I once bought a piece of mimollete cheese on a lark. When I ate it later that day, I was extremely impressed by the rich and nutty flavor, and wondered how I had reached adulthood without knowing about something so delicious.
So I looked it up on wikipedia. And learned about the mites.
When I looked closely at the rind of the the cheese I'd bought-- sure enough, it was busy with tiny, transparent crawlies.
I still like mimolette, but there's something in the back of my brain that cannot forget the mites. The innocent bliss of that first experience is impossible to recapture.
I don't think the mites are able to penetrate to the inside, as mimolette is quite hard (I prefer the extra old). I don't eat the rind, myself.
It's my favorite cheese. It's as if three year sharp cheddar and proper Parmigiano Reggiano had a delicious, sharp, salty baby that comes apart with the flaky dry texture of mica almost.
Speaking of disgusting delicacies with strange methods of preparation/consumption, in Sweden they eat Surströmming, which is a canned fish that's been fermented in a relatively light brine, and is so pungent it is often opened submerged in a bucket of water to avoid the smell and brine shooting out of the tin when pierced (it continues to ferment in the can, so if it's opened incorrectly it will spray out brine)
After reading your comment I did some research, and you're right, they don't have anuses, so they just store all their poop in their abdomens until they die, when they decompose and release that poop all at once. So there's that to look forward to.
"Mark Twain" had a posthumously published essay in which God points out that, just as one builds a boarding-house for the benefit of its boarders and not of the building, man was created for the benefit of his microbial population.
If you keep your cheese warm enough (not refrigerated for 4 to 6 hours) you can even see the mites run in your plate at times :) They're not actually microscopic, though they're really, really small. There are cheeses that gets their name (and taste) from the mites : "la tomme céronnée" is so called because it's covered with "cirons" (mites) that gives it its typical nutty taste (you're of course supposed to eat the rind, eventually after brushing off some of the dust).
Another interesting thing to now is that raw milk cheeses have an intense life of their own, but they're less susceptible to host bad bugs : the existing fauna and flora keeps the nasty ones out. OTOH, a pasteurized cheese must be either almost sterile, or may rapidly host all sorts of bad microbes.
The Wikipedia article gives a suggestion for how to kill the maggots (and force them to vacate the cheese) if one is squeamish. The article actually makes it sound rather delicious (if hard to obtain).
I watched a history video about England and it seems many children died from tuberculosis infected milk. According to the show, "Boracic acid was believed to 'purify' milk, removing the sour taste and smell from milk that had gone off".
I think you may be confusing pasteurized milk cheese with pasteurized cheese. Many cheeses are made with pasteurized milk and cultures added after pasteurization. These cheeses are most definitely not sterile. I’m not sure that genuine pasteurized cheeses exist in the US, at least not ones that are sold as cheese. There is “cheese product” that is a whole different beast.
(Even home made yogurt is frequently pasteurized at home. IMO the tastiest yogurt is made by first holding the milk at 180F or so for half an hour, at which point it’s pasteurized. Then the milk is cooled and a starter is added. The result is not sterile and has a respectable shelf life.)
I'm not sure, there's a huge difference in the cheese sold next to the milk and eggs and stuff and the cheese sold in the deli section.
The Kraft/cracker barrel style Cheddar and stuff doesn't even come close to resembling even mild Cheddar in that section and has a consistency closer to rubber than cheese, even the apparently old and extra old cheddar of the Kraft/cracker barrel kind.
I find it hard to accept that it's even really cheese and i've never really gotten to experience really nice cheese like some of the other commenters here have mentioned.
The Kraft/cracker barrel cheeses go mouldy in a completely different way the other cheeses do. The mould itself even looks different. I'm not sure exactly what pasteurization/sterilization methods are used on those cheeses vs the others, but there's a noticable difference not only in taste and texture, but during the actual moulding process which would be directly affected by any kind of pasteurization or sterilization.
If you look in the cheese section of a decent store, you’ll find many real cheese with ingredients like “pasteurized milk, salt, enzymes, cultures”. These contain living cultures but not raw milk, and many of them have long shelf lives.
My point is that, while you’re unlikely to find raw milk in a sterile so-called cheese product, actual cheese is not sterile despite often containing pasteurized milk. And that pasteurizing the milk isn’t necessarily done for food safety reasons — some cheese recipes call for raw milk and some call for cooking the milk.
>I would not personally consider Kraft products to be cheese
I wholeheartedly agree with this. Most Kraft products like the singles and cheese wiz and shit, the 'modified milk products' are not even close to cheese.
What i was talking about are all those cheeses most people buy from the fair section, there's usually a mild, medium, old Cheddar selection, a mozzarella, lately i've seen Monterey jacks. Those are what I think of as the sterile 'cheese' made with pasteurized milk and lacking in active cultures. I'm guessing, like you say, they're likely closer to those modified milk products than real cheese, but for many, many people, that's the cheese they know, buy and eat.
