The Secret History of Camembert

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Bonjour, family.

Bonjour, Caroline.

We are the real fish wives of Paris.

Today, we are going to talk about the most popular soft cheese in France,.

And it is not brie.

Emily, why are you qualified to teach me all about Camembert?

I am a huge cheese fan, but more than that, I am a culinary journalist specializing in cheese.

I judge cheese contests, and I spend a lot of my time getting nerdy with cheesemakers and finding out all about the history of French cheese and French food.

Caroline, what are you doing here?

Well, I'm mostly here to eat the cheese, but I am a wine expert who's lived in France for seven years now.

You've been here for 18 years, right?

I've been here for 18 years.

Wow.

And I run Leon wine tastings and we do not serve Camembert because it is not local to Lyon.

So I'm really excited to eat some of this cheese and to learn about it.

We're going to do a big tasting at the end, which I am very excited.

I actually have a present surprise for you, which I'm pumped about.

But this is our real Fish Wives take.

And what does that mean, Emily?

I mean, fishwives, right?

We're loud.

We are unapologetic about our opinions.

We're a little salty.

We're a little salty.

I think we get shit done too, you know?

Yeah, yeah.

Fish Wives.

I just love the idea of reclaiming what, you know, is sort of an archaic Shakespearean insult, you know, I mean,.

I think most of the old insults are best reclaimed.

I'm ready to, like, live up to my most obnoxious self.

Yeah, we're in our fish Wives era, and we're not mad about it.

No, let's talk about cheese.

Let's talk about cheese.

And let's talk about Camel mer specifically.

I mean, this one is beautiful.

It is odiferous.

I'm really sorry, audience, that you cannot smell the footiness of this cheese.

It's.

It's pretty stanky, but I think actually the real stench is coming from my little surprise that's coming later.

But when we opened the fridge, it was like a green cloud of gas from a cartoon fell out of it.

So that is where we're at.

I feel like the Camemberts that you're gonna get in the States or even the average Camembert that a French person is going to be eating on the reg is not this stanky.

Well, Camembert, I think, is a cheese.

There's a lot of variety in terms of the quality of individual cheeses, but Camel Bear is one where you see maybe the biggest variety in terms of, like, your humble industrial Camembert versus your, like, stanky.

In France, one of Camembert's many nicknames is God's feet.

Ah.

And I think that's.

It's just apropos.

Interesting.

Interesting.

Well, before we dive into that, I really want you to share the history of Camembert with me, because I know it is illustrious.

It's illustrious, and it's long, and it's complex.

But I think, you know, we have, as is often the case, a really pretty myth, a really pretty legend, and then we have the reality, which are.

Usually not the same thing.

Generally speaking, these myths have a bit of truth to them, and then they take a big left turn at Fantasyland and go off the rails a little bit.

So the truth here is that during the French Revolution, all priests living in France were forced to swear allegiance to the new republic.

Were they, like, not allowed to be priests anymore?

They were allowed to be priests, but basically they had already sworn allegiance to the Vatican.

They can't also swear allegiance to the Republic.

So they have two choices.

They either lose their heads or they run away to England.

Okay, so we do have a lot of monks who have their hand in cheese making.

This particular priest, not necessarily a monk, but definitely a priest coming from Paris, and he's a member of what we call the refractory priests.

And the refractory piece are the ones who run away to England.

And so he's passing through Normandy and according to legend, he meets a lovely young lady called Marie.

And Marie says, come, Father.

I will hide you in this castle where I work as you do.

And the priest is like, oh, Marie, you're so lovely.

How could I possibly repay you for your kindness?

This isn't going where you think it's going.

Oh, it's not one of my dirty fairy smut romances?

No, I mean, it's a cheesy fairy smut romance.

No, it's your next book deal, Emily.

Done.

I gotta go.

So he ends up staying overnight in this castle.

She says, no, all good.

No sweat, Father.

You know, it's just a favor that I want to offer to you.

And he goes, no, no, no, no, no.

I'm going to give you the recipe with the cheese that we make where I'm from.

Oh.

I mean, that's some.

Some sweet secrets.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

And he's from Paris.

