From the Mountains to the Table: Cheese in Vorarlberg

Von Kurt Bracharz

Unmistakably good: what has made alpine cheese from Vorarlberg so special for 2000 years are the original method of its production and its distinctive taste, characterized by the grasses and herbs of the alpine meadows. In 'From the Mountains to the Table' Kurt Bracharz vividly describes why cheese and its production are so highly regarded in the west of Austria. He tells of the love of nature and hard work which have shaped the people and their traditions to this day.
Sophisticated recipes from starred chefs Mike Schwarzenbacher and Florian Mairitsch as well as impressive photographs of life on the alp, of the cultivation of traditions, and of cheese production, make this book into a beautiful homage to the alpine dairy and its cheese.

- Texts by Kurt Bracharz, published by Josef Rupp
- Everything you want to know about the various alpine dairy products
- Historical facts about cheese making in Vorarlberg
- Insights into the alpine dairymen's work throughout the year
- Cooking with cheese then and now
- Numerous delicious recipes and atmospheric photos

• Sprache: Deutsch
• Herausgeber: Löwenzahn Verlag
• Erscheinungsdatum: 30. Mai 2014
• ISBN: 9783706627610

Buchvorschau

Rupp

WHAT IS CHEESE?

Cheese is Milk that has come of Age

A general introduction about everything that can be made out of milk, from fresh soured milk to years-old hard cheese, and a bit about the biology, chemistry, and physics of cheese production. If you, however, are more interested in the history of Vorarlberg, in what goes on at an alpine dairy, and in recipes, then you can also skip this chapter.

When Milk Curdles

Words such as milk and cheese need no definition in everyday life— literally every child is familiar with these two staple foods from his or her own experience. On the other hand, one has also heard of almond milk and soy cheese—why are such vegetable products, far removed from any cow, called milk and cheese? What does omniscient Wikipedia have to say about milk?

Milk is a whitish, opaque, milk fat-in-water emulsion liquid, produced by the mammary glands of mammals. (...) ‘Milk’ as a foodstuff is generally the name for mammalian nutrient fluid. In German the expression ‘milk’ is primarily a synonym for cow’s milk. Already human milk is explicitly called mother’s milk. In trade in the European Union ‘milk’ may only be applied to cow’s milk. Milk from other animals must be described with the name of the animal. Consequently there is no ‘soy milk’ on the market here, but only soy-drinks".

While we are on the subject of scientific definitions, let us also open the fourth volume of Modernist Cuisine by Nathan Myhrvold, published in 2012, an opus whose subtitle after all announces The Revolution in the Art of Cooking (English title: The Art and Science of Cooking). Here we can read: Milk is a typical oil-in-water-emulsion in which the milk fat particles are dispersed in a continuous aqueous phase. In other words that means that in the milk of mammals, microscopically small drops of fat are finely dispersed in a watery fluid. Fat and water do not really combine with each other which is why they can be separated again using various methods, for example mechanically in butter making or chemically in cheese production.

Wikipedia on cheese:

Cheese is a food derived from milk that is produced in a wide range of flavours, textures, and forms by coagulation of the milk protein casein (with a few exceptions). It is the oldest method of preserving milk and its products.

Nathan Myhrvold has a chemically somewhat more exact definition:

For thousands of years milk is the basis of an especially traditional get: cheese is, in its innumerable variations, a milk-gel created by means of coagulation.

But what is a gel?

A gel develops when molecules become entangled and form a three-dimensional network in which liquid is bound. This meshwork holds the water molecules captive and thus transforms a liquid into a firm gel.

Now we can answer the question casually put forth earlier why tofu is often described as soy cheese. Soy milk is an oil-in-water-emulsion like cow’s milk, however with vegetable oils instead of animal fat, and one can make a gel out of it—namely tofu—in the same manner that one produces fresh cheese out of cow’s milk.

Whoever finds the definition of cheese as a gel to be too scientific will be surprised that already in an over one hundred year old Appetite Lexicon one could read: Cheese is milk aspic or milk jelly, belonging thus to the products of higher culinary insight and experience and thus is to be found only among true cultivated peoples, first among the Hebrews. (This is a reference to 1 Samuel 17:18, where Jesse gives David ten cheeses.)

