Zingerman’s was saddened to hear of the loss of our friend, Bob Nueske. To help remember him, we’re reprinting Ari’s interview with Bob from 2013.

In honor of Bob Nueske

This year’s Camp Bacon 2015 is dedicated to the memory of Bob Nueske, much-loved patriarch of the first family of bacon, who died unexpectedly this past January. We’ve had the great pleasure of cooking, serving, and eating Nueske’s bacon every day at Zingerman’s for over thirty years, and we were graced by Bob’s passion, stories and love for pork at Camp Bacon the last two years. Long esteemed by pretty much everyone in the specialty food industry, Bob was intelligent, quiet, and determinedly committed to quality in all he did. He helped take his father’s work to ever greater heights. His love for Johnny Cash was legendary amongst friends and family members. Like his hero he generally wore all black. His soft voice, strong opinions, dedication to perfecting his craft while walking his own way, caring for community and those in need, all combined to lead me to start referring to Bob as a “the Johnny Cash of Bacon.” Two years ago when he spoke at Camp Bacon for the first time, we played Johnny’s version of “I Walk the Line” when Bob came up to the podium. Imagine it playing, if you like, as you start to read the interview with Bob that follows. Done two years ago, it still conveys the powerful character, quality conscious, quiet, but opinionated leader he was in both business and in bacon. – Ari

Ari recently had a chance to chat with renowned Wisconsin bacon maker Bob Nueske about the history of his family’s business. Bob will be speaking at Zingerman’s 4th Annual Camp Bacon this summer. Please join us!

Bob Nueske’s great-grandfather came to the small town of Wittenberg, Wisconsin in 1882. Shortly thereafter he started to cure and smoke meats in the style of his German heritage.  Located up near the UP, they’ve been making their bacon using basically the same family recipe for nearly a century and a half now. We’ve cooked off Nueske’s Applewood smoked bacon at the Deli every morning for over 31 years now. I have no idea how many tens of thousands of pounds it adds up to but I know it’s a lot. That record, like the bacon on which it’s based, is something special.  So too is the man behind the bacon—Bob Nueske is a marvelous story teller, a very grounded and forward thinking business man, a “Small Giant” long before Bo Burlingham wrote the book, a master bacon maker and a bacon lover.  We’re excited to have successfully enticed Bob to leave northern Wisconsin for the wilds of Ann Arbor and a few days at Camp Bacon. 

Ari:  Can you tell me a bit of the Nueske story?

Bob:  I hardly know how to begin. When you’re born and raised into something that becomes your life it’s hard to know where to start. The only way I can explain it is that if you’re born in a cooler and raised in a smokehouse it permeates into your being and you don’t even realize it. I’ve been part of Nueske bacon literally my whole life. And when you are born and raised in a family business, working as a father and son it makes a special situation. I had a good father. He smiled a lot. He was a good man and a good businessman. He was really firm and fair. And yet as a kid, you know, when you’re 16, 17, 18, and you have all the answers . . . when I was 16 years old . . . . Well, I’ll you a story.  Back when I was 16 I had a car. Back then Wittenberg was a town of 895 people (Today, it’s totally taken off—the 2010 census said it had 1081 people). It’s all a farm community. I figured the best way for me to see the world was to head down to Chicago on my own. So I drove south. I got downtown by myself. I’d never been there. I was looking at all these great big buildings and I noticed there were a whole lot of good restaurants. But I couldn’t afford to eat in em. And I thought to myself, I’d love to understand ’em. Now, who’d have ever thought that bacon would take you to places like that? But today our bacon is in some of the best restaurants and stores in the country. As I remember growing up, my dad had put four hours in at work by the time we kids got up in the morning. We were always eating the odd shaped pieces he didn’t want to sell to other people. My mother would say, “I’m married to the man who has the best bacon, but you always bring home the other stuff!” He’d say, “We don’t sell those odd cuts, we eat em. It tastes the same. It just don’t look the same!” We have some pictures of me sitting on a truck with three birthday candles. When you’re little it seems like your parents are doing things you could never do. Then you get to the age when you think, “They don’t know anything.” But then eventually you realize that things that seemed big aren’t that big, they aren’t that important. And I realized that my dad knew what he was doing. In learning how to do a product like my dad taught us it was time consuming and it wasn’t like I took notes. Day in and day out you learn it and you don’t even know you’re learning it. But my dad had these little books that he used.  And they weren’t just sitting on the shelf. They were well read, well worn. And he would take a lot of notes. My dad was a good student of bacon. Making bacon like ours is like making fine wine. You don’t hurry the process. I remember him saying, “You know Bobby, we do it this way because of . . . . ., but, not this way because . . . ” There were good reasons why each piece of the process happened. I remember thinking “There has to be a faster quicker way to make bacon!” But eventually I realized that he really knew what he was doing.

Where did your grandfather come from?

He was from Germany. I’m still trying to figure out exactly where. I got drafted into the military got my medical training at Ft. Sam Houston and thought for sure I was headed for Vietnam. It was not a pretty time. But somehow I was the only one in our class that ended up stationed in Germany. So through a fluke of luck I learned the heritage of the meat. My great grandfather came to Wisconsin in 1882. Wilhelm Nueske. I’m still trying to find out what town he came from. No one really knows. We know it’s German heritage. I’m starting to discover that it was up in the northeast area of Germany and what’s now Poland.  There are still some Nueskes up there. It’s not that common a name. I literally know most everyone of them in this country. After I went through the military I went into the printing press business for a while. But then I came back to smoking meats and I began to experiment a little on my own, I realized that speeding things up, going fast just creates another me-too product. Volume and big is not what we’re after at Nueske’s. We don’t want to be the biggest. One of the best words I’ve learned over all these years is, “No.” When we’re approached by certain companies to sell to them we look at how they actually run their business. A lot of times I can see that we’re not large enough to produce enough for them so we say, “No.”

