Barely Legal: Is it Worth the Risk?

There are a lot of directions in which this post could go...

Raw milk regulations, import taxes and tariffs, politics, the FDA, the USDA, affinage. Obviously these were all buzzword that came to mind when you saw this post, right? ...Riiight?

Well, my sleazy and chaste-minded friends, in case you didn't know, if an unpasteurized cheese has not had at least 60-days to age, it is off limits. Too young. 

The 60-day rule applies to both domestically made and imported cheeses. The given rationale being something something bacteria blah blah danger something something I'm an expert with no practical background in dairy science and/or a lobbyist with competing interests in the dairy industry blah blah yay nay blah blah dumb bill containing dumber regulation passed. (A nutshell of a potential direction this post will not be going.). 

Alas, the rule means many cheeses that the Old World has traditionally made, and made exceptionally well for centuries, as raw milk cheeses are next to impossible to find here in their authentic and historically-delicious form. These are soft, young, raw cheese luminaries that cheesemasters in Europe will age for a few weeks at most until the cheese reaches its full-flavored gooey prime. Brie, for instance, has a short life in the world of affinage. The place I worked in Waco made a rare and delightful raw milk brie. An uncommon treat that they had to carefully control by aging in temperatures that are far below normal for several weeks in order to slow down the aging process, allowing the cheese enough time to reach 60 days and not become a foul rock-hard disc of milk mess. 

So it's not impossible to find a raw milk version of these cheeses here, but it's very difficult and often prohibitively so. It's no joke to get scrutinized by a federal health inspector for making a "taboo" cheese, nor is it a slap on the wrist to get flagged by the FDA for importing a cheese that's too close to the 60-day limit.  (A restaurateur is allowed to make cheese out of his wife's breast milk and that's not taboo but apparently raw milk Reblechon is.). I've heard stories about inspectors giving importers the stink eye just because the label on a soft cheese coming off the ship says raw (au lait cru in French). Over 60 days? Yes. But just barely legal. 

But it does get here sometimes. Is it all worth the risk in making or importing dangerously young versions of raw milk cheeses? 

Cheese connoisseurs will complain about the difficulty in finding a true Camembert, for example, or the tasteless, sub-par pasteurized counterparts Europe is forced to send over (I imagine the continent collectively guffawing over all the superior cheese they get to keep for themselves). Their complaints are justified. To a degree. 

I work in a city that's crazy about cheese; therefore, it's not hard to find the bolder cheese proprietors willing to weazle and claw their way to a young imported cheese. The cheeses I've discovered in the last few months have opened up a new world of deliciously naughty young cheeses.  Pecorino Gregoriano, an extremely young and soft pecorino from the Abruzzo region of Italy, rocked my cheese paradigm. Imagine wrapping all the delicious yeasty, sweet profiles of a bread and carb binge into a compact (and totally carb-free!), fudgy cheese bite. I'd never tasted a cheese profile like that before, and couldn't begin to figure out how you could even get sheep's milk to acquire that taste. It was young, raw and legal...but dangerously so.  

So yeah, when even the average cheese-joe goes to his local grocery store in a lukewarm cheese city to find a bunch of pasteurized Old World knock offs, it does feel a little generic and underwhelming after knowing that the real deal is out there somewhere. It's true that most of those mass produced imports are boring, bland and just lame as hell. So is it worth the risk to go raw and young? Definitely. If you do it right. Keep a clean shop if you're making the stuff (inspectors don't like meth-lab bathtub style raw milk cheese cooks), and source your imports as closely to reputable European farms and producers as possible if you're selling the stuff (you can't complain about "business" trips to Europe to eat cheese). 

But we shouldn't rule out the beauty of pasteurized cheese entirely. Don't let any cheese snob, French, New Yorker, Houstonian, or otherwise, tell you that there is no such thing as a good pasteurized cheese. Because I'm here to tell you there most definitely is! Grocery store brie is disgusting, yes. Pasteurization and production can be done carefully and gently, however, such that you're not totally destroying the flavor profile of the milk and forthcoming cheese. Several of my new favorite cheeses that I've discovered at the shop are in fact pasteurized, as are many domestic cheeses I've enjoyed in the past. Tome Chabrin a tart and sweet goat's milk wheel from France actually tastes like figs, another flavor profile I hadn't experienced. Cheesemakers can control the quality and flavor of pasteurized cheese through effective use of starter cultures.

We all want a little danger in our lives. So if that means I'll have to come back to New York several times a year to find mine in raw, young, spoiled-milk, then so be it. Otherwise, wherever I end up, I'll enjoy the worthwhile pasteurized options available to me via more risk-averse cheese curators. I'm sure I can find something delicious.