Liberté Égalité Fromagerie

Charles de Gaulle, the French General and President, once famously uttered the words "How can anyone govern a nation that has 246 kinds of cheese?" The first thing I said when I booked my airfare to Paris earlier this year was "I'm going to eat so much cheese!" I consider my quote just as valuable as de Gaulle's. Take that as you will.

We landed at Charles de Gaulle airport (funnily enough) outside Paris at about 7:30 am on a Saturday morning this past September after an overnight, non-stop flight from Dulles airport near my home in northern Virginia. About four hours later I was strolling down the rue Moffetard with a baguette in one hand and a crottin of goat cheese in the other experiencing a kind of bliss that only things like English beer and French cheese can bring to me. This is a kind of heaven on Earth experience I love every time I do it. I know it will never get old.

I believe every trip to Paris or France should involve cheese. And not just a nibble after dinner or a walk around a grocery store or fromagerie picking up some samples and popping them in your mouth to distract yourself. I mean like whole meals of the stuff with several different varieties, preferably with a fresh crusty baguette, although honestly I consider the bread optional. It definitely helps with blue cheese though; offsets the salt in some varieties very well.

We designed our cheese experience in Paris a few weeks before we set off on this trip. We allowed ourselves to wing it a little bit, figuring we'd run into one or two or forty or fifty fromageries just walking around at breakfast or lunchtime (we did). But we also signed up for a cheese tasting since I'd never done that before in Paris and we circled on a map a couple of what were allegedly the best of the best merchants in the city to seek out a particular kind of cheese: young raw cow's milk (read: unpasteurized) cheeses that had been aged less than 60 days.

Why this specific type of cheese? Well quite simply because you can't get it in the United States. It's banned. It has been since 2004. The Food and Drug Administration has determined that there are just too darned many bacteria living in cheese made from unpasteurized milk and so they prohibit the importation and sale of such cheeses right after they are made. 60 days later is fine, but not 59 or less. Go figure. And hold that thought. We'll come back to these later.

Part of the cheese selection at Chez Virginie in Montmartre.

First setting foot inside a Parisian fromagerie (or cheese shop; fromage is French for cheese) is a magical experience. It's not like heading down to Whole Foods to buy a wedge of gruyere. If you are lucky, you will be faced with every shape and size and color of cheese known to man and a lot of it will probably be unknown to you. Sure there are some familiar things like wheels of brie or camembert and maybe some sort of cheddar and some logs of chèvre. But there will also likely be aged bright orange hard cheese, cheese wrapped in clear film to prevent it from running away, small cylinders or cones or donuts of whitish looking things (hint: it's cheese) covered in what looks like some sort of mold (it is); and maybe even some things that more resemble scotch eggs than what we think of as cheese. Don't be afraid. It's really good!

And the smells will be incredible. I know it's funky when you first walk in but there's a freshness and sourness and tang and overall cheesiness to assault your senses which is wonderful. Faced with that smell and the sight of the whole array of different shapes and sizes, you know this is going to be good. Some fromageries are set up with all the cheese on one side of the shop; the most fun ones have it on both walls and the back of the store meaning you are literally surrounded with the stuff. Then you can truly feel like you are in cheese heaven.

The magic for me started that first morning in Paris. We stayed this trip on rue Monge in the Quartier Latin and as soon as we had a quick nap, we walked a few blocks west to rue Moffetard, a sort of all day, everyday (well, except Monday) open air market featuring creperies (lots of them), bars (lots of those too), boulangeries (bread shops) and of course a fromagerie or two. I just picked some cheese that looked like nothing I could get in the United States and just started eating and walking. This to me is the best way to start. Don't get something that looks familiar. Take a chance and get something different. You might be pleasantly surprised.

Now, trial and error might work on day one, but cheese week in Paris this time around for me needed some structure, so four days and two meals of only cheese and bread later, we arrived at Parole de Fromagers, a cheese merchant right near the Marché des Enfants Rouge (the oldest covered market in the city of Paris) to take our experience to the next level.

Parole de Fromagers is not just a cheese shop. They are actually cheese agers or what is known in France as an affineur. What this means is they are allowed to age the cheeses they get from cheesemakers to fundamentally change the flavor. They essentially take off the "best by" date and guarantee the quality of the cheeses based on their own aging techniques. We stopped into their aging refrigerator in their sixteenth century cellar right when we got there. What we saw there might make the FDA shudder: cheeses stored openly in a tight room wth air directed over the top of them; cheeses buried under straw or with pieces of straw inside them; and cheeses with either patches or entire shells of greenish blue glistening or powdery mold. To me it looked amazing.

But we didn't come to Paris to watch cheeses age; let's get to the good stuff. Our tasting guide that day was Pierre, Parole de Fromager's in house aging expert with a little wine knowledge on the side gained from his generations old family winemaking business. Cool stuff, folks. Pierre taught us that day how to taste cheeses, which is something I will never think about in quite the same way again.

Pierre Brisson telling us all about how to taste and eat cheese.

When we finally sat down at the table, in front of us were seven different pieces of cheese and sure enough one of them was wrapped in plastic to keep its shape. And yes, it did start running as soon as the plastic was removed. We started with the mildest tasting, a sharp goat cheese aged in their cellar with a strong hint of mushrooms (and thus covered with a blue-green powdery mold), and worked our way to the strongest tasting, a salty bleu d'Ecosse from the southwest of France which definitely needed to be eaten in quantity with the nearby baguette. This mild to strong technique is the way I've always tasted beer; going the other way doesn't allow you to taste the milder stuff properly.