There are other possibilities of defining cheese, for example in §1, Section 1, No. 2 of the Regulation of Prices for Butter, Cheese and other Dairy Products: Cheese is cheese within the meaning of the regulations on cheese, a formulation whose effortless self-referentiality has made it the title of a booklet on peculiar legal definitions. The definition of butter from the Swiss Food Regulations to be found there too is, however, not peculiar, but concise: Butter is an emulsion of water in milk fat. Myhrvold could not have been more precise. Strange on the other hand is §1, Section 2 of the German Law on Margarine in the Reichs Law Gazette of 1897:

Margarines in the sense of this law are those preparations similar to milk butter or clarified butter, whose fat content does not derive exclusively from milk.

But that is just an aside.

In addition to scientific and legal definitions there are however also the poetic. Among the best known statements by the most famous of all gastrosophical writers, Jean Anthèlme Brillat-Savarin (1755—1826) told the sentence: A meal without cheese is like a beautiful woman with only one eye. He could however not yet have meant the cheese that today bears his name, a rindless, handmade cow’s milk cheese from the west coast of France. An otherwise rather dry German author also waxed poetic when he came to talk about cheese. The editor of a Gastrosophie published 1851 in Leipzig, Westphalian Baron Eugen von Vaerst, believed French Brie to be the best cheese in the world. He however suspected that he could but rarely find a genuine form in Germany. Vaerst believed that only since being familiar with this cheese was he able to understand the endless depths of yearning in the lines from Goethe’s poem The Fisherman:

Resistless was her strain

Half drew him in, half lured him in

He ne’er was seen again.

Vaerst meant with this almost melting away not the cheese, but the eater’s appetite. The residents of the British Isles praise their own varieties of cheese especially, but in 1937 Edward Bunyard wrote a particularly lovely metaphor for all cheeses in the world in Epicure’s Delight: Cheese is milk that has come of age. Surprisingly, one finds the German trend toward songs of praise on French cheese even in the case of Bertolt Brecht, of whom Karl Heinz Kramberg tells the following anecdote:

Last year, in May, Bertold Brecht sat with friends on the terrace of a bar-restaurant on the Seine in Paris, renowned among connoisseurs for its wide-ranging selection of good cheeses. He had come for the performance of his Caucasian Chalk Circle in the French capital, just that performance which in a single stroke won him the hearts of the Parisians. Before dinner he had visited a bouquiniste and supplied himself with English crime novels, around thirty page turners lay next to him while he studied the numerous types of cheese served on wooden plates with appreciative interest. He also tried a round, cylindrical goat’s cheese whose soft physiognomy is a charming contrast to the very sharp character it unfolds on the tongue. Brecht then said, with an almost bashful smile: I would like to exhibit this cheese platter in the foyer of my theatre in order to teach the Germans what culture is. According to witnesses he said this neither sarcastically nor spitefully, but so to speak regretfully, probably in the voice he ascribes to his alter ego in the Stories of Mr. Keuner.

What all can be made from Milk

The first decision that needs to be made regarding milk fresh from the cow is whether one wants to produce cream and butter or rather fermented milk products and cheese. For cream and butter, milk fat is mechanically won by means of skimming or separating. For cheese, milk is separated into cheese curd and whey through the addition of fermenting acids or the natural enzyme rennet. Butter is made at a low temperature (14° C) out of sweet or acidified cream in a plunge churn or in a paddle churn (found today almost only in museums), or stirred in a centrifugal cream separator. For domestic purposes, a mixer at low speed will also do. In earlier times even simpler methods were applied, as, among others, Alexandre Dumas writes:

In whatever country I was travelling, I always had fresh butter made the same day. Here is my recipe for all travelers, a simple, yet infallible recipe. Wherever I could find fresh milk, be it from a cow, a camel, a m are or a sheep—I got some, filled a bottle three-quarters full, closed it, hung it on my horse’s neck and let the horse do the rest. When I arrived in the evening, I broke the neck of the bottle and found a fist-sized piece of butter which had formed itself. This method was always successful, in Africa as in the Caucasus, in Sicily as in Spain.

Real fresh buttermilk results through the production of butter. It must be immediately consumed as it spoils very quickly. Buttermilk available in the market is a partly skimmed pasteurized milk which was inoculated with butyric acid and aged for a few hours. When making butter from sour cream, buttermilk quark can be made by means of slow warming and straining the curds through a cloth.

If one lets fresh milk stand unchilled, then it apparently becomes soured or clabbered milk on its own. Indeed, the lactic