Speaking of which, you and I both read a lot of business books.  Were there any that were particularly helpful to you?

I was remembering a book called Beyond World Class. It’s by Ross Alan. It was written about the way I think a business should be run. It said that if your suppliers don’t treat you like you wanted to be treated, and if someone in your company or a customer doesn’t fit the way you want to work, then you just say, “We’re not interested.” You just don’t stay with them. You need to work with people who care like you do and who want to work the way you do. That’s a recipe for how to have fun while you’re running your company. You enjoy your relationship with everyone and you work with a great group of people. It takes work to keep it that way. But growing up in a company like ours . .  . well, you know .  . . When I left the family business at 18 I had two really good experiences. One was in a small printing company. And then I was wooed away to American Can Company. It was a huge corporation. I actually got that feeling of putting your brains up on the time clock when you punched in. They didn’t want your thoughts. And then you picked them up when you left. They didn’t want you to think. I learned I could get done 8 hours work in 3 hours and kept pushin’. But then I was told “Don’t do that again.” People that work here like what they do and they’re having fun. That’s the key. Many an outsider looking in at our company goes by and says, “How do you do this?  How do you get your culture?” At first they think it was a trick, like when you used to go to Russia and they put on a stage Grand Tour to fool you. But after a while, the visitors realize there’s no “Grand Tour.” That’s the key. What your people do. How they smile. How they work. That’s what makes a great company. It just seems to work.

We love your bacon here at Zingerman’s.  It’s gotten great press in the New York Times and just about everywhere else.  What makes the bacon so great?

Well, what really makes the difference how the hogs are fed. How they’re grown. How they’re treated as far as stress. You don’t want stress in the hogs. You have to find companies who know how to slaughter and cut and sort correctly. And then how you cure and smoke the meat properly. We taste test constantly. Even though there are strict formulas, there’s still always the human side. If something doesn’t seem right when we taste the product we pull it off. We all know that our bacon is a natural product and the whole production system can run a little off one way or another. Pretty much it means the standards of where you want it to be even though the flavor profile never changes. Something comes in wrong and you have to make a point and send it back.  Consistency is key. Don’t accept anything that’s less than what you really want. Our hogs are raised in Canada. They’re the Belgian Pietrain breed and some others. We cure the bellies and then give them 24 hours in the smoker. We use real Wisconsin Applewood. We actually have one man who’s responsible to select the Applewood. We buy full trees, not wood already cut in pieces.  He actually cuts it as we need it. When you select the wood it has to be the right balance of dryness and greenness. Not too dry, not too green. We use wild Cherrywood and it’s the same thing there. We start with a full tree. We’re fortunate . . . when I think back when my grandparents moved here, we’re fortunate that they picked an area with so many apple and cherry orchards.

It’s pretty impressive that Nueske’s has stayed small and focused for four generations.  Why do you think it’s worked so well?

Let me tell you another story. There’s a man around here who started a very large nationally known meat curing company around the time my father was getting going. He and my dad knew each other pretty well. The companies were just about 45 miles a part. Our location was on a dead end street. We didn’t really have a retail store. We just were wholesaler but my dad would let people in when they knocked on the door. Finally he put in a tiny little counter. Anyways, Fritz would come in to that little counter and buy our bacon and smoked liver sausage. “I said why are you buying our bacon when you have your own?” He said, “I want to buy the good stuff for our big shots coming up to my cottage up north.” “Well, Fritz is probably in his 70s now. He came in one day quite a few years ago now and he asks one of the retail clerks in our shop, if I was there.  I asked him the same question I would ask every time he came back when I was 14. “What are you doing buying bacon here?” And he said the same thing he said back then: “I’m going up to my cabin and need the good stuff.” But then he said, “I want to tell you a story about your dad and me. You know, I would tell your dad, ‘Robert, I’m gonna build the biggest meat company I can. And your dad would look at me and say, ‘Well Fritz, I’m gonna become the best meat company I can become.'” Then Fritz said to me, “I succeeded.  I sold out to a big company. I made a lot of money. But I don’t like what the big company did with our products. And you know what? Your dad was right and I was wrong. I would never do that again.” When I think of the decisions I’ve made over the years. You gotta know when to say ‘No!’

What’s your favorite way to eat bacon?

I love it best when you lay it on parchment paper and bake it in the oven. It comes out sort of crispy and soft in the middle. I love it that way.

See you at camp!

Zingerman’s Co-Founders, Paul Saginaw and Ari Weinzweig, were inducted into the Specialty Food Association Hall of Fame at a galat even on Sunday, January 11. Please see the press release below for more details. 

Specialty Food Association Establishes Hall of Fame

Inductees to be Celebrated at Winter Fancy Food Show

NEW YORK (Jan. 5, 2015) – The Specialty Food Association has established a Hall of Fame to honor individuals who have played significant roles in creating and shaping the $88.3 billion specialty food industry.

The inaugural inductees include 114 individuals who helped establish the specialty food industry in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, as well as pioneers in specialty food retailing, tastemakers, and culinary innovators who are continuing to change tastes today.

“The specialty food industry is built on the creativity and passion of individuals who have worked hard to bring top-quality food and new flavors to market. We are proud to recognize these pioneers,” says Specialty Food Association President Ann Daw.

Inductees include Chuck Williams, Williams-Sonoma; David Bigelow and Eunice Bigelow, Biglow Tea; Julee Rosso, Silver Palate and Jerry Kehe and Joe Shannon, KeHE Foods. The inaugural class was selected by Association members and members of the Hall of Fame Committee.

