Finally, a French cheese to love at a price we can like. It’s been a while since I’ve bought artisan cheese from France without flinching at the checkout counter. Of course you can find affordable Brie and Camembert at the big-box stores, but these cheeses are typically industrial, with quality on par with their cost. This beauty is a distinctive raw cow’s milk tomme, with a rustic natural rind, abundant aroma and an uncommon “double-textured” interior. The reasonable price is just one more of its many admirable features.
Tomme Crayeuse (tohm cray-yuhz) is a modern creation, a collaboration between a prominent cheesemaker in the Savoie region and a respected affineur (cheese ager). Its back story—as recounted to me in an email from French affineur Laurent Mons —is peculiar. The cheese evolved from a mistake, a flawed batch too acidic to ripen properly. But as Mons told me, perhaps tongue in cheek, cheesemakers never discard their mistakes. They send them to the affineur to fix.
In this case, affineur Max Schmidhauser and his caves in Annecy did salvage the defective batch, transforming it into a cheese not only sellable but desirable. Tomme Crayeuse—the “chalky” tomme—debuted in 1997 and was successful enough that other creameries began to produce it as well.
Tomme Crayeuse: creamy layers surround a firm core
The cheese I purchased recently was made by Fruitières Chabert, and their site says it’s raw milk. Mons told me that producers today use exclusively thermised or pasteurized milk. I can’t untangle those claims, but no matter. The Chabert cheese was terrific, rustic in appearance, with a thick, rippled, crusty rind and aromas of cave, mushrooms and broccoli. The interior was semifirm, open and tender, with a rich butter color. The flavor was earthy and highly savory with a pleasing acidity.
A chalky interior is not usually a feature I appreciate in cheese. But Tomme Crayeuse is intentionally brittle—not chalky exactly, but certainly more friable in the middle than the creamy layers under the rind. The high acidity impedes proteolysis, the protein breakdown that makes cheese creamy. Caerphilly has the same layer-cake quality.
Sue Sturman, an American expert on French cheese who translates the French trade magazine Professsion Fromager, sent me some background on Tomme Crayeuse. Affineurs achieve the unusual texture, in part, by aging the wheel in a warm, humid environment initially, then finishing it in a colder cave. Aging is a minimum of 60 days but what I sampled recently seemed older than that.
In the hands of a good affineur, Tomme de Savoie can be compelling, but I’m disappointed more often than not. Tomme Crayeuse, its kissing cousin, has not disappointed me yet. Be sure to bring it fully to room temperature. “Once it warms up, it becomes something to treasure,” says Helder dos Santos, a Chicago-area cheese judge and a Tomme Crayeuse fan.
Look for Tomme Crayeuse at these California retailers:
Cheese Cave (Claremont)
Cheese Store of Beverly Hills
Davis Food Coop (Davis)
Gourmet Corner (San Mateo)
McCalls Meat & Fish (L.A. and Santa Monica)
Rainbow Grocery (SF)
Say Cheese (SF)
V. Sattui (St. Helena)
In the past, the cheese had more national distribution. Let’s agitate for it and get it back.