Comté Cheese from Fort St. Antoine

What’s the shelf life on cheese?

• Hard, aged cheeses stay good for a long time. Many days for sure. Sometimes weeks. Bigger hunks of cheese last longer. If it looks and smelled as expected, it’s likely still great.

• What if it’s got a little mold on it? A little mold is no problem. It’s a good sign, it means the cheese is alive. Scrape it off with a knife. But if there’s a lot of mold and it’s turning dark and funky it’s time to say goodbye.

• Soft cheeses and cheese spreads (like pimento and liptauer) are best eaten within a week or two of receiving them.

How do we ship artisan cheese year-round across the country?

In warmer months (early April to mid September), we ship cheese with two business day service plus warm weather care. We employ an ice pack and insulation defensive strategy to protect against warm delivery trucks and warm warehouses and ensure your shipment arrives in great shape.

The rest of the year (late September to the end of March), the shipping method will either be flat rate service (1-4 business days) for our durable hard, aged cheeses or two business day service for our more perishable soft cheeses and cheese spreads.

Hard cheeses have been carefully selected to withstand a longer transit time. Don’t worry if it arrives a bit warm or a bit cold – cheese is durable.

How should the cheese be stored once it arrives?

• Store cheese in the fridge, ideally in the spot closest to 50 degrees. That will likely be the door of your refrigerator or in a drawer where the temperature is consistent but not too cold.

• We wrap hand-cut wedges of cheese in a cheese bag before shipment, and you can continue to keep the cheese in that cheese bag. The next best option would be parchment or wax paper.

• After you open the cheese for a nibble, any remainders can be put back into the bag and closed with a simple roll or fold. 

• Do not freeze your cheese! Cheese is a living thing. Freezing will stop the natural processes that keep cheese so tasty. 

How should the cheese be served?

Regardless of the kind of cheese, it’s best to take it out of the fridge about 20 to 30 minutes before serving it. Cheese tastes better at room temperature. It makes a world of difference: the aromas expand, becoming more complex; more of the fat spreads on your tongue, which makes the flavor more intense. When cheese is warm you’ll eat less of it and enjoy it more.

Imagine if your job was to taste cheese. Sounds pretty great, right? But what if, instead of snacking on lots of different kinds of cheeses with maybe some wine, you tasted only one kind of cheese. Dozens of samples from identical wheels, one after the other, all day long. The wheels were all made with the same recipe. But they were made on different days, or the milk came from different farms, or they were made by different cheesemakers, so each wheel tastes slightly different: some more sour, or more dry, or more nutty, or more fruity, or more bitter. You have to keep all of those slightly different cheeses straight and remember which ones matched a particular flavor you were looking for—or, more precisely, which ones you think will continue maturing to reach that particular flavor a couple of months from now. And you do all of that tasting in a dank, chilly space that smells of ammonia.

Maybe it’s not such a romantic job after all. Romantic or not, that’s how we select our Comté cheese.

Jason Hinds tastes dozens of wheels of Comté to select wheels that fit our precise flavor profile.

In his day job, Jason is a partner at Neal’s Yard Dairy, the famous cheese shop in London. Jason started at Neal’s Yard as a cheesemonger, and he’s been working with cheese for 30 years. Every six weeks, he makes the trip down to the Jura region of France to taste Comté with his Comté tasting partner, Dominic Coyte. They’ll taste dozens and dozens of wheels to choose exactly which ones will be sent to us in Ann Arbor.

What’s unique about what Jason does for us is that he’s selecting the cheese entirely by flavor, not by age or by price. While the French tend to prefer their Comté on the younger side, here in the states we’re generally biased to believe that older cheese is better cheese. Think of three (or seven, or twelve) year old cheddars. More aging means more time for flavor to develop—right? Sometimes. Some cheeses do get better and bigger flavors as they age. Others will dry out or become way too salty. Each wheel reaches its peak at a different age, and it’s up to the affineur—the French word for the person who ages the cheese—to know when the cheese will be ready.

Our affineur, Marcel Petite, ages 100,000 wheels of Comté in the 19th century Fort St. Antoine.

The fort was built in 1882 near the eastern border of France, to defend against the Prussians. In its heydey it housed hundreds of soldiers. After World War II it was obsolete and abandoned. In the 1960s, Marcel Petite, a fifth-generation Comté maker, was looking for a place to begin aging Comté. He came across the fort and bought it from the government.

What makes the fort such a great place for aging Comté cheese? This particular fort is built into a hillside, and the thick stone walls and ceiling are buried under the turf. Only the big stone doorway protrudes from the earth to show you that there’s something there. Being underground means that outside as the weather changes from summer to winter, the conditions inside stay the same. Without needing to use any heaters or humidifiers, the space where most of the Comté ages remains at a fairly constant 50º Fahrenheit with 98% humidity, day and night, every month of the year. Some rooms are a tad warmer, others may be a bit drier, but the whole space only varies by a few degrees. That sounds like a pretty miserable barracks for a soldier, but the cheese loves it. The cool, humid conditions help it mature slowly and develop incredible flavor.

