Geek relaxation
24/03/2014
There are three cheeses on this platter: tomme, frontine, and goat cheese.
This tomme and this frontine are 200% natural cheeses; they were made completely artisanally by Christian Favre, a Savoyard farmer in Pralognan la Vanoise.
Christian has four dairy cows and a few heifers (intended to replace the dairy cows). They are Tarine cows, those cows with beautiful brown coats and magnificent black eyes topped with lashes that look like they're made up with mascara.
Four cows: they are therefore milked by hand, in the barn in winter and in the meadows in summer; it would take too long to wash an automatic milker just for four cows! On the other hand, all of Christian's meadows are needed to feed his cows and heifers. Christian mows his hay with the help of his antique Massey Ferguson. He lets it dry in the pure mountain air before baling it and storing it in his barns for winter.
These are therefore cows raised outdoors for more than half the year and otherwise fed in the barn with hay harvested in the high pastures far from any notion of intensive agriculture.
The milk from these cows that remains from direct sales and yogurt production is used to make tomme and frontine. Again, this production is completely artisanal. The milk, to which a little veal rennet is added, is heated in an ancestral copper cauldron, a little longer for frontine than for tomme but less than for beaufort. After molding, draining, and salting, these cheeses are aged in the cellar behind the barn.
It would be impossible to make a more natural cheese.
In the photo above, these cheeses are presented on a platter carved from the trunk of a family spruce over 30 years old, planted long ago by Michel Barme himself. Curiously, it's a hard wood. To make this platter, it was hand-polished by Laurent Barme, little by little, over hours spread across several weeks.
Slowly polishing wood by hand between two pages of code—nothing better as relaxation for an old geek.