Archive for the ‘Mimolette’ category
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Cheese that improves with age…
Thursday, December 16th, 2010
The older a cheese gets, the more water it loses. However, a totally dehydrated cheese would not taste of anything. One of the challenges when maturing longlived cheeses like Mimolette is to ensure that it retains enough water to be edible, since the process is irreversible. The cheese grader’s skill is to be able to [...]
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Celebrating the new scallop season
Saturday, December 19th, 2009
Seafood and a lot of inshore fisheries can be considered as extensions of the terroir notion, since the seabed that forms the continental shelf is contiguous with the land that supports the more readily accessible products of a terroir. By the same token, the inshore waters are fed by the rivers that cross the landscape. [...]
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Cutting mimolette: a hard cheese challenge
Monday, August 31st, 2009
How do you cut a hard cheese like mimolette safely and easily? For anyone behind a cheese counter, cutting veteran specimens of this cheese is at best an art, requiring a certain level of skill and dexterity. For a start, it requires a thick blade with a wedge profile to split the hard orange ball. [...]
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One Mimolette, up to two years
Saturday, August 29th, 2009
The first 15 days in the life of a Mimolette are vital to ensure it lasts the course. Since this cheese can be ripened for up to two years, it is hardly surprising that the cheesemakers and graders are very careful to follow the technical manual. Between the cheese mould to a special press, the [...]
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A few helpers for Mimolette…
Tuesday, July 28th, 2009
At Sainte-Mère, the cheesemakers have millions of helpers working on the maturing Mimolette cheeses. As the cheeses ripen, so cheese mites feed on the fungi that develop naturally on the rind. The mites are completely harmless to humans. Their action develops little pits on the rind, which help to aerate the cheese. The cheeses need [...]
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Mimolette: a 17th century wartime initiative
Monday, July 27th, 2009
The round Mimolette cheese was an unlooked-for byproduct of hostilities between France and the Low Countries in the 17th century. The people of northern France were passionately attached to Dutch hard cheeses, such as mature Gouda, but these were no longer available while French and Dutch cannons were facing each other across the plains of [...]
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Keeping cheeses in shape
Sunday, July 26th, 2009
Why is a Mimolette cheese round? To be sure, it comes out of a spherical mould, but as a young cheese, these 3kg cheese balls would soon take on irregular shapes unless they were turned at frequent intervals by attentive cheesemakers. This means once a week while the cheeses are young and once a month [...]
