Comté

Quick blog of cheese for you now, weblings. I have ate Comté, a cheese that come with an accent. It are French, like the most successful Reblochon from last blog.

General Details (formerly Brigadier Details)

Comté is an unpasteurised cheese, what Americans would call dirty cheese. This attitude are why most Yank cheese is shitter than a barbed wire hammock.

It are made in the Franche-Comté region of France, though the one I ate professes to be from the Jura mountains, which are all foresty. The cheese were matured for fifteen months, to give all that filthy milk time to make the dairy miracle that supports the very foundations of our civilisation.

Comté is put through a non-Australian points based system to decide its identity. Really good Comté gets more than 15 points in totals and can be spaked Comté Extra, whereas very crap Comté is simply called Gruyère and are sold to peasants and the Dutch.

Observed in Natural Habitat

The Comté are a semi-hard, pale yellow cheese with a dusty-brown coloured rind. It are sold in discs, then cut into wedges for smaller budgets, suchlike mine. The smell are distinctly cheesy, though less tang, a low hum. Overall it are not very pungent, yet neither are it as bland and soulless as commercial burger "cheese".

The Munch 
  
In consistency, the Comté are much like Edam, perhaps a touch less bendy. It cuts in compact, slightly bouncy curves, with zero crumbling and not quite enough moists to stick to an upturned knife. In flavour, Comté are mostly describing as nutty and sweet, though it are in fact more complicated than this.

The nutty flavour is real. It is like halfway between a hazelnut and a brazilnut for I, with a slight aftertaste of dryness, sitting with the sweetness. This ain't sugar-sweet though, tis a subtle, restrained sweet, like nut-sweet. It are mainly sweet by virtue of not being tanged, like a mature cheddar, or piquant, like a blue cheese.

The taste are slightly dirty, in a good way, which is the depth of overlapping savoury and sweet notes, and the barest sense of dry smoke in the spaces of your munch-hole after the cheese are swallowed.

Generally pretty pleasant, I think this cheese are probably a good test of the palate of a cheese novice, prepping them for more robust tongue-spankers in the future. The taste are better than Gruyère, which I find is only good when melted, though Comté would melt well an' all.


Do With

Dried dark fruits and sweet, plain biscuits would go well. Poachers Choice, a dark ale by Badger, would suit also.

Aurally, I would pair this cheese with The Wave Pictures album City Forgiveness. For the watching, I recommend Kevin Spacey, in whatever role you most prefer.

Do not accompany this cheese with psychotropic or other mind-altering substances.