And so the most local cheese we have to Paris is Brie.

Well, this is a good segue because I have a bone to pick with Americans particularly.

Brie is not what you think it is.

Okay, I'm sorry, but most Americans, when they think of Brie, they actually think of something that looks like this.

They think of something that they buy that looks like this.

They.

They say, oh, baked Brie.

That it's not Brie.

Brie comes from Ile de France.

It comes from near Paris.

It is big.

Brie is like the size of a pizza.

It's big, it's flat.

You buy a slice of it and Brie.

When we talk about a brie style cheese, what we're talking about is that white rind.

Yep.

And that's something that brie and Camembert do have in common.

And that white rind, in French we call a bloomy rind or a floured rind.

And it's.

It's a rind that's.

I mean, look, we're.

We're not.

We're the fishwives.

We're not going to hide anything from you.

It's fungus, okay?

It's a fungus growing in the actual cheese.

I take a lot of comfort during these apocalyptic times knowing that when we make everything extinct, the mushrooms will rise up.

I mean, they're already here.

They're the next great life form, you know, Go mushrooms.

And yet this is something that's currently plaguing Camembert is that people are afraid that the mushrooms are dying.

No, really?

They're wrong, though.

Okay, good.

We'll get to that.

So basically, we have this woman who's living in Normandy.

She gets this recipe for this cheese from Ile de France, and she uses what is locally available to her.

And in Normandy, we have a very specific breed of cow called the Normand cow.

Normandy, if we look at the word, it has this idea of the Norseman in it.

So we had the Vikings who came over, who conquered Normandy.

They brought these cows with them.

And the descendants of these cows are the Nalmond.

Okay.

And Nal Monde have very, very rich, fat, rich milk.

And so when you use that milk and you have, you know, your individual fungus in the air, you're going to end up with a very different cheese just by virtue of taking that recipe and making it somewhere else.

So Marie gets this recipe and by using the mold for a cheese.

And I'm not talking about moldy mold, I'm talking about a mold.

Like a wrinkle.

Yeah, yeah.

By using the mold for the local cheese to her, which was a cheese called Livaru, she invents a new cheese, which is basically Brie, made with local milk and the local fungus.

In the air.

Yeah.

In a little tiny mold.

And it's so stanky.

And she names it after the village where she's from, which is Camembert.

That's interesting.

And there's a lot of connection there with wine because.

And this is funny, you know, you.

You cannot replace, you know, an abacab with a Bordeaux or vice versa, because place really matters.

And that's why these are products of origin.

That's why it is an appellation d' origine protege aop.

Because the place matters, the cows matter, the.

The yeast, the fungus in the air matters.

And that is what makes this different from a pre.

So, Emily, is this story true?

It depends on who you ask.

And it could be, right?

It totally could be.

I mean, they.

There is evidence that Mariah was a real person.

Okay.

There is evidence that her children and grandchildren were camel bear makers in the region.

But as is often the case at the time of industrialization in the 19th century, we start to see people telling very convenient origin myths about where their local food comes from.

And these are often really pastoral, really.

Gorgeous stories, because we are now in.

During the Industrial Revolution, we've got trains.

We're trying to sell this cheese in Paris.

Exactly.

And so to sell it better, you sell a pastoral tradition.

And.

And, you know, when you look at that myth, you see a number of themes coming to the surface.

You see, you know, a local maiden who's, you know, in charge, who's, you know, self Possessed.

You see the conjunction of old France, the ancien regime, at the.

At sort of the.

The precipice of the new republic.

You see, okay, passing an old tradition down.

You see regionality.

You see separation of church and state.

So you see a lot of themes coming to the surface where it's like, is that convenience or is that really good storytelling?

I mean, I love to believe that it's both.

I mean, and probably, I would say most of these myths start from some sort of grain of truth and then proliferate.

What I think is really exciting and important about this myth is the second piece of it, because Marie invents her cheese.

And when Maria invents her cheese, she's selling it pretty locally.

And then according to the myth, her grandson meets Napoleon iii, who's the nephew.

Just always Napoleon.

It's always Napoleon.

