Cancoillotte

[chefzadi]

Yes, context. They serve La Vache in the First Class Lounge of Asiana Airlines in Seoul. They sincerely offered it me as French Cheese.

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Which I suppose, is why I don't search out Korean food in Paris.

gdg, in the US we refer to milk without the cream as "skim milk," and milk with the cream in it as "whole milk." Most dairies in the US now sell milk with various percentages of cream. There is skim milk with no cream, 1% milk with 1% cream, 2% milk and whole milk which I believe generally contains about 4% cream.

The cream is removed from the milk and sold at a much higher price, but the resultant skim milk is no cheaper to buy. Skim milk is no less expensive, just inferior.

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Since you bring it up. I actually did seek out Korean food in Paris. I found a restaurant that was clearly making few attempts at authenticity. I had to try it! My wife protested the entire way to the restaurant. She didn't understand the point. But I wanted to see how the dishes would be altered to suit French tastes.

My report:

The food wasn't that bad. It was tasty enough, the ingredients were pretty fresh. But all the flavors were toned down. The fire and sourness that Korean dishes can have were noticeably absent. They also had a wine list and most of the other diners were drinking wine with their grilled meat, even with kimchi. I would recommend the restaurant to French people who are curious about Korean food or already like Korean food, but have a hard time forgoing wine with their meals. Yes context, there are quite a few French who must have wine with their meals. And it's nearly impossible to enjoy authentic Korean food with wine.

On the other side of the pond:

I was an Executive Chef at a French restaurant in Korea. Instead of trying to alter French foods to a local palate that I didn't understand I strived for authenticity as much as possible. So I purposely and quite successfully culivated a largel French and European clientele. The Koreans complained that the food was "flat" tasting and cloying, they needed a palate cleanser in between bites, perhaps kimchi would be nice, they suggested. I told them that Koreans get acidity and sourness from their pickled dishes to round out a meal. And yes, I've heard many Koreans refer to the "palate" cleansing qualities of pickled dishes in between bites of richer foods. But in French dining sourness and acidity come from wine., it's what refreshes the palate.

Context and habits.

[Ptipois]

In my mind all of your past and future posts will be forever tainted by your "confession."

 

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That's okay with me. That was not a confession. I tend to react this way whenever I'm confronted to culinary "a-prioris". As was said before, it's all context. In terms of foods and ingredients, I think there's nothing sacred or vile per se. And I've heard that, somewhere near the Pays basque, some chef does some pretty interesting things with Vache Qui Rit.

By the way, Vache Qui Rit à la crème is even nicer...

Edited January 25, 2005 by Ptipois (log)

[gdg]

Yes, context. They serve La Vache in the First Class Lounge of Asiana Airlines in Seoul. They sincerely offered it me as French Cheese.

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Which I suppose, is why I don't search out Korean food in Paris.

gdg, in the US we refer to milk without the cream as "skim milk," and milk with the cream in it as "whole milk." Most dairies in the US now sell milk with various percentages of cream. There is skim milk with no cream, 1% milk with 1% cream, 2% milk and whole milk which I believe generally contains about 4% cream.

The cream is removed from the milk and sold at a much higher price, but the resultant skim milk is no cheaper to buy. Skim milk is no less expensive, just inferior.

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thank you Bux ... in france the whole milk got the same name "lait entier" ... same thing for the price, i think ... as for "vache qui rit" i use to love it, i can't remember but i use to do something with, i mean cook something, pasta ? butter melt vache qui rit qnd ... spaghetti ? that's it i'm afraid .................... kids love it france, or use to ... thanks again

[bleudauvergne]

Well, I finally got around to picking up some of this cancoillotte product. The small Monoprix store where I got it had two kinds, one President brand, and the other which looked like the producer packages and sells it himself, from a fromagerie called Poitrey, the same product as Therese got in Atlanta. Neither of the packages claim that this is actual cheese, Poitrey describing it as a "Specialité fromagère de Franche Comté" The ingredients listed on the package were basically the same except for the butter content:

Curdled skimmed milk, butter (8% for President and 14% for the Poitry brand), salt,

Disodium phosphate, Trisodium phosphate, and polyphosphates.

However looking at the website for Poitrey, I see that the product I picked up is their "super" version which contains more butter than the usual basic cancoillotte. They also list on the website that the curds contain 50% minimum milk curds and that some of the curds have been made with présure (they don't specify how much). They don't say if the présure comes from vegetable or animal origins. website here.

The President brand touts 6% total fat content, and the Poitry brand 11%. Both say it is a low fat treat.