I won't give a blow by blow of our experience but I will cover the highlights. The tasting method we were taught involved sight, smell and taste. After being taught how to cut cheese properly (rind to rind to get all the flavor profiles in a single cut), we started our experience by inspecting both the rind and the paste (the inside of the cheese or pretty much just the cheese) to observe the texture of each before smelling each component of the cheese individually. When tasting, we were told to spread the cheese around our mouths with our tongues and then breathe in and out through our noses while holding our tongues away from the roofs of our mouths. Sound like some hocus pocus? It generally worked, even for me with my limited palate. You really could taste the cheese better this way.

Some other highlights of the individual cheeses? Pierre showed us how the shop makes the aged cheeses more appealing to the customer by tapping on the first goat cheese crottin; he essentially made it rain with mold onto the table. Less mold = more appealing. Unsettling perhaps but we ate every morsel of that stuff. We tasted a young raw cow's milk brie (we'll get to the raw cow's milk thing I promise) where the smelling really helped; the aroma of cauliflower and ammonia helped us understand the first wonderful bite but this was definitely something to be taken in moderation. By the fourth of fifth bite all you could taste was ammonia. This was the only cheese our group did not finish.

We also ate a Beaufort d'Été, a yellow cow's milk cheese (think cow when you see yellow) which was buttery and fruity and overall just the picture perfect cartoon-like taste of cheese, and a washed rind cheese that we ate with a spoon (this was the runny one). As crazy as it sounds, we discovered during the smelling portion on this one aromas of yeast and hot chocolate. I'm not kidding. I'm not saying the cheese tasted like hot chocolate because it was fairly mild and creamy but it definitely smelled like hot chocolate. We ate this cheese with a sweet red wine that made both the wine and cheese taste better. We also found out that eating it with bread destroyed the taste. The baguette tasted and acted just like a sponge inside your mouth. Yuck!

I'm not usually the kind of guy who goes in for this sophisticated tasting notes thing but I'm telling you Pierre opened up my eyes that day. It was the cauliflower, ammonia and hot chocolate that got me. For better or worse.

The 24 month aged Comte in Fromagerie Laurent Dubois complete with crunchy amino acid clusters. Yum!!!

Our tasting at Paroles de Fromagers was my third (of four) meals of just bread and cheese in the week. Hey, there's a lot of other great food to eat in Paris. We can't eat the same thing for every meal. But let's get back to this whole young raw cow's milk cheese thing, shall we? Because this was the holy grail we came to find in France.

In our second day in country, we went up to Sacré-Coeur, the gorgeous white and gold church in Montmartre which overlooks the entire city of Paris. After climbing to the highest point in the dome for a less than impressive view in the morning mist (you can't get all the way to the top, just so you know), we took a walk over to 54 rue Damrémont, the location of Chez Virginie, a fromagerie that we had read specialized in the sort of contraband cheeses not permitted in the good old U. S. of A. that we were seeking on our trip.

Chez Virginie is an amazing place. It's a tiny little shop with very little floor space that appropriately devotes much more surface area to their product than it does to customers or the people who work there. The spread is incredible. There are cut and whole cheeses in every color and texture and each is immaculately presented.

I can speak enough broken French to get by but I can't ask for some young raw cow's milk cheese. So after a quick "parlez-vous anglais?" we got to the business at hand. These guys were great. After getting my preferences down (definitely some soft blue with strong flavor and maybe something a bit stiffer in texture) I was pointed to a couple of different cheeses that they felt met my requirements. What I emerged with was a slice of Bleu de Bonneval, a wheel of Saint-Félicien and the directions to the nearest boulangerie.

While I struck out with the Saint-Félicien which was a bit too goat's cheese textured, the Bleu de Bonneval was a grand slam home run. It is an off white cheese with large irregular gashes of blue and a yellow and green striped rind. It was soft and creamy which was just what I asked for with a sharp finish and I could taste the blue on my tongue while I walked around Montmartre the rest of the morning. This is what I came to France for. This was the perfect blue that I was seeking.

Now, whether it being a young raw cow's milk cheese made it this way, I can't say. Sure you can get a cheap thrill out of breaking the FDA taboo but I'd obviously have to compare it to some other older cheeses to get a really good benchmark. The only thing I can say is that having more types of cheeses available to me gives me more variety to pick and choose which are my favorites. The Bleu de Bonneval is definitely on that list. And I didn't get sick or die or turn into a piece of mold or whatever else our American regulatory agencies feel is going to happen to us.

The blue we ate from Chez Virginie I think was one of the top two cheeses I consumed in my week plus in Paris. The other hands down winner was the 24 month aged Comte from Fromagerie Laurent Dubois in the 5e Arrondissement which was just plain buttery and cheesy and so delicious. If you love cheese, I'd encourage you to find your own cheese trail in Paris. Next time I go I'm sure I'll consume as much or more as I did this time and I'll do it totally differently. After all, if de Gaulle was right, I just scratched the surface on this trip.

Final note: I know what you are thinking. How much weight did I gain in France? Let me just say that Paris is an incredible walking city. I came back from Paris weighting exactly what I did when I left home. Seven to ten miles of walking each day will do that for you. If some of that walking is done with a baguette and a hunk of cheese, I'm all for it. Bon appetit, everyone!

Baguette and Fourme d'Ambert Grand Affinage (blue cheese) for breakfast near the Maubert-Mutualité Metro.