See the full list of 114 inductees.

The inductees will be celebrated on Jan. 11, 2015, at the Winter Fancy Food Show in San Francisco as part of a special event that also includes the Association’s Leadership Awards and a keynote address by Seth Goldman, co-founder and CEO of Honest Tea. The event is 5 – 6:30 p.m. at Moscone Center.

About the Specialty Food Association
The Specialty Food Association is a thriving community of food artisans, importers and entrepreneurs who bring craft, care and joy to the distinctive foods they produce. Established in 1952 in New York, the not-for-profit trade association provides its 3,000 members in the U.S. and abroad the tools, knowledge and connections to champion and nurture their companies in an ever-evolving marketplace. The Association owns and produces the Winter and Summer Fancy Food Shows, and presents the sofi™ Awards honoring excellence in specialty food. Learn more at specialtyfood.com.

Congratulations to Paul and Ari! 

“Secret” Pamphlets

Excerpted from the Guide to Good Leading series. Each are printed on sustainable paper, saddle stitched, and include a hand-laid scratch-board illustration. We’ve chosen several key “Secrets” to introduce our collection.

Secret #1: The Twelve Natural Laws of Business: A More Organic Way to Operate? 
The keys to running your organization in harmony with human nature. The laws of nature that underlie the success of any organization—large or small, for profit or not-for-profit, and most definitely Zingerman’s!

Secret #6: Revisiting the Power of Visioning: Why Positive Futuring Really Works 
An in depth look at just how amazingly powerful the Zingerman’s visioning process can be.

Secret #7: Writing a Vision of Greatness: And Why It’s Not the Same as a Strategic Plan! 
The basics of our approach to vision writing, including the four elements of an effective vision at Zingerman’s.

Secret #9: An 8-Step Recipe for Writing a Vision of Greatness; A Surefire Way to Get Clear on the Future You Want 
The recipe that we’ve used here at Zingerman’s for over twenty years and taught to thousands around the country and the world and which, through Shawn Askinosie’s work, is now being assimilated into the activities of the Mababu Cocoa Farmer Cooperative in Tanzania.

Secret #19: Fixing the Energy Crisis in the American Workplace: Why Ignoring the Natural Laws of Business Is a Recipe for Big Trouble 
How working in violation of the Natural Laws of Business has created an energy crisis in the workplace and what we can do to help restore the natural human energy, creativity and intelligence of everyone in our organizations.

Secret #23: A Recipe for Servant Leadership
It’s a natural law of business that if we want our staff to give great service to our guests, we as leaders need to give great service to the staff. This secret explores the why and how-to behind this transformational approach.

Secret #29: Twelve Tenets of Anarcho-Capitalism: How to Make Money without Getting Hung Up on Hierarchy
A look at Ari’s views on how the tenets of anarchist thought can be put to work in the world of progressive business.

Secret #35: The Power of Personal Visioning: Applying Natural Law #1 to the Business of Living
An in-depth essay on how to take Zingerman’s approach to visioning and put it to work to help you create the life you want to lead.

These bite-sized nuggets of wisdom from the Zingerman’s Guide to Good Leading series are a great way to introduce yourself to the concepts behind our business.

Order your copies today!

Featuring special guests Rolando Beramendi, Gianluigi Peduzzi, and Ari Weinzweig!

Last night, we were very fortunate to welcome Gianluigi Peduzzi of Rustichella and Rolando Beramundi of Manicaretti Italian Food Importers, arguably two of the most influential voices in the world of traditional pasta.

Ari introduced the two luminaries, speaking of our long history of featuring their products at Zingerman’s. He then turned it over to Rolando and Gianluigi, who talked about the history and care that goes into this delicious, high-quality pasta. Gianluigi is a third-generation pasta maker from the Abruzzo, whose Rustichella pasta line has long been one of THE best in Italy and the U.S. Rolando Beramendi is one of the country’s premier importers of fine Italian foods, and whose excellent palate and passion for traditional Italian food have significantly altered the food scene here in the US.

Throughout the evening, guests were served samples of various Rustichella pastas as our two speakers talked about the pasta, how its made, and the best way to serve the various styles.

First up was a delicious Whole Wheat Penne, the first pasta Rustichella imported into the US. The pasta was served very simply as aglio, olio, e peperoncino (garlic, oil and spicy peppers). This was the recipe that was written on the original Penne bags.

Next, we tried a  Linguine tossed with the simple tomato and basil sauce, with a bit of grated Parmigiano Reggiano over the top. The serving style really showcased the flavor of the pasta.

Orecchiette came next, served alla Pugliese, with kale and Zingerman’s housemade sausage. This pasta works well with heartier fare.

We tried an Egg Pappardelle next, served with just melted butter, and sauteéd mushrooms. Another simple, yet excellent dish.

Gianluigi introduced their premier PrimoGrano Sagne a Pezzi next, which is a 100% Abruzzo product, travleing 0 kilometers from sowing to harvest. The grain really makes a difference, and Gianluigi proved this by serving this pasta with just a splash of extra virgin olive oil. Outstanding flavor!

The duo finished up by introducing a new pasta line, ZeroTre, that’s aimed a kids. Guests enjoyed Alfabeto, tiny alphabet letters served in Zingerman’s famed chicken broth. This delicious comfort food was a great way to complete our culinary journey through the Abruzzo countryside.

Thanks again to all of our guests, and to Rolando and Gianluigi for traveling so far to share their amazing pasta with us!

See you soon!

