French Cheese

[Claude Kolm/The Fine Wine Review]

Busboy --While you're in Provence, Carpentras and Ile-sur-la-Sorgue have don't miss markets. I don't remember the day(s) for the Carpentras market, but Ile-sur-la-Sorgue is on Sundays.

[robert brown]

If you go to L'Ile sur-la-Sorgue on a Sunday, you will mostly be going head-to head with antiques shoppers, as this is about the biggest town for antiqueing in France. I believe the food market is by the church. Nearby it is a good Michelin one-star with a prix-fixe lunch menu I have always found to be rewarding. Just don't leave your car in one of the big parking lots if you have valuables even in the trunk. I think the tourism slump has made the lots unnecessary, at least when I was there last summer. Nonetheless, don't leave maps, guiebooks, etc. in the car.

[Bux]

- Apples and oranges. Comparing the best Paris cheese shops to American supermarkets isn't reasonable. The hypermarche cheese selections in France aren't so brilliant -- they're better than what we have here, but the apples-to-apples contrast isn't so dramatic. Remember, they eat a ton of pasteruized cheese in France, and a ton of poor-quality cheese regardless of the pasteurization issue.

All good points although I think you over simplify the case from time to time and no more so than here. They do eat a lot of crap cheese in France and more importantly, they've thought processed cheese is fit for kids so long that they've raised at least one generation that grew up think that was cheese and doesn't know much better.

I'll take issue with the broad brush you use to paint hypermarches. I've been taken shopping in Lorient, Brittany by a French born chef working in the US on several occaisions. Sometimes it's to the local open air market and sometimes it's to the supermarket. The announcement that we're going shopping was a high until he said we're stopping off at the local Champion hypermarche -- bummer, I thought -- until I got to the charcuterie and fromage service counters. Assuming it got a 10, I'd give Murray's a 7, and that for having more countries represented, but not so high for the quality and condition of the cheeses which included plenty of raw milk fermier artisanal cheese. And that was in a region not at all known for the local cheese.

Supermarkets in France successfully compete with our best specialty cheese shops more often than you suggest.

[Busboy]

I'll take issue with the broad brush you use to paint hypermarches... The announcement that we're going shopping was a high until he said we're stopping off at the local Champion hypermarche -- bummer, I thought -- until I got to the charcuterie and fromage service counters. Assuming it got a 10, I'd give Murray's a 7...

Supermarkets in France successfully compete with our best specialty cheese shops more often than you suggest.

On a quick business trip to Monaco, ducked into a hypermarche -- or maybe a supermarche, I don't know where one ends and the other begins -- for a bottle of wine. Admittedly, Monagasque grocery stores have a pretty high-income clientel to draw from, but I was still surprosed to see cases of classified Boredeaux stacked in the aisles -- as well as the 2 Euro a bottle plonk.

More to the FG's point, though, the fish section was amazing: 40 or 50 kinds of fish laid out on ice, impeccably fresh and ready for la feme du maison to cook up and serve with one of those white Graves a couple of aisles over.

Even in New York -- not that I've ever lived there but I am drawn compulsively to food markets of all kinds -- I've never seen a store or specialty fishmonger with remotely as many high-quality choices.

[Fat Guy]

I think I counted 58 varieties of very attractive fish at Wegmans last time I was in Princeton, NJ, and approximately 200 cheeses, including many American artisanal ones like Point Reyes Original Blue and Vermont Shepherd, not to mention nearly 20 varieties of cheddar. There are no supermarkets like Wegmans in New York City, but they are the proper comparison to a French hypermarche.

[pirate]

Fat guy: How do the Herme' pastries at Wegman's compare with those of Herme' at his Paris stores.?

[Fat Guy]

It has been too long since I had a Herme chocolate in Paris, but the ones at Wegmans are pretty damn good. If you want the exact same quality as a top Paris chocolatier, though, you just need to go to La Maison du Chocolat on Madison Avenue -- the product is identical to what they sell in the Paris shops, and you can get mail order anywhere in America. There's no major challenge with something like chocolate: all you have to do is put it in a properly insulated container on a plane once a week and send it over. Cheese is more problematic because it requires participation on the retail end.

