Comte Cheese

Comte is a hard cheese of the Jura mountains in Franche-Comte, eastern France, made from raw cow's milk and produced in large wheels. Its production dates to at least the twelfth century, when mountain cooperatives called fruitieres pooled summer milk from high pastures to make wheels that would keep through the winter. It received its Appellation d'Origine Controlee in 1958, the first cheese in France to be so recognized; the designation restricts production to the defined Jura zone and requires raw milk from Montbeliarde and Simmental cows. Comte remains the largest-volume原产地命名 cheese in France.

A wedge of Comte shows a dense, smooth paste the color of straw, scattered with tiny crystals that crunch faintly under the tooth and release bursts of umami. The flavor is nutty and sweet when young, deepening with age toward brown-butter, caramelized onion, and roasted hazelnut; the paste firms and the crystals grow more pronounced as the cheese ages. A wheel of twelve months or more is markedly different from one of four.

Comte is a cooked, pressed-curd cheese. Rennet coagulates the raw cow's milk; the curd is then cut, heated to roughly fifty-three to fifty-five degrees to shrink it and expel whey, pressed into large molds, and salt-brined. The long affinage in cool cellars — a minimum of four months, often twelve to eighteen, sometimes far longer — is what builds the flavor: slow enzymatic breakdown of proteins and fats, by both the milk's own enzymes and those of the ripening cultures, produces free amino acids and fatty acids that compound into the nutty, savory complexity. The characteristic crunch comes from tyrosine crystals, formed as the amino acid tyrosine concentrates and precipitates out of the paste during the long slow aging.