I've had raw milk cheese before and i've eaten plenty of active culture cheeses, the difference between them isn't really that noticable, they're all actual cheese.
Sounds like something that could be solved with food irradiation [1] after the cheese has ripened, to kill the mites. It's similar to pasteurization, but without any of the heat which would melt the cheese. And it's already FDA approved[2].
Many food regulations seem to be based on people’s traditional idea of cleanliness than on actual salutary benefits. I doubt hair and cockroaches are huge disease vectors but I still don’t want them in or near my food.
Yeah but if you kill the mites/worms/whatever, its still in the cheese, just dead. I would actually prefer the, you know, meaty part, to be fresh upon digestion
There's no official ripe date, and French cheese-mongers typically state the date of packaging to give the customer a general idea of what to expect. Young and aged mimolette have significant differences in texture and taste.
You know what the French do with un-irradiated ground beef?
They mix in a raw egg and some other spices and eat it raw. It’s called steak tartare (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steak_tartare), and it’s pretty good. It helps when you have sane agricultural practices (except for that time they spread prions to people—ooops—and I still can’t donate blood in the US because I was in Europe at that time) and a culture of gastronomie.
Steak tartar is widely available in North America. It's not even French in origin. The implication that America has no culture of gastronomy and insane agricultural practices is distasteful.
It was even called ‘steak à l’américaine’ in France, early in the 20th century. That said, from my experience it is much more common in France than in any other country I have visited. Hell, they even refuse to do anything less than medium-rare in American restaurants most of the time.
Certainly within the EU, eggs are generally of a higher standard than in the US; there are generally completely safe to eat raw in the EU, whereas this would be unwise in the US.
Comparing the number of salmonella deaths/cases between (for example) the UK and the US is rather interesting/amusing depending on ones perspective.
> Certainly within the EU, eggs are generally of a higher standard than in the US; there are generally completely safe to eat raw in the EU, whereas this would be unwise in the US.
This is a myth. There are different sanitary requirements resulting in tradeoffs (i.e. longer fridge life in US due to the rapidness with which eggs enter a fridge, longer shelf life out of fridge in europe), but in both cases the risk comes from salmonella in the yolk before the shell forms and would be unaffected by the differences in sanitation of the resulting egg. I would think the risk of raw eggs would be approximately the same.
Another thing is that eggs are washed before sale in North America, which removes the outer membrane and means they have to be refrigerated. In Europe they can sit at room temperature because they are not generally washed.
The downside being that you should wash them before use in Europe but in North America they are safe to use from the fridge.
We raise our own eggs, and leave them on the counter unwashed.
Oh for sure I'm sure many Europeans refrigerate their eggs. I'm just saying they don't necessarily have to, nor do the stores have to sell them in a refrigerated area. In North America this is mandatory, because the eggs will spoil.
Salmonella hasn't been a real problem in American eggs for decades. They're used raw all the time. (Yes, there are occasional outbreaks. There are also outbreaks in Europe.)
I can't count the number of times I've consumed raw USDA eggs in the form of uncooked chocolate chip cookie dough and cake batter throughout my childhood...
Yes, but the French do it with freshly and carefully ground beef, from whole-muscle cuts instead of random trimmings.
I'll happily eat a rare burger at my local butcher; they'll grind the meat right in front of me and serve it with a side of beef fat fries. One of the things I intend to immediately enjoy again once lockdown is over.
In Germany there is a cheese called Milbenkäse (mite cheese) that contains live mites inside the cheese, not just on the rind. They contain hundreds of thousands of them per cheese block.
Not all raw milk cheese is banned. Raw milk cheeses that have been aged less than 60 days are not allowed in the US and Canada(excluding Quebec). You can buy raw milk cheese in most supermarkets in the US.
Cheese is often a bargaining chip in trade negotiations, or collateral damage when the American government wants so show it’s not happy. One example was the banana trade wars in the 1990s, which saw things like roquefort (as well as other European food) getting banned and un-banned a couple of times. It often has not much to do with actual food safety.
True, but I doubt that banning this one very specific cheese (that is much less known than Roquefort in the US) is due to trade negotiations. Even the German mite cheese is supposedly in kind of a legal grey area in the EU.
You’re right, in this instance apparently some customs agents did not like the look of one batch. My memory is a bit hazy, and finding details is difficult.
The report is fantastic though, you can feel the disgust of the officer who wrote it:
—
The article is subject to refusal of admission pursuant to Section 801(a)(3) in that it the article appears to consist in whole or in part of a filthy, putrid, or decomposed substance or be otherwise unfit for food.
— https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/importrefusals/index....
There are actually a bunch of things that are not entirely compliant with EU regulations but get some kind of exemption because they are traditional, and usually not produced in large quantities. Sometimes they can be produced but not sold, like the casu marzu mentioned elsethread.
(I did a production of this book as a nice epub for Standard Ebooks: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/charles-babbage/passages-f... if you want something for your reader.)