 

Celebrating France’s Wonderful comté cheese

When you travel in the Franche-Comté region in eastern France, you’ll see dozens of green and white road signs for the “Route de Comté,” pointing you toward the village cheese makers where you can buy well-made local cheese. They pop up on the road every couple of miles – there’s a Comté maker in most every village in the region, and the Comtois people take great pride in their cheese.

Though it’s got about as much name recognition around here as Dry Jack does in Outer Mongolia, Comté is a great, grand cheese. Above and beyond all the other stuff I’m about to tell you below, there are a trio of really big reasons why you should know about this cheese and why it’s so deserving of a chapter in this book.

1. There’s more traditional Comté being made than any other French cheese. That’s right. More on this in a minute. But to get the point out front, while Brie, Camembert, Roquefort and various versions of traditional French goat cheeses usually get the big press, there is actually more Comté made using traditional methods than there is of any other cheese in France.
2. Comte is the cheese by which French cheese mongers judge another cheese shop. Why? Because there’s so much fairly traditional Comté still being made there’s a lot more room to move in the way one buys it. So when a French cheese pro wants to judge the true quality of a shop, she starts by buying some Comté.
3. All else aside, at it’s best it’s simply a great tasting cheese, one that anyone who likes good food should get the chance to savor at its best a few times before they die. Eating some Comté right now. It’s buttery, smooth, soft but masculine at the same time. This is not timid cheese. It’s just not one that has to hit you over the head. At the more forceful end of its spectrum—which is where I like it, it’s got a great balance of bigness and bashfulness. It’s been ten minutes since I ate it and the flavors are staying right with me, as much in balance now as they were when I first started eating it. Buttery, nutty, nice nose, croissant?

Not Just the French Version of Gruyere

Comté (which the French pronounce “Con-tay”) has been made in the Jura mountains for centuries, long before there was a country called France; without question, it is the cheese of the Franche-Comté, the district of France which butts up against the Swiss border.

In France, the cheese’s formal name is “Gruyere de Comté.” Over there, they use the term Gruyere as a generic for any mountain cheese. But in North America the use of the word Gruyere has resulted in its often being dismissed as “a French copy of the Swiss.” This is wholly inaccurate. While they have similarities, Comté has a flavor all its own—smoother on the tongue, less salty, rounder in flavor, with less of a “nose” and not as much of the fruitiness that is so characteristic of its Swiss cousin.

Comté has more than enough history and heritage to stand on its own. In fact, it was the first of France’s cheeses to be recognized and rewarded with an “AOC”—an “appellation d’origine controllee”—to guarantee its makers and eaters’ authenticity. No small achievement in a country that takes its food and itself as seriously as France.

Made into large, flat 75-pound wheels, Comté has a rough dimpled brownish rind, and a smooth, firm white to yellow interior. The best Comté has a wonderful nutty, buttery flavor. Unlike our usual image of large holed Swiss-type cheeses, Comté has only an occasional pea sized “eye” (what we call holes). In fact many of the best tasting Comtés have almost no holes at all, but rather long fissures or cracks (known as “lenure”) that run through the paste of the cheese. In its home region, Comté seems to find its way onto the table in just about every way you can think of; on sandwiches, in fondue, melted into omelets, in sauces, on salads, after dinner. Or, of course, eaten just as it is.

Who Cares About Comté?

My first hint that there was more to Comté cheese than I might have thought, came in over two decades ago, when I visited the Franche-Comté for the first time back in 1984. I have vivid memories of walking the market in the mountain town of Besancon, blue skies overhead, the rustling of the river Doubs in the background. Almost everywhere I looked, long lean two-foot high triangular wedges of well-aged Comté cheese stood, reaching skyward, like pointed, symmetrical mountains. Tasting Comté from those cheese counters made me realize that (as usual) what was being shipped over to us in America was the youngest, blandest version available of what was really a cheese of great character – no wonder no one in the U.S. was taking notice. But the Comté I bit into in Besancon was beautiful, buttery, well-aged and richly flavored.

That first visit piqued my interest. But it was my second visit to the Franche-Comté, a decade later, that made me a devoted follower of this fantastic French cheese. And my third, just a few years ago, reaffirmed everything I learned and believed after the first two trips. This is a great cheese.

7 Generations of Cheese

The highlight of that second trip was a day with Jean-Charles Arnaud, affineur (cheese ager) and a man on a mission. He is one of half a dozen affineurs who mature top-notch Comté cheese. On my recent visit I spent the day with the folks at the Fort St. Antoine, the maturing company of Marcel Petit. Most everything I learned from Jean-Charles years earlier, the men and women at Petit echoed on this most recent trip. They have a bit of a different approach to maturing the cheese (more on that in a minute) but the passion for tradition is equally solid.

Jean-Charles is so connected to the Franche-Comté you could film a French version of Roots with him as the lead. He’s the seventh generation of his family to work with cheese. One of his grandfathers was a cheesemaker, the other a winemaker. At the time I visited in the mid-90s, Jean-Charles was in his early thirties, but despite his youth he was already running the family firm, guiding the buying, aging, and selling of nearly 20 percent of the entire production of Comté cheese.

Tall, thin, and energetic, he is a font of knowledge about the cheese he cares for so much. He comes on pretty casually, gentle, happy, a man who likes his life and likes what he’s doing. For a while he had me fooled—worried I guess if I’m honest about it—into thinking that I was in for a rather superficial day of the usual legends and lore of Comté. But beneath the soft surface, Jean-Charles is a man of deep devotion, with a core of emotional connection to the land and the cheese on which he was raised. Just as I was starting to wonder if I was in for a day of Comté cliches, he caught me with a sudden seriousness, a sense of gravity that literally made my eyes tear up (remember to imagine the French accent):

“Really my goal in my lifetime is to help preserve the integrity and quality of Comté cheese. Sometimes we add some equipment here and there, to help make it a little easier for the people, to make sure they stay in business. But the important things—the freshness of the milk, the raw milk, the Montbelliard cows, copper kettles, no silage, real rennet—these things we must preserve.”