There's always a Napoleon.

And all of these stories.

Yeah.

So Marie's grandson meets Napoleon III at a train station and is like, hey,.

Napoleon, I got something for you.

What up?

Want to try my stinky foot cheese?

Yeah.

Just pulls it out of his pocket.

But it's important that this happened at a train station, okay.

Because the reason why Camembert is going to become so popular and become the most popular soft cheese in France.

Because it's easy to transport.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Cause Brie is big and it's all melty.

So, you know, you swing the wrong way and it just slops off into the distance.

I.

That is the image from now on that I will associate Brie.

There's a meme of someone, like, unmolding a flan, and it just, like, falls onto the plate and then slithers off the table.

And that's how I'm imagining these breeze on the train.

Yeah.

I mean, that's how camel mares would have originally been if we'd been sending them by train.

A little sort of, like, slop of cheese.

Except that we came up with this idea of putting them in boxes.

Okay.

So that's an industrial revolution invention.

That's an industrial revolution invention.

It's something that comes originally from eastern France, like, from the sort of mondor area where they have these boxes where they're already putting their cheeses.

Okay.

Yeah, yeah.

And people realize, hey, we can use boxes for kiln bear.

They.

They originally were buying them almost like IKEA boxes.

Like, you'd get them flat packed, and you'd have to staple them together for yourself.

But suddenly camel bear becomes shipful.

Okay.

Because it.

It's.

I mean, in its infancy, it's quite firm.

But how long does it take to develop?

So Chamomare, when it's quite young is pretty.

Yeah, pretty chalky on the inside.

And then over the course of like two months, you sort of age it up to.

Up to its perfect stinky softness.

But really, Camembert shouldn't be gloppy.

No, there's a lot of rules about Camembert.

There's a lot of rules about food in general.

I think you're really well positioned to talk about that because most of the rules fall into this AOC or AOP system, which comes from wine.

So can you get us like a quick and dirty.

Like, what is an aoc?

So AOP and AOC are interchangeable.

It's appellation d' origines protege or controller, which we see more often for wine.

And an appellation is a physical boundary on the map and a set of rules.

So for a wine that could be that the grapes have to come from the boundary.

They have to be these grapes.

For a cheese, the breed of cow, it's the percentage of milk fat, it's the shape, it's the aging.

And, you know, those rules even do go into packaging and sales.

And so it really encompasses everything that defines a product as being a product of origin.

And it's a way to protect producers, protect the brand value of the product, and also to protect consumers.

So we get what we are expecting.

The problem with Camel Bear is that it becomes really popular before we start protecting cheese.

So we're way after the Industrial Revolution, way after rail travel.

Camembert becomes popular, really sort of rises to popularity in the 19th century, becomes something that people get really excited about.

And then, of course, when you get excited about something, you start copying it.

Right.

Like, imitation is the highest form of flattery.

Indeed.

So with Camembert, we have a cheese that's highly technical to make.

Okay.

So you need very specific rooms for airing it out, for drying it out.

Um, it's made.

The reason its texture is so unique is that it's made by hand ladling curds of cheese into a mold in five distinct layers at 40 minute intervals.

Sounds like a lot of work.

And you can't just be like, fucking off and doing something else in the meantime, like, you know, as opposed to a lot of other sort of country traditions where you can leave it.

Yeah, you can't do that with calmer.

So it becomes something that's industrialized pretty early on.

It's no longer as much of a farmstead cheese that you would just like make with your leftover milk.

And so because of that becomes heavily industrial, it starts giving.

Getting people a lot of money.

And so a lot of people want to copy that recipe.

What's going to happen is that thing, farms are going to get bigger, so you're going to start hiring more people, you're going to start buying in milk from other farms, which was totally mind blowing in the 19th century.

How it's done now, mostly.

Exactly, that's how it's done now.

But at the time, your cheese was a byproduct of the fact that you already had cows.

Okay.

So you wouldn't be like, I'm gonna go buy milk from somebody else to make cheese.

You're like, oh, shoot, what am I gonna do with all this extra milk?

I guess I'll make cheese.

Okay.