[Bux]

I've not had Wegman's Herme designed pastries, and I've not had enough Herme pastries.

I recall a thread here in which the Wegman pastries were mentioned and I believe the poster indicated it was not fair to compare than with the ones you might buy in Herme's own shop in Paris. The are excellent for what they are, but they are not the same quality according to that poster.

[Fat Guy]

The issue there is a little different, though: It's not the presence or absence of Herme (he doesn't personally make the stuff in Paris either, most likely) but the manufacturing process. I think at Wegmans they make them in a central facility in Rochester and ship them frozen to the individual stores, at least I'm sure that's what they do with the chocolates. This sacrifices a small bit of flavor for the ability to have tight controls at a single location, so the person Herme trained (Stephane Sucheta), can be directly responsible for all the chocolates for the entire chain. It's a good compromise as a means of getting this quality of product out to a chain of 65 grocery stores spanning an area that's probably the size of France. But it's easy to ship the raw materials for chocolate to a processing facility overseas (Wegmans even uses French butter and cream for the Herme chocolates). You can't do that with cheese. You have to send around the finished cheese and then you need a competent person at every single retail outlet in order to store, ripen, and sell the stuff properly. That's a tall order.

[Louisa Chu]

I'm so sorry. Every time I read about your plights with cheese, I tearily spread some runny ripe Camembert on a fresh baguette and wash it down with some artisanal cider. This one's for you.

[Bux]

Cheese, chocolate and pastry are three different things. I agree. I was talking about the pastries not the chocolates and I seem to recall someone posting that they were a different line of pastries than is made in Herme's pastisserie in Paris and that they are not an attempt to reproduce what is baked in Paris. Of course Pierre himself doesn't make either batch of pastries, but he's most often in Paris these days and it's his own shop's output that he can check on a regular basis. In any event, I don't think Wegman's advertises the pastries as the same as those available in Herme's Paris shops or that consumers think they are.

On the other hand, some consumers probably believe the Epoisses, Livarots and Munsters are the same, while others are convinced they are not. As noted by many, even when the same cheese leaves the same farm headed for two different shops, by the time it reaches the consumer, it may not be the same cheese for sale in both shops.

[fresh_a]

I'm always surprised by the banality of American cheeses on my vacations. It's as if they've been purged of all taste and character, and visibly even seem translucid and unpalatable. They taste good. But nothing special. And no character.

[Pan]

fresh_a:

If you come to Manhattan on your next vacation, try the extra sharp cheddar the Amish-looking guy from Pennsylvania sells on the Union Sq. North side of the farmer's market in Union Square. I think he's there Wed. and Sat., but I don't remember.

By the way, I was really impressed with the selection of excellent, inexpensive wines, pates, and so forth in a little market near Les Halles in Paris. I definitely think that artisanal products are more prevalent in France than in the U.S. including New York - however, I think they're more prevalent in Italy, where it seemed to me like poor-quality products were virtually nowhere to be found in shops selling things like fruits, vegetables, wine, cheese, and such-like, very much including supermercati. I'm probably exaggerating, and it's probably possible to find something less than amazing at a shop off the Autostrada, but even in those shops, it was easy to assemble a really solidly acceptable lunch, which is way more than I can say for any similar kind of shop in the U.S., to the extent such places exist at all right off interstates. Italy has the most consistently fresh and high-quality products I've seen and tasted anywhere except for 1970s Malaysia (which equalled and didn't better Italy). Parts of France like Provence are very comparable.

[Claude Kolm/The Fine Wine Review]

fresh_a:

Have you tried Artisan Cheeses on California Street between Fillmore and Steiner in San Francisco?

[Bux]

I'm always surprised by the banality of American cheeses on my vacations. It's as if they've been purged of all taste and character, and visibly even seem translucid and unpalatable. They taste good. But nothing special. And no character.

One of the more interesting cheeses I've had in NY was a brebis, sold in the Union Square Greenmarket. As I understood the situation, it was made in small quatities and because it varied so much from batch to batch, it was sold inexpensively directly to the consumer at the Greenmarket because shops wanted a more consistent cheese to sell. It does seem as if most of the American cheese on the market aims to be reliable rather than great. There are some goat cheeses made out in Indiana that I've liked and thought were unique.