The man meant what he was saying. To preserve the tradition for another generation, to pass the torch of craft and Comté to the eight generation of Arnaud’s is akin to an American fighting to save a piece of Redwood forest. Traditions take centuries to build up, but they can unravel at an alarming speed. Jean-Charles has undertaken a trust of great magnitude.

Unlike so many heirs to family businesses who have little enthusiasm for their work, Jean-Charles is a man with great passion and love for everything about Comté cheese; the mountains, the people who make it, the land it comes from. He seems to know all his producers intimately. When we ran into one of the local farmers delivering milk, he knew him, too. Wherever we went, he knew the cheesemakers, greeted them with enthusiasm. He knew their children. He knew their cheese.

Arriving in Comté Country

In school we used to sing “purple mountains majesty” and I used to wonder what it meant. In the Franche-Comté the mountains in May were majestic in yellow. When we arrived, they were covered with millions of yellow, yellow dandelions, looking like the poppy fields Dorothy landed in on her way from Kansas to Oz. The locals say that the Comté cheese from the first eight days of May is very, vibrantly yellow, the inevitable and very natural result of cows munching mouthfuls of the yellow flowers.

Being a city boy, I love to hear about life in the mountains. Jean-Charles obliged me:

“I remember when I was about ten years old and I was visiting with my grandfather in his village and there was so much snow that we were completely cut off from communications for eight days. No telephone. Nothing. But every day the farmers brought the milk—with sleds, with dogs, with horses—and everyday my grandfather made cheese.”

The mountains mystify me. As a kid I was terrified of getting lost, separated from my mother when we went to big public places like the beach, or downtown department stores. But it’s almost impossible for me to imagine being completely cut off, left behind by the rest of the world in a village with 22 homes for eight snow-drifted days, no outside world, no newspapers, no mail, no TV, no nothing. Just the family, the Comté cheese, bread, dried country ham, wine, and some potatoes to get by on.

Tied to the Region

During the cold winter months in the mountains, cheese was one of—or often the only—serious source of protein available. Cheesemaking is woven into the fabric of life in ways which are not easily abandoned. Jean-Charles explained, “The Comté cheese was made in this area because we have everything you need to make it in the Jura mountains. The cows, the milk, the wood to make the fire, the salt.”

We take salt for granted nowadays, but in days of yore, salt was hard to come by. You’d never know it from the cheap cardboard drum of Morton’s, but salt was once something people fought wars over. The Franche-Comté was once one of the most important sources of non-sea salt to be found in Europe. For more on this, see Mark Kurlansky’s excellent book, “Salt.” To this day, large storage buildings, including one of the Arnaud cellars, can still be found that only a few hundred years ago were used exclusively to house salt.

Without trying to sound like a commercial, I can tell you that the best Comté cheese today is still made much as it was when Jean-Charles’ grandfather was making cheese. Milk is still delivered twice a day, real rennet is prepared only from local calves, and the curd is cooked in copper kettles. The copper contributes to the flavor of the finished cheese. In the smaller dairies the cheesemakers still pull the finished curd from the kettles the old fashioned way. They tie two corners of a large cheesecloth like a giant lobster bib around their necks. Then, bracing their feet against the wall, they lean over the kettle like one of the Flying Wallendas preparing to leap. Reaching deep into the hot cauldron, they drag the other two corners down across the bottom of the kettle to pull out the curd. Remember these are 75-pound wheels of cheese.

The Milk

As we were driving into the village of Arbois for what was to be an incredible lunch at the Taverne La Finette, Jean-Charles mentioned that, “this is the home of Pasteur.” He waited a minute or two, chuckled a little Comtois chuckle, and added, “But we don’t pasteurize the milk here.” There are no coincidences. Instead of pasteurizing, the Comtois have gone to great lengths to make pasteurization irrelevant, by setting up standards for milk production that make a mockery of what we tolerate in our bacteria phobic, hi-tech society. There’s an arm long list of rules and regulations set up to insure that the milk that goes into Comté is exceptional.

It starts, of course, with the cows. By law, they must be the traditional local breed of Montbelliards. A beautiful russet and white, they have been the main milk producers in the Franche-Comté for centuries. In the Comté cows are treated with the care and concern that we normally associate with the Hindu. Cars stop as the bovines parade across country roads, strutting like the local gentry that they are, cowbells ringing off leather collars. Strict codes dictate what the cows are allowed to eat (no silage), and where they can eat it.

Every facet of the milk handling is monitored. No pumping of the milk is allowed, in order to protect the delicate fat globules so crucial to good cheesemaking. The milk must be fresh (from the morning the cheese is made and the previous evening) and unpasteurized. Bacteria counts must be very, very low.

It’s interesting that in the U.S. cheese made from unpasteurized milk has been wrongly accused of being a health hazard. Jean-Charles thew up his hands in frustration at the mere mention of it. “In America the laws require a bacteria count of less than 1,000,000. One million! This is ridiculous. But because they pasteurize the milk no one knows or cares that it is of such poor quality. To make Comté cheese we must have milk with a bacteria count no higher than 2,000!”