Which is how Libero got developed, which was the predecessor to Camel Bear, the cheese that was most popular in this region before Camembert started to.

To develop.

So now we have this cheese that is expanding beyond the frontiers of Normandy that is very, very popular.

And now everybody wants to make it because it's being sold for a lot of money in Paris.

So in Brittany, you have people making Camembert.

In the Loire Valley, you have people making Camembert, except it's not going to have.

Not Camembert.

Right?

Yeah.

So the word Camembert is being used willy nilly for a really long time.

And it means that Camel Bear doesn't have that same sort of placeness, hereness as you get with a lot of other cheeses.

Well, I guess if it was already diluted and spread out before the 20th century, which is when all these Appalachian rules come into place, it's harder to claim that status because this is political.

This is something where, you know, if I'm making Camembert in the Loire and the people in Camembert are trying to protect it in Normandy, and I'm, you know, a big cheese producer, I'm going to take all my money and I'm going to fight it.

I'm going to fight it hard.

I'm going to say, nope, I've been making this for 30 years, 50 years, whatever.

You can't take this away from us.

Even if Camel Bear is a place in Normandy.

Right.

And so they try again and again and again.

These coalitions, these, you know, groups of Camel bear makers are saying, okay, we don't want you to use Our word, we don't want you to use our town name.

And there's nothing they can really do about it.

And it gets even worse after World War I, because during World War I, Camembert becomes the official cheese that is supplied to French soldiers in the trenches.

They all get a taste for it, and they all go home with a taste for it.

And so now everybody wants to get Camembert.

And so now they're just industrializing it and making so much of it.

And so these small, artisanal producers of a cheese that really is linked to a place, well, they're fucked.

So we get Camembert de Nomonds, this phrase that's protected rather than the word Camembert.

And it's that little de that's going to be a problem, because big producers who want to be able to bend or break the rules of Camembert, which might be.

Okay, which cows are we using right now?

The AOP requires that at least half of the milk that goes into your Camembert come from those Normand cows, that original Normandy breed.

Okay.

The other half is probably going to be from Holstein's because they are milk machines and they produce a lot of milk.

If you're a big industrial factory, you might want 100% Holstein.

You might want to pasteurize.

That's illegal in the aop.

Well, and that is why, unfortunately for our compatriots in the States, you cannot actually get Camembert de Normandy because it is unpasteurized.

It is raw cow's milk.

Right.

And in the United States, the FDA has a stipulation that any raw milk cheese that's imported must be aged at least two months to be imported.

And it also has very strict regulations about how much dry matter to water ratio you can have.

So none of these sort of wet, soft, raw milk cheeses are able to be imported.

Camembert is an arena in which a lot of arguments about aops play out, because Camembert is so representative of France to the French.

The French identify very strongly with Camembert, and we can talk a little bit more about that.

But the.

I mean, the.

The fact that this is playing out in the calendar arena means that you have big producers who are saying, okay, we're not going to call ours Camembert de Normandy.

We're going to call it Camembert fabric on Normandy, Camembert made in Normandy.

Oh, that's so cheeky.

Yeah.

And so now that's illegal.

That's become illegal very recently.

Thank you.

But there was.

I mean, in.

And small Camembert producers saying, no, we don't want that, because it's going to basically kill off so much of what makes this so deeply flavorful and so complex is the.

Is the bacteria.

You know, it's all the good stuff.

Cheese is alive.

You know, let it be gross.

Yeah, yeah.

And that brings us to this idea of those local endemic mushrooms that hopefully will survive the apocalypse.

And yet.

And yet.

So during the industrial revolution, it actually started in brie.

When we think about these bloomy rinded cheeses, what color is the outside?

White.

White.

So the problem is, originally these cheeses weren't just white.

They were like white with, like blue blotches.

Ooh, I still see that here.

But it scares the Americans, that's for sure.

Well, and I think that potentially just my nose is telling me that maybe when we open up this Camembert, it might not be a hundred percent white.

Like when you buy brie in the States, it looks like wall plaster.

Yeah.

It's always going to be completely white, right?

Yeah.