Both were chilled in my fridge overnight, and this morning, I opened up the plastic tubs and peeled back the foil on top. They were exactly the same color, a sort of creme anglaise color. When I tipped the pots, the President brand ran faster than the Poitrey brand, logical, since it contains less fat. The consistency reminded me of a play compound my little brother once got a long time ago at a birthday party when we were kids. It came in a little plastic garbage pail and was called "slime". The appeal to children was that it had a runny, icky slippery feel to it, but it didn't stick to your hands. The Cancoillotte seemed like this, with a slightly gelatinous quality. Unlike "slime", it stuck to everything it touched.

I took a little bit in a spoon and tasted the President brand first. It tasted similar to a bland cheese whiz. The Poitrey brand tasted as if it actually had been through some kind of very slight fermentation process, while the President brand did not. They were both very artificial tasting to me. (it could be the context...)

I spread some of each brand on my breakfast toast. It did nothing to improve the toast. heated up on the surface of the toast, it melted to a thin runny consistency instantly. The extremely high salt content was more evident in the heated product, and the chemical flavor receded slightly but not completely. It smelled better than it tasted. I suppose this product might have some kind of appeal to someone trying to trick themselves into eating less fat in their diet, since it has about 1/10th of the amount of butterfat in it than real butter, but a buttery smell and color. If I had to choose between the President brand and the Poitrey I'd choose the Poitrey.

Both of the Cancoillotte packages say that this product is an absolute necessity to any cheese plate. Thinking of the cheeses I have on the plate at the moment, I think it would be a real shame for anyone to pick up this product thinking that it was a kind of French cheese. It really falls in the category of cheese whiz in my mind, it leaves a chemical taste in my mouth, a tingle on my tongue that doesn't go away right away.

I went to the website and looked at the metton, thinking it might be worth it to try to make it at home with just the cheese curds and forego the massive dose of sodium and stablizers. There has got to be some appeal to the original dish, if it is a specialty of the region... Oh well, I see that the cheese curds are also sold with the sodium di, tri, and polyphosphates. The next thing to do is to curdle some skim milk, since I have some presure in the fridge.

[bleudauvergne]

To horrify the audience a little further: I love Apéricubes too, they're my favorite kind of French decadent gastronomy. The tomato Apéricube is tops.

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Alright, Ptpois, I'll try and fish out a tomato flavor one the next time I am forced to take apericubes again! But I won't buy them, it's one thing I won't do.

[Ptipois]

Alright, Ptpois, I'll try and fish out a tomato flavor one the next time I am forced to take apericubes again!  But I won't buy them, it's one thing I won't do.

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God forbid that you should buy it!

Besides, if you have a friend who actually forces you to ingest apéricubes, I suggest that you dump the friend together with the apéricube, that's a very weird friend indeed.

About the cancoillotte: that was not the right way to try it. First of all you should avoid anything labeled Président (I do, that's my own personal advice). Second: get the garlic-flavored cancoillotte. Poach a Morteau sausage or, better, a Morteau jésu (a very large boiling sausage), boil some potatoes, toss a green salad in a nicely vinegary, shalloty vinaigrette and pour the cancoillotte on slices of hot boiled potato. Eat with the warm sliced sausage and the salad. Then you may understand what cancoillotte is about. I've never seen it on a cheese platter anyway.

[therese]

I suppose this product might have some kind of appeal to someone trying to trick themselves into eating less fat in their diet, since it has about 1/10th of the amount of butterfat in it than real butter, but a buttery smell and color.  If I had to choose between the President brand and the Poitrey I'd choose the Poitrey. 

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Exactly the context in which I bought it in the first place: I'm dieting, and the label indicating that it was made with skim milk was what prompted me to try it. Lower fat and higher calcium than full fat cheeses are particularly important to me at the moment.

I don't find the stickiness off-putting, as stickiness is precisely what's missing from most of the other "cultured/curdled dairy" things that are part of my diet at the moment: cottage cheese, yogurt, ricotta, etc. Even something like a soft chevre has 268 kcals per 100 gm, whereas cancoillote (even the highest fat "gourmande" Poitrey version) has 165 kcals per 100 gm. Brie is 334 kcals per 100 gm.

One of the chief drawbacks to low/non-fat cheese is precisely the fact that they won't really melt, so again the already somewhat liquid aspect of cancoillotte is not a drawback.

I find that the "gourmande" Poitrey product has a fairly pronounced cheese flavor as opposed to a butter flavor (though French butter is generally made from cultured cream, so already strikes many Americans as tasting slightly of cheese). The web site doesn't say what distinguishes the "gourmande" and "super nature la belle etoile" products (both are 14% butter), so perhaps the gourmande product is made with metton that's been fermented for a longer period of time before being melted into cancoillotte.

[bleudauvergne]

Alright, Ptpois, I'll try and fish out a tomato flavor one the next time I am forced to take apericubes again!  But I won't buy them, it's one thing I won't do.

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God forbid that you should buy it!