Fruitieres

If you journeyed back into the cheesemaking world of 200 years ago, you’d find that most every farm in Europe and North America would have been independently making its own cheese. Comté is—and always has been—an exception. Since the middle of the 13^th century Comté has been made, not on farms, but in fruitieres; small village dairies which are found throughout the region. What brought about such a unique system? The cold mountain climate and difficult terrain led the Franco-Comtois people to make large well, aged cheeses which could be stored for eating in the long winter months. The emphasis is on “large.” A wheel of Comté cheese takes about 600 liters of milk, much more than the average small-holder’s herds could come up with in a day’s “work.” The result was a natural movement towards cooperative cheesemaking.

The fruitiere system has a simple elegance to it. Each village would have a fruitiere, and each fruitiere has a cheesemaker. Each morning and each afternoon farmers from the surrounding countryside would bring fresh milk to the fruitiere. Each morning the cheesemaker mixes morning and evening milk, adds the rennet and starts the process of making Comté cheese. The fruitiere keeps the new cheeses for only a few days. The cheeses are then taken to an affineur (an “ager,” like Jean-Charles) who cares for the cheeses from then until the time they are sold – anywhere from three months on up. Affinage is a profession that has only recently been revived in the U.S., but in France it is an accepted and essential part of the cheese world.

The fruitiere today remains a critical part of maintaining the viability of village life in the Franche-Comté. To this day it dominates the agricultural life of the region. Letitia, who works at Marcel Petit, told me that she grew up nearby on a dairy farm. I asked if her parents had sold the milk to a fruitiere for Comte making. “Here if you produce milk, you sell it for Comté,” she answered matter of factly. “That’s just what you do.” In total there are about 3200 farms contributing the milk of their Montbelliard herds (the only type of cows one can use to make Comté) to the system. The average herd is still very small, many having only 15 or so cows. The Comté codes require at least one hectare of land per animal in order to allow sustainable grazing without overburdening the pastures. Since a single wheel of the cheese takes about 530 liters—the yield of about 30 cows—the system is set up to support the small farms while still making traditional large wheels of cheese a daily reality.

Jean-Charles is dedicated to preserving as many of the fruitieres and the farms as possible, a commitment that comes from a common care for the quality of his cheese and for the quality of traditional life in the Franc-Comtois countryside. As we drove he spoke with passion: “In the village now there is only the fruitiere. There is no more school, no more church, only the cheese making. If we lose the fruitiere, we will lose the village.”

An Ancient Tradition with a Modern Business Bent

As old as it is, there is a compelling, cooperative genius in the fruitiere system, one which we in our “progressive” wisdom are working hard to reinvent in the modern American business world. The Comtois system is set up so that all three of its components (“stakeholders” we might call them in business school these days) have their success interlinked. The affineur depends on the cheesemaker to deliver a well-made young cheese. The cheesemaker relies on the farmer to bring in the best quality milk. While each is free to pursue his (and it is a predominantly male world from what I saw) particular passion and style, none of the three can be successful without comparable efforts from the other two links in the chain.

To seal the shared “stake” in the deal, the final price that the milk producer and cheesemaker are paid is linked to the price the affineur gets for the cheese when it is sold. The better the quality of the cheese, the better the price, the more everyone makes. Voila. What goes around comes around. A medieval system where stakeholders are working cooperatively to create quality, where the reward system reinforces the drive for quality, where all hold a shared vision of what success and quality is. Who says history doesn’t repeat itself?

A Living Tradition

Part of what made such an impression on me is how much the Comté producers have done to make their tradition a living, and thriving modern enterprise. There are nearly 200 fruitieres left in the Franche-Comté. This is truly a phenomenal number of small dairies still operating. By comparison, there are only about 500 dairies left in the whole rest of France! To give you a frame of reference, in Somerset, home of English cheddar there are fewer than a half dozen dairies left making traditional raw milk cheese! What accounts for this? Since the Swiss have accomplished a similar feat, it seems to me it must be something about the mountain cultures (Rootedness? Separateness? Distance created by mountain barriers?) that has kept more of the cheesemaking traditions intact than in any other area. Whatever it is we ought to learn from it. They have done so much to preserve the integrity of their tradition, yet they’ve done so in a way that’s not stubbornly opposed to modernity, or to making an effort to learn, to grow and to improve.

There are two ways you can learn to become a cheesemaker in a Comté fruitiere, and both require a good bit of time in the school. The “short route” is that you can go to work for your father who, in this case would have to be a cheesemaker, for two years of apprenticing. Then you go to the dairy school in Poligny, the capital of Comté country, for two years (along with upwardly mobile cheesemakers from all over the world), then out to do an apprenticeship in another fruitiere for a year. Finally you go back to Poligny for final year of formal schooling. In total it’s six years training! And if your father isn’t a Comté cheesemaker? Then you need to go to the school for an even longer run of study and apprenticeship.

Proper Aging in the Caves

Comté aging caves (or “cellars”) are quite a sight. Thousands upon thousands of wheels of Comté carefully laid flat, like thin milky millstones, on unfinished wooden shelves. The shelves, which by law must be made from local pine, reach up a good twenty five feet high, and stretch fifty yards or so across the rooms. There are a dozen different enormous aging rooms, each with its own unique combination of temperature and humidity. The affineur moves the cheeses through the rooms at various stages of aging, to bring out the best in each wheel of cheese.

To reach the apex, the mountain peak of majestic flavor, that makes it worth paying the higher prices charged the cheese, Comté has to be aged for, to my taste, at least ten or twelve months. Only then is it really ready to be savored. Best of all really are wheels that have been in the caves for over eighteen months.

To properly age a wheel of good Comté cheese takes more than just patience. After the young wheels arrive at the Arnaud cellars, each wheel is turned 3 times a week for 3 weeks, then twice a week for the rest of its stay on the aging shelves. By my rough calculations, that would mean that before it gets to us at 12 months age, each wheel is rubbed, washed and turned about 107 times! On top of that each and every wheel is tapped with a hammer, plugged and tasted two or three times during the aging to check it for quality, and class it accordingly. Compare that to the average American factory cheese whose only turning comes as cardboard cases of it are loaded and unloaded from sixty foot semi-trailers, cheeses that are tasted for the first and last time by the unsuspecting consumer that bought them.

