A cheesy question with a complicated answer

Pasteurization is one of the most misunderstood issues in American
cheesemaking. Just witness the following two recent dialogs that I've
had with cheese-savvy people.

I
asked an editor, who frequently travels to Europe, where he buys his
cheese when he's home in New York City. My hope was to lure him to The Bedford Cheese Shop, so that I could introduce him to great cheese and turn our acquaintance into a friendship.

"Oh I try not to buy cheese in the States," he wrote back. "It's all pasteurized."


A few months later I was finishing hashing out some issues with my
literary agent, who lives down the street from Bedford Cheese, when I
asked why I never see her in the shop.

"Oh, I'd love to come by more but I'm afraid all the cheese is unpasteurized, and I'm expecting."

The interesting thing about these seemingly contradictory statements is that they are both mostly right.

Pasteurization
involves heating milk to temperatures a few degrees short of boiling
for a short period of time to diminish the presence of harmful
bacteria. Studies have shown that Listeria and E. coli bacteria are found a little bit more (a fraction of one percent) in samples of unpasteurized milk than in pasteurized milk.

You
can see why my agent wouldn't want to risk exposing her unborn child to
raw milk. She did begin coming to the shop — not for cheese, but for pickles, which are both the new rage and, of course, a classic object of pregnancy craving.

But
— as critical readers might note — pasteurization has been around for
less than two centuries; cheese has been eaten for more than two
millennia. If unpasteurized — or "raw-milk," in cheese-lover parlance —
cheeses were truly harmful, then wouldn't Europe have ceased to exist
long before the Roman Empire fell?

That's the anecdotal evidence I often cite to folks who have concerns
about the safety of raw-milk cheeses. Every creamery, whether here or
abroad, has to maintain standards of cleanliness so high that the
chance of finding a contaminated piece of cheese at a retailer that
specializes in great cheese is less than remote. The cheese will have
passed both inspections by health officials and close inspection by
knowledgeable cheesemongers.

Nevertheless, the Food and Drug Administration
has restrictions on raw-milk cheeses being sold in America. The rule is
that raw-milk cheeses must be older than 60 days to be sold in the
United States, since harmful bacteria are most likely to occur in the
first two months of a cheese's life. That means that when sold in
America, Brie and Camembert,
two of the best-known cheeses in the world — say nothing of the two
best-known cheeses that are younger than 60 days — must be pasteurized.


That situation has led to the stereotype that my editor
mentioned. In fact there are hundreds if not thousands of great cheeses
made of unpasteurized milk for sale in America, but because of the FDA
restrictions, even food lovers are confused.

Purely in terms of
flavor, cheese made of raw milk is substantially different. It's fuller
and richer than its pasteurized counterpart. Yet cheese flavor is so
broad that only the worst cheese snob (or a raw foodist) would refuse
to eat pasteurized cheese. Most aged goudas
are pasteurized, and they feature a wonderfully complex mix of sweet
flavors in their finish. Amid the overtones of toffee, butterscotch,
and caramel found in most aged goudas, the differences between raw and
pasteurized milk get lost.

In fact, there is a growing number of excellent pasteurized cheeses on
the international marketplace. Most British blue cheeses are now
pasteurized; several exceptional Irish cheeses like Gubeen, Ardrahan,
and Coolea are pasteurized. And a variety of Italian pecorinos are too.
What gives?

Part of it is that there is fear that the EU will
mandate pasteurization guidelines, and part of it is that these cheeses
come from small creameries and that, as these dairy farms grow and
increase the scale of their production, it's simpler for them to use
pasteurized milk to insure meeting safety standards. These cheeses are
all full of depth, flavor, and nuance. Not even my globetrotting editor
would resist them.

Martin Johnson's "The Joy of Cheese" column runs the second Tuesday of every month in the MOLI View.