Also, all Brie or Camember in the States is always going to be unripe.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And the rind is going to be so thick here.

You're supposed to eat the rind.

Yeah.

And in the States, I can under.

I don't.

I don't condone it, but I can understand why people would carve the rind off of their brie in the States.

I have seen people at Liam wine tastings try to scoop the flesh out of a Saint Marcelin.

Saint Marcelin, you guys, is like the size of an orange.

Maybe it's tiny.

It has a super thin rind.

It's wet.

Like you can't.

You can't eat, you can't.

There's nothing left.

If you try to scoop the flesh out of it.

It's so funny.

It always makes me laugh when people do that.

I'm like, why are you SC of this?

It's fine.

I know.

And I.

Well, I always say to people, what you do on the privacy of your own plate is your own business, but do not carve cheese out on my cheese board.

I'm still judging you.

I mean, I'm going to judge.

Yeah.

But I'm not going to.

But I will actually scold you?

Yeah.

If you take your knife and scoop the inside of a brie out of.

You, you are on the street, you are out.

We're not friends anymore.

I'm blocking your number.

We're done.

That's Crimes Against Cheese.

So with this white rind that we have now, that's actually something that came from the industrial revolution and that's something that we have you sort of microbiologists who studied under Pasteur to thank.

It starts in Brie.

They kind of basically isolate an albino mutant of the Penicillium camemberti mold that makes this white rind on the outside.

And for a long time people have actually, even before the industrialization of it, producers and consumers alike kind of agree that they want a whiter rind.

It doesn't need to be white.

White, white, but they want it more white than it is blue.

Yeah.

I mean, when you think of it, you think of it being white, right?

Yeah.

And so originally, producers are going to try and naturally make this happen by encouraging the red mold to foam form because the red mold kind of kills off the blue mold.

O But in Brie, they're like, hey, this albino Penicillium camemberti is just white all on its own.

And the brie makers are like, yes, we're going to start using this.

And came bear makers.

They're Normans.

Yeah, they're like, fuck you and your albino mutant strain.

Yeah, we don't want this.

No, we don't want it.

Bit by bit starts to become popular, starts to take hold and then essentially it kills off the original.

I know.

And these days, everybody from the producers of Camembert to the producers of Brie to the producers of Bloomy Rinds in the States, like, you know, Kelworld Creamery.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

They're all adding this sort of lab grown spore to their milk to force it to have this very white rind.

Interesting.

So it means everything looks a little bit similar.

Yeah.

People are weird about cheese.

I think.

I think that having it look what, like what they're expecting it to is probably just a very modern thing where people have, especially Americans, just have no experience with the fact that cheeses can be moldy and they're fine, you know.

Well, they are moldy.

They are.

They literally are like, it'd be bad.

News if there was no mold on the cheese.

It wouldn't be cheese.

It would be spoiled milk.

Exactly.

So that's interesting.

Speaking of good news, can I show you some surprises that I have for you?

Yes, so when we look at the Camembert de Normandie packaging, it's what, about, you know, five inches wide.

It's in this little wooden box.

It has a lovely picture on it.

It says Camembert de Normandie.

It has the appellation protege stamp, which is red and yellow.

It says au lait cru, which is with raw milk.

What does that mean?

That means it's hand ladled.

So basically they use a big slotted spoon that they call a pelle a, which means a brie shovel.

And it's a serrated sort of a slotted spoon.

That means that you're going to be able to hand ladle the curds in sort of delicately and you end up with the perfect texture that way.

Cool.

It also says fromage fermier, which is made in a farm.

So that is our AOP Camembert de Normandy.

That's so beautiful.

And then I got a crappy Camembert.

Oh, yeah.

So this is from Casino.

This is just from the grocery store.

This was the cheapest one I could get.

I think it was 320.

The other one was not 320, I'll tell you that much.

And this just says pasteurize.

So this is pasteurized.

It does say that it is French milk.

I think one thing that's also really interesting when you look at these two boxes is that we still have that storytelling.

So when we're talking about the legend like on the traditional Camembert, the one that's the one that has its.

It's aop.

There is a Norman lady on it and it says what tradition noblesse.

