#alpine cheeses

[mina-berlin]

CHEESE HEAVEN 🧀 

#cheeseberlin2017 #markthalleneun #kreuzberg #berlin

Not just any cheese: crafted cheeses deeply rooted in their places of origin. Cheeses that can tell stories about the people, animals and landscapes that produced them.

This year the focus was on cheeses from the Alps like Gruyere, Comte & mountain cheese 🍷

[marcellathecheesemonger]

Alpine Saturday – Presented by ACS CCP® Pat Polowsky:

This week on Alpine Saturday: something different. Since we’ve covered most of the major players, let’s learn a little more about Alpine Cheese as a category.

Check out this presentation from the 2012 ACS conference: http://www.cheesesociety.org/…/PPT-Potter-Alpine-Demonstrat…

cuture style highlight: https://culturecheesemag.com/cheese-iq/alpi…

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[thedignifiedwhey-blog]

NPR, The Salt, touches on the viability of mountain cheeses made by those that move their herds into the alps year after year to take advantage of prolific summer pastures.  And guess which cheese gets a mention?  Bra Duro D'Alpeggio, a Northern Italian favorite that takes its name from the town I used to call home.  

The objective of this piece is to point out the alarming rate at which alpine cheese traditions are declining in Italy, largely due to the fact that younger generations aren't interesting in farming and cheesemaking as a way of life.

Beppe and Patricia Rocchia -- the husband and wife dairy team pictured here -- are one of the few exceptions.  They have three children under the age of 10 and the hope that at least one of them may follow in their footsteps.  I spent last August with them learning about transhumance and their version of the tradition.  One more reason why I moan a little while eating most alpine cheeses.

The article also brings up a recent study led by chemist, Giovanna Contarini, designed to distinguish the composition of alpine cheeses from those of the same style and recipe made at lower elevations. 

"Where cows live changes what they eat — and that difference is detectable in the cheese made from their milk, says Contarini.

"In the mountain areas, the cows are free to pasture," she says. They mostly eat a mix of fresh grasses and other vegetation. Cattle raised at lower elevations in Italy, in contrast, are kept in farms and eat a prepared feed that contains dried grasses and some fat and vitamins. "Consequently, the rumen digestion is different," she says.

The rumen is the first chamber in a cow's stomach, and it's full of microbes. What a cow eats helps determine what microbes rumble in its rumen, and those differences play out in the chemical composition of its milk. "So some constituents of milk, particularly the fat and the lipid soluble compounds, are different," Contarini says.

Milk from mountain-raised cows also contains chemical compounds called terpenes, which come from little flowers growing among the grass. "In the plains cows, you don't find any terpenes," she says. Scientists aren't sure how or if terpenes affect cheese flavor, but they do consider them a marker of mountain cheese.

In her recent experiment, Contarini's group took milk from cows living on two sides of a mountain in northern Italy. Both pastures were mostly covered in fescue and bent grass, but they received different amounts of sunshine, and from different directions. One pasture also had a bit more yarrow growing in it than the other.

Milk from cows raised in each pasture was used to make a couple dozen wheels of local Asiago cheese. When the scientists analyzed the cheeses, they found they differed, just slightly, in the amounts of some hydrocarbons and trans fatty acids.

That wasn't enough to affect flavor, but it helps to validate methods that may one day be used to authenticate cheese made from mountain-raised cows, Contarini says. And while that could be helpful for consumers looking for the real thing, it could also help to show that there is real added value in these local, artisan cheeses, she says, and worth the effort of driving herds of cattle up into the Alps."

 Full article here:  How Mountain Grass Makes The Cheese Stand Alone