1. Humboldt Fog with Blackberry Honey (p. 80)
2. Ossau-Iraty with Brown Sugar Fudge (p. 81)
3. Ameribella with Red Wine Shallots (p. 83)
There are three essential steps to creating a fine cheese, each requiring different skills and resources. The first two are dairy farming and cheese making (see page 66). The third is a step many people don’t completely understand: affinage.
According to UrbanDictionary.com, affinage is “The art of selecting, nurturing, and maturing cheese to achieve peak ripeness, superb texture, and genuine flavor.” We think that’s about as good a definition as there could be, but this is the cheese world (hell, this is the world), so there are many competing definitions. The American Cheese Society calls the process “cheese ripening,” the Artisanal Premium Cheese Center refers to it as “refining,” and the French translate it as “maturing.” It is commonly just called “aging.” Regardless of the nuances, though, affinage is what happens after a cheese is made and before it is consumed.
For us, the important concept is “maturing.” An affineur takes a young cheese and nurtures it, controlling the temperature and humidity, flipping it at the right times, washing it, piercing it, and so on, until it is ready to be sent out into the world and eaten. The cheese doesn’t just need to get older—to “age”—it needs to get better, tastier, creamier or harder, funkier or mellower. Like us, cheese doesn’t simply grow older; it matures.
For a fresh cheese, this process is nonexistent. The cheese doesn’t age; it is ready for consumption as soon as it is made. For other cheeses, the process can require a few days, weeks, months, or years in a temperature- and humidity-controlled space. We cheese people like to call these spaces cellars or caves (pronounced “cahv,” after the French), and in several places, including the Cellars at Jasper Hill Farm in Vermont, Crown Finish Caves in Brooklyn, and Caves of Faribault in Minnesota, affineurs are maturing cheeses in actual caves that are dug out of the earth. But in many places, especially in the New World, caves are, in fact, walk-in refrigerators. In New York City, we get a kick out of visiting affineurs who refer to their “cahvs,” which are more likely to be located on the second floor of an office building than dug out of the side of a mountain.
Often, the people who make the cheese also mature it. On many small farms in the United States, all three steps (milking the animal, making the cheese, and maturing the cheese) are undertaken in different rooms on the same farm by the same people. The resulting product is called farmstead cheese. In other cases, the cheese maker passes the cheese on to an affineur, who has the facilities, time, and expertise to age the cheeses. This practice is very common in Europe and is becoming more so in North America.
Whether you think affineurs are the rock stars of the cheese world or just worker bees, and whether or not the affineur and the cheese maker are the same person, the fact remains that cheese must be nurtured from the time it is made until the time it is consumed, and someone with the know-how needs to do the nurturing.