A Trained Comté Palate

Although the cheese of many dairies is aged in the same cave, each retains its original character. “Every fruitiere makes cheese with its own flavor,” Jean-Charles told me. “And each wheel is slightly different. If you give me Comté cheese to taste (at random) from the caves, 95 percent of the time I can tell you from which fruitiere it comes, and when it was made. But,” he hastened to add before I might conclude he was bragging, “so can this man over here (the taster working his way down the rows). I must. It’s my job.” That may not seem all that impressive until I tell you that the Arnaud caves are filled with about 70,000 wheels of Comté cheese made by 60 different fruitieres.

In search of the “perfect” Comté, I tasted, and tasted, and tasted some more. Well over 25 different cheeses by the time we were done. I treasure the opportunity to taste like this, because it’s the only way to truly appreciate how significant the differences are between one wheel of Comté and another. Finally we settled on the cheeses from a particular dairy one of Jean-Charles favorites. Since the cheese varies from day to day, and year to year with the vagaries of weather, dairy farming, and cheesemaker job continuity, it really doesn’t much matter which dairy it was. What does matter is that it was one of the fruitieres which makes cheese only in the summer months, when the cows are high in the mountain pastures eating the wild flowers, herbs, and greens. This is the kind of cheese that makes good Comté a favorite of connoisseurs.

Marcel Petite: Long Aging, Cooler Temperatures

I first learned about the Comté of Marcel Petit from Jason Hinds, who’s long been a key component of the crew at Neals’ Yard Dairy in London, where traditional cheese is as much of a religion as anything else. I can’t remember how Jason first hooked up with them, but generous spirit that he is, he’s been selling their cheese, and telling everyone else he knows in the cheese world, about it for a number of years now.

Visiting the Fort St. Antoine to see the folks who make Marcel Petite’s cheese a reality today, it’s easy to see the same passions, and the same expert palates that impressed me a decade earlier in meeting Jean-Charles Arnaud. While I’m sure there’s a level of competitive spirit in the region amongst the various affineurs, the great thing for the rest of us is that the competition seems to be taking place on a very, very high level of quality.

Petit started his business up in 1966 and from everything I saw on my visit, he did a great job of founding an exceptional company that stands behind his values and commitment to quality. His biggest conceptual contribution to the world of Comté though was to create what he called “affinage longue.” What M. Petite did was to lower the temperature at which Comté was being aged from the then typical 15°C to a much cooler 7-8°C. The reduced temperature allowed the cheeses more time to develop at a gentler pace, maximizing flavor while holding on to moisture and butter fat that might otherwise be more quickly lost. He also had the foresight to buy the Fort St. Antoine, a huge stone structure buit in the 1870s that had been abandoned since WWII. Of course the thick stone walls and high vaulted ceilings of the Fort made it ideal for maturing large wheels of cheese and today it’s filled with roughly 65,000 75-pound rounds, stacked neatly on spruce shelves all the way up to the 30-foot high ceilings. The company buys from about 35 different fruitieres, of which 13 are considered good enough to have their cheeses aged in the Fort.

Of course, stone walls alone aren’t enough to mature the cheese properly. Affinage remains very much a craft, and the quality of the affinage is very much dependent on the skill of the man or woman doing the work. In this case, that would be Claude Querry. Quite a guy. Small and thin but with an enormous energy coming out of him. About 5’ 7”, maybe in his mid thirties, with a thin Van Dyke beard, long sideburns and bold, almond-shaped brown eyes. I’d been warned before meeting him that his style is often to grill visitors to see if they’re really serious about Comté before he’ll share his secrets with them. For whatever reason—I was with Jason, our time was tight—I was spared any interrogation. We got right into cheese. Although there are 65,000 wheels of cheese under Claude’s command, amazingly he seems to know most everyone. His work is first to maximize the flavor of each cheese, and then, of equal import to match the tastes of Petite’s customers with the cheeses.

To that end, we tasted twenty different cheeses within an hour. Walking down row after row of cheese, he would stop for reasons known only to him to taste and take notes. Our purpose was two fold really—Jason was choosing cheese for his Burrough Market stall in London, and, at the same time, Claude was trying to get a handle on what I was looking for. We met both goals, and at the same time I got a very good sense of why Claude is so damned good at what he does.

As we walked he’d slow down to rub any number of cheeses, first with his hands, then often tapping with the handle of his cheese tryer. “This is still really a mystery,” he reminded us early on. “We don’t know a fraction of what we want to know.” And, I can safely say, the rest of don’t know a fraction of what Claude knows. Many of the wheels we walked by had a series of scratches in them. Why? I asked. We mark each cheese after we taste. And we don’t want to pull from the same cheese too many times.

He’s also something of artist. Every once in a while he stops to scratch a drawing into the rind of a wheel of cheese, sort of cave art of a more modern sort than what Claude’s Gallic ancestors might have been doing a few million years ago. The first was a four axis sketch of the flavors we taste—bitter, salty, sour and sweet at each end of each of the two axes. “I am an architect of flavor,” he explains, using the diagram to show how he must manage the various natural flavors in the cheese to develop them properly.