Besides, if you have a friend who actually forces you to ingest apéricubes, I suggest that you dump the friend together with the apéricube, that's a very weird friend indeed.

About the cancoillotte: that was not the right way to try it. First of all you should avoid anything labeled Président (I do, that's my own personal advice). Second: get the garlic-flavored cancoillotte. Poach a Morteau sausage or, better, a Morteau jésu (a very large boiling sausage), boil some potatoes, toss a green salad in a nicely vinegary, shalloty vinaigrette and pour the cancoillotte on slices of hot boiled potato. Eat with the warm sliced sausage and the salad. Then you may understand what cancoillotte is about. I've never seen it on a cheese platter anyway.

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Now now, Ptpois, no one's twisting my arm. I usually eat what's put in front of me when with my friends. It's only polite. In any case, I don't plan to ditch my friends for any apericube habit they may have. It's not my style.

Honestly, though, it was the cancoillotte I wanted to taste to understand it's flavor. I understand it's commony used as tartine for morning toast, and both products claim to be absolutely necessary to the cheese plate. Unfortunately I've thrown them away, so I won't be ladling them over potatoes at my house any time soon. A nice Morteau jésu with boiled potatoes and a green salad in a nice vinegary shalloty vinaigrette sounds very nice indeed, however.

When I am in the region where this is made locally from fresh ingredients and without the chemical stabilizers which in my opinion shine though the flavor of this cheese-like product quite strongly, I may change my opinion. I will certainly try it the next time I am in the area where they make it without the stabilizers.

My rejection of Apericubes does have a context. Bux has mentioned a particularly offensive cheese-like product. It was put out by a national chain store which I will not mention because I see that they are still in business. They pretended to be selling artisanal farm made products, and which used to make these gift baskets in the 1970s that looked very nice but in actuality were not. Back when I was a kid, they made "cheese logs" rolled in nuts which were very strongly laced with lots of salt and stabilizers and chemicals to make them last for years. They suggested that they'd been flavored with down home on the farm things, when in reality they contained no natural flavoring whatsoever.

The cheese-like products were usually accompanied by nitrate laden "sausages" that contained little to no real meat (they were most likely made of reconstituted animal "dust" and fillers) and dyed a bright red color or painted brown with smoke flavoring to seem as if they'd been smoked at the farm. Many people believed that these products were the real thing, and gave them as gifts to each other at the holidays. A memory of this type of product, the strong predominance and flavor of additives, and concern about them in my mind makes me sensitive to it.

About Apericubes, sure, they are a novelty here in France, Ptpois. But precisely these types of products were also a novelty of a similar kind in America, in the 1970s. And little by little, marketing campaigns made a whole country believe that products like apericubes were actually cheese. It may sound crazy but it's true. These things and many other products like them actually replaced the things that were at one time produced authentically on farms. Consequently, the farms dissapeared too. Now there is a whole movement to bring back the real food to America. But there was a period of time when real quality products were not accessible, at least not to the everyday people.

I have so many choices available to me here. You don't know (maybe then again you do know but you're just pulling my arm), how lucky you are to have been raised in such a rich environment. My world has completely opened up to a whole new spectrum of flavor and enjoyment in this country. I have no problem with someone saying it tastes good to them, but God forbid that I would ever buy apericubes. Yes, you've got that right.

[Ptipois]

I don't believe Apéricubes are to be compared with the offensive cheese products that you're mentioning. La Vache Qui Rit has been around for a long time and Apéricubes date back to the mid-70's. They never were pointed at as particularly unnatural or offensive by French gourmets. I'm even a bit surprised that such a fuss is made about them. La Vache Qui Rit was created in 1921, in a small factory in Jura (the very region of cancoillotte, by the way) and was the first in the category of melted cheeses. It is not made of scraps but of decent cheeses, some produced by the Bel company itself, the rest bought. The recipe includes comté, edam and mimolette amongst other cheeses, plus butter and cream, melted at slightly more than 100 °C and shaped into portions. The recipe has changed several times during the cheese's history, I admit that today's Vache Qui rit has gone down compared to that of decades ago, but all the same, there are worse junk foods around. As I wrote before, La Vache Qui Rit à la crème tastes rather like the Vache Qui Rit of long ago.

There used to be other brands of melted cheeses, including Six de Savoie and La Vache Grosjean which tasted much better than La Vache Qui Rit, but it seems that only La Vache has survived.

As for the Cancoillotte, that was just a tip I was giving you. I've had cancoillotte in Franche-Comté, where it is made artisanally, and according to the people who made me discover it, that was the right way to try it. It is such a delicate product, really, that I'm not surprised that any preservatives, stabilizers or any such crap do show through. The generic brand "Reflets de France" that you find in Champion supermarkets may have some better cancoillotte than the ones you tried.