The terroir of cheese

[cdh]

I recall hearing/reading a story a while ago about a cheesemaking operation that moved from one building to another. In their new quarters they found that the cheese they made just wasn't the same as the cheese that came from the previous facilities. They followed their procedures exactly, used the same ingredients, but couldn't get the cheese to come out the same. The punchline of the story was that they needed to culture the room they were making the cheese in by storing a big batch of the earlier made cheese in there in the open to allow right the microfauna to take up residence.

My question to you is-- was that story apocyphal, or is consistent cheesemaking really that subject to environmental conditions. Any similar stories you've run across? How about examples of cheeses that are made from the same recipe but come out totally different?

[master cheesemonger/grocer]

Chris, this is the very thing about cheese; the fact that cheese is the most lyrical and magical of substances; the fact that even the most jaded and cynical of any of you among us, the most intolerant and dismissive -- none of the worst of you can deny that cheesemaking, the pancaking, the sandwiching, the concatenation of soil, herbiage, air and sunlight, beast and human is the most romantic and (again) magical by far of any substance in the entire realm of gastronomy.

I know of innumerable episodes of established cheeses being adversely affected by rogue yeasts and bacteria that weren't there before; the same for established "family member" mold strains (also yeasts and bacteria) that for various reasons disappeared or were inadvertently removed and had to be restored. This stuff is the fairy dust that makes artisanal cheeses fly -- or crash to the ground; it is this stuff that is the secret ingredient in the alchemy of cheese. Their application is far from rote; it rather comes about via a combination of happenstance, trial and error, and repetition. You must understand that the cheesemaker doesn't decide what her cheese is going to taste like, nor the shape it will assume. It is the region that will make those decisions. The cheesemaker is just there to help it emerge, like a sculptor who looks at a block of marble or granite or wood and ponders what is inside. A Brie from Brie did not appear to the world one fine day as a thin, flat disk covered with a downy white mold. the Brie region decided. It is that thin shape that SO prospers from the Seine-et Marne slurry of bacteria and yeasts in the air, it is the yeasts that are blown off the fruit trees and wild flowers that grow in the dales between the rivers that provoke the croute-fleurie. It was not a cheesemaker who decided that Cabrales would be a blue cheese of three animal's milks -- it was the Picos de Europa, fifteen miles inland from the Atlantic in Asturias, where the wind currents in the caves have delivered specific bacteria to nascent cheeses as well as having simply oxygen-nourished the bacteria already lying dormant within the immature cheeses.

As for the example you request, that of two cheeses with the same recipe made in two very different locales -- wow. Great question.

Consider how different are the great Piemonte Castelmagno and Mrs. Kirkham's Lancashire. Normandy's Livarot and Menorca's Mahon. Campania's fiore di latte (cow's milk mozzarella) and Galicia's Tetilla. Asturias' Queso de Vare and Western Andalucia's Queso Ibores. Basque sheep's cheeses and Pecorino Toscano.