but the rules for Sainte-Maure de Touraine require that the molds be filled by hand. When you cut and bend a slice of the cheese, it breaks along the smooth curve where one ladleful of curd met the next. The texture is moist and delicate.

Industrial goat’s-milk cheeses, whether made with raw or pasteurized milk, tend to have simpler, milder flavor. That’s because they’re made using simpler, less interesting commercial cultures, because they’re produced more quickly with less focus on ripening, and because a mass market is less attracted to complex flavor than to a product that tastes predictably the same.

Sainte-Maure de Touraine may not be sold under that name until it has aged for at least ten days and is visibly covered with flora. The ash coating — today powdered charcoal — used to be optional. It reduces surface acidity, allowing the ripening organisms to become more quickly established. Inside, at first, the very white, moist cheese retains much of the smooth, melting softness and flavor of a fresh cheese. The logs, having a proportionately large surface area, evolve quickly. Day by day, as Sainte-Maure de Touraine ripens at temperatures from 6 to 16 degrees C (43 to 61 degrees F), the taste becomes stronger. At a variable point after 20 days, a darker, creamier color and texture appears just beneath the surface and works its way inward. This proteolysis (breakdown of protein) contributes important flavors. Some Sainte-Maure de Touraine cheeses are innately creamier than others, partly because some milk is higher in fat, but within limits a moist cheese can be made creamier by ripening it in a somewhat warmer, very humid environment. Occasionally, you see a cheese in which too much warmth has caused the cheese to quickly turn very creamy under the skin, and then if you pick the cheese up, the skin may slip off completely.

The microorganisms that ripen cheese behave differently at different temperatures. Best in general are what you might call natural cellar temperatures, around 10 degrees C (50 degrees F), where the cheeses develop a broader, richer, more buttery flavor. Much warmer than that, and the taste becomes more tart and chalky. Much cooler, and the compounds and flavors are simpler.

The ripening of a small cheese is also significantly a process of drying. Sainte-Maure de Touraine, like most other goat’s-milk cheeses, gradually becomes denser and crumblier, as it moves to demi-sec (“half-dry”) and then sec (“dry”), which isn’t actually “dry” but only distinctly firm. A log starts at an average 250 grams and after two months, if, exceptionally, it’s aged that long, is reduced to about 150 grams. Its flavors, including goat (which is among the flavors from the breakdown of fats), have become steadily stronger and the creaminess has reached deeper inside.  There’s no single desirable state of ripeness. You choose what you like. From the day the cheeses are turned out of their molds, they provide a continuum of pleasure.

The more wild the ripening cultures, the more varied the appearance of the cheese. Patrick Rance, in his elegiac French Cheese Book, published in 1989, described his first visit to the Sainte-Maure market in the 1950s: “We plunged through a sea of live kids and poultry to the endless stalls of chèvres. The coulours of those Sainte-Maure cheeses dominated the market and remain vivid in my memory after thirty years: gold, pink, deep rose, grey, pale to dark blue, but, above all, the glistening reds of cheeses which appeared to have just emerged from a bath of Chinon Rouge. The richness of those exteriors did not belie the flavours within.” I admit I’ve never seen such colorful extremes today.

France’s cheeses used to be commonly sold unwrapped, and ideally, and romantically, you would never buy them any other way. An impermeable plastic film, now the norm in cheese shops in France as elsewhere, distorts the aging of small goat’s-milk cheeses by eliminating drying and breathing and by stifling surface organisms with a lack of oxygen. (There are exceptions; some cheese wrappers are almost invisibly perforated and do allow some exchange, and some cheeses are sold in open boxes beneath transparent plastic, allowing some exchange and air space.) Close wrapping for any length of time requires that a cheese be kept refrigerated, so its evolution is slowed almost to a halt. If you buy directly from a farm maker in France, the cheeses are less likely to have been wrapped or refrigerated. And yet a skilled retailer may have his or her own small cave just for goat’s-milk cheeses and may excel in selecting and ripening them. ●

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