Perhaps more than anything else, I was blown away by Claude’s palate and his ability to put amazingly precise and often unusual flavor descriptors onto what we were tasting. While the words may seem off the wall, the truth is that the flavors were there in the cheese. I kept looking up at him with amazement but sure enough he was right on in what he was saying. “Buttery, nutty .. . these are typical descriptors. Accurate but not surprising. Claude started in with stuff like “citrus,” “cacao,” “cooked cream,” “grapefruit,” “smoked ham,” “dried fruit,” “hazelnuts,” “peanuts.” Damn the guy is good. But then he really blew me away when he said—totally accurately—that one particularly good cheese had the aroma of “croissants, of fresh patisserie.”

As we move forward tasting young cheeses someone asks if a particular 10-month old cheese is going to mature out to be really great at two years. He shakes his head. I can’t tell if it’s with humor, cynicism, or . .. . Regardless, he scratches another of his diagrams in the rind of the cheese in question. This one shows how some cheeses peak out at 10 or 12 months, while a minority of other wheels go on to mature more meaningfully. Then he adds with a touch of a cynical smile, “If you can predict scientifically where the cheese will be in three years from where it is now, then shut the Fort and I retire.”

The great thing about tasting like this is that there is a good cheese for most every palate and that most every palate likes a different style of cheese. Jason I know likes his Comte softer, gentler, sweeter. These are the kinds of cheeses I think you could eat every day and that’s exactly what he’s doing with the cheese so successfully in London—selling it at the market at a rate and in away that’s fast making it every eating for food lovers in the area. Me, on the other hand, I like my Comté with more guts, more earthiness. We tasted together until we found something I liked. Loved is probably better. My notes, a conglomeration of my own comments and Claude’s, say it was “Big, long, round, a bit of leathery blue Stilton, nuts, walnuts. Butter, hint of butterscotch, but it’s not sweet. This is what I like!” Claude nodded, smiled a small smile, put his fist up to tap his chest and said, “This is a cheese for a montagnard..” I’m not sure, but I think that’s something I like. I know I like the cheese. I know I like good Comte. I hope you do, too.

Zingerman’s 5th Annual Camp Bacon gets underway in just a couple short weeks. To help you prepare for our annual celebration of all things pork, we’re posting excerpts from the Zingerman’s Guide to Better Bacon. 

Sorry, I can’t resist the subtitle—the tune slipped into my head while I was out running one day, and I couldn’t get it out. So . . . if Peter, Paul and Mary had lived in the second half of the nineteenth century instead of the twentieth, their big hit could well have been, “Where Have All the Drovers Gone?” While you most certainly won’t see any such openings on Craig’s List, thousands of Americans once worked as drovers, the less glamorous (but probably more important) eighteenth-century piggy equivalent of cowboys like Rowdy Yates and Gil Favor from Rawhide.

In one of those interesting, now all-but-forgotten footnotes of history there was once an entire profession having to do with pork that’s completely lost to us today. It’s a line of work I certainly would never have thought about had I not come across it while doing some reading on nineteenth-century American agriculture. But once you read about drovers, the need for them seems obvious: in order for urban dwellers to get fresh pork to eat, pigs had to be brought from the farms on which they were raised in the rural areas of North America to the cities where they could be slaughtered, sold and served. Before the introduction of the railroads, there was really only one practical way to do so: the hogs had to walk. And since the very valuable pigs weren’t going to be allowed to make the trip un-chaperoned, they were shepherded along their routes by men known as “drovers.” Without the drovers there would have been no American pork industry. Bacon would have been forever limited to on-the-family-farm consumption.

While I’m sure others were at it in less recognizable places, the first formal record of North American drovers that I’ve found concerns William and John Pynchon. The Pynchon brothers started taking livestock from Springfield, Massachusetts, into Boston in 1655. By the end of the seventeenth century theirs had become a well-accepted profession. Farmers driving their own hogs generally had an easier time of it because the animals were comfortable with them. But more often, professional drovers went around the countryside buying a few hogs from each farmer they encountered (most farmers had only four or five pigs, one or two of which were typically to be kept for the family) and gradually gathering them up into a single, large herd. While the boss might ride a horse or wagon, most men walked their way through the hog drives.

Long-distance driving began in 1800 and probably reached its peak by about 1825. A long drive in those days could take three months—the herd made five to ten miles a day if they were doing well. To keep them moving effectively, domesticated pigs were trained to respond to the blowing of a conch shell. En route, drovers risked theft, porcine illness and bad weather: thunderstorms could cause the hogs to panic and stampede. And even under the best of circumstances weight loss was always an issue: pigs often dropped ten to twelve pounds during a drive (I’d guess the drovers lost some weight, as well).

A whole industry grew up around the drives. Drovers had to pay tolls on each hog whenever they traveled on a turnpike (in 1817 the Philadelphia-Pittsburgh route charged a toll of six cents per 20 hogs). A well-positioned stock stand on the turnpike might see a few hundred thousand pigs pass through in a year. The biggest season for driving was late fall, just before slaughtering time. Spring was popular as well, whereas summer heat and winter cold made the long cross-country walks almost impossibly difficult in those seasons. Innkeepers along the route were often paid in lame hogs, which could be turned into provisions for the table. Nor was droving an exclusively American occupation: a great tradition of bacon-making sprang up around Wiltshire, England, in part because the area was a resting point for drovers moving Irish pigs from the port of Bristol up to London.

The demand for drovers—here, in Britain, and probably everywhere else—began to drop off as the railroads came to dominate commercial transportation in the second half of the nineteenth century. Not surprisingly there was a great deal of opposition to the railroads along the driving routes. As you already know, the railroads won out and the drovers disappeared—as did other once-essential and now-unneeded occupations like ice harvesting and stagecoach driving. The only modern reference I’ve ever seen to drovers is the name of a Chicago-based band.

We’ll see you at  Camp Bacon 2014!