Today, the affinage at Marcel Petite’s company is led by five cellarmasters.

It’s their job to get to know every one of the hundred thousand wheels of cheese and to help steer each one toward the best possible quality. It’s not enough to just put a bunch of cheese in a cool, humid spot and expect it to become something special. Each wheel needs care and attention to reach its peak. At the beginning, that may mean adjusting how much salt is rubbed on the rind or how often they’re washed with cool water. As the cheese continues aging, it means rotating the cheeses regularly so they mature evenly. This back-breaking part of the work is actually done by robots today. A robot can turn a row of cheeses in 15 hours—a job that used to take people a whole week to complete.

Traditionally, cellarmasters test cheese quality with the help of a hammer. A wheel is selected, pulled out of its spot on its wooden shelf, and then the small hammer is used to thwack the top a dozen or so times. They’re listening for any cracks inside the cheese: a few tiny ones and it’s about ready; too many big cracks and it’s past its prime. Using this method they can tell if there are any defects. For decades, all Comté was deemed Ready or Not Ready for sale by the hammer method alone. Jason and Dominic were the first to suggest tasting every wheel to select the ones that taste better. When they first asked about it everyone thought they were nuts. Now, many years later, the cellarmasters at Fort St. Antoine have come around, and they taste every wheel, too. I’m still not aware of anyone else who selects Comté this way.

Comté is consistently a favorite cheese of cheesemongers and cheese lovers alike.

The wheels we select have a fudgy texture and a well balanced flavor with a buttery, hazelnut, french onion soup flavor. That flavor slowly grows and grows, and then lingers for a long, long time. It’s easy to eat as is, but also incredible with cured ham, fruit, nuts, wines ranging from crisp whites to the distinctive, hip wine of the Jura region. I adore a hunk of Comté smeared with a bit of our fig and walnut confit, which accentuates the sweet, nutty notes of the cheese. I could eat this cheese every day.

First things first: it’s not a cave.

Cheesemongers universally refer to their cheese storage rooms as caves but these rooms have about as much in common with a cave as astroturf has in common with the field of dreams. Cheese caves are commercial coolers. Usually walk-ins, which is industry speak for a refrigerator big enough for a full-sized door.

Our cave is ten feet wide, twenty feet long, about the size of a short container truck. It is stark white and sits right in the middle of our warehouse, across the pick line from the bread bagging tent. Between the two they mark the two poles of our operations. Bread and cheese. Both made by hand. Cut by hand. Wrapped by hand. Traditional, practically ancient foods.

We work mostly in whole wheels of cheese.

That’s the way the cheesemakers make them and that’s the way we buy them. We haul them into the cheese cave and cut them open by hand. Sometimes with a big knife. Sometimes with a cheese wire: a thick steel cable with handles that the cheesemonger uses to glide through cheese like butter.

And sometimes you’ve got to tackle Parmigiano Reggiano. Those 80 pound wheels have a hide as tough as a stegosaurus. They need to be coaxed open with a set of wedge shaped knifes that become part of every cheesemonger’s rite of passage. A freshly cracked wheel’s aroma is beguiling. Every one who splits one stops for a moment, puts their face up to the cut surface, and inhales. Fresh shards of parmesan always flake off too – cheesemonger’s treat.

Once a wheel is open we cut pieces of cheese and hand wrap them in waxed cheese bags.

If we cut a piece that weighs exactly the right size on the scale we ring the bell – perfect cut! We send the just-cut cheese out to be packed in boxes, then wait for the container to empty and return to let us know we need to cut a few more. We do this all day long for the 50+ cheeses we carry. On our busiest day in December we’ll do it thousands of times.

That means your cheese is essentially cut to order.

It spends a few hours at most from when it’s cut to when it’s packed to ship. It sounds simple – and it is. But it’s also rare. Most companies that ship cheese these days don’t cut cheese to order. They ship cheese that has been cut long ago – weeks, even months – and sealed in cry-o-vac. It’s not terrible, but remember that once a cheese gets cut it never gets better. It fades. Cry-o-vac slows the fading, but if it spends a long time cut in a wrapper its flavor will become a shadow of itself.

Freshness matters, even when you’re talking about aged cheese.

The primary culprit for flavor loss is air. Air surrounded the wheel of the cheese, of course, but it didn’t penetrate the paste inside thanks to the rind. Now the cheese, with its insides showing, is under siege by air. Air swoops in to dry out the cheese, carrying the environment’s off-aromas and unwanted bacteria along the way.

To protect the cheese’s cut face from air’s ravages we wrap each cheese in a waxed cheese bag. This bag lets the cheese breathe yet keeps it from drying out. The wax lining keeps them in perfect shape. It lasts, too – reuse it for other cheese, it’ll keep almost any hard cheese in great condition.