Like tradition noblesse.

So we are telling ourselves a story about this cheese.

But it's reflected in these charters and controls and.

And, you know, it's a story, but it's also reflected by the reality.

But this still has a crust on it.

It still has the lions.

It's still trying to look fancy.

Yeah, you know, it's trying to.

Is trying.

Well, so these are our Camemberts, but I also thought I would surprise you with two other cheeses.

Oh, no.

What?

Well, this.

And this took all my.

This was like €16.

It's crazy.

Oh, my God.

This is the stinkiest of the stinkers.

Oh, my God.

So this is actually a little bit bigger than our Camembert.

And this is the cheese that was the, you know, the precursor.

It smells disgusting.

It smells like.

Like a gym that's never been cleaned.

Yeah.

These are the ones that, if you bring them on a train, everybody knows about it.

And they all hate you.

It's on my fingers too now, but I'm not done.

Oh, no.

What did you get?

What did you do?

I'll put this on here because it's the queen.

Okay.

I got a Camembert Auxel Vados, my.

Favorite cheese in the whole.

Really?

Yes.

So this is a special one because it basically is something that the cheesemonger himself made.

He carves it up the top and then soaks it in Calvados, which is apple brandy from Normandy.

And so this is something that I saw, and I was like, well, that looks pretty special.

So we should get it too.

Should we unwrap these?

Yes, we should definitely unwrap these.

So I'm going to start by.

You can work on unwrapping those.

And I will start by cutting the live since it's close to me.

So the liverrot is a little bit bigger than the other three.

Yes.

Probably got another inch on it.

So traditionally, they should all kind of be the same size.

But Livaru, for example, traditionally would have been made with skim milk.

Now it's not anymore.

So there's been developments in these cheeses.

The reeds are tough to work with.

Yeah.

Okay, So I want to briefly take a moment to talk about crimes against round cheeses.

Do not cut your cheese across.

You always cut a wedge out of a round cheese.

You do not cut across it like you're chopping off the top of it.

We are not barbarians, okay?

Yeah.

And the reason for that, honestly, like, if you're ever unsure of how to cut a cheese, bear in mind that the rule is don't fuck up anybody else's piece.

Yes.

And they all age from the outside in, so you want to have clean ratios of.

So if you, like, lop off, like a.

Like, you cut off the arc of the Camembert.

You're a monster.

And you're not invited to my house anymore.

No, no.

That also gets you banned and blocked and maybe stabbed.

I have a little bit of cheese crimes that I've committed by failing to bring these out of the fridge.

So these are cold fridge col.

I apologize.

Because that means that we're not going to get all of the nuance, but I forgot.

And I'm a human too.

Oh, my God, this Libero is so stanky.

It's not as wet.

I don't think libero is ever as wet, is it?

No, no, not terribly wet.

Like, there are definitely.

We're gonna do a whole episode about.

There you go.

You like it.

I.

The thing is, I think this liverro to me tastes a lot better than it smells like.

It smells pretty.

It actually smells worse uncut than cut because the inside is actually pretty mouth.

So the idea with Livaru and all wash drying cheeses is that you're basically daubing the outside in a brine solution that promotes the growth of a very specific bacteria called brevibacteria and linens on the outside.

It's the same bacteria that you get on your sweaty feet at the gym.

Yum.

It's why it smells like gym sneakers.

Okay.

But Livaro is a relatively mild mannered wash dried cheese.

When you look at something like a poiss, it's like wet.

Yeah.

And then it's sloppy.

Yeah.

So it's going to be quite different.

I think is disgusting.

And muenster too.

But so this of all the wash rind cheese is the one that I can tolerate and this is, it is too cold.

I apologize for that.

It's got a pretty bouncy interior.

It has some holes.

It has a really nice.

Almost like if Baby Bell had some holes texture.

Like it has that slightly rubbery texture.

It's really tasty.

It's not as intense as it smells on the palette.

You know the.

We in French we call it the pet.

The like paste.

The inside of the cheese.

Like the texture that I think it's.

It's a little bit rubbery.

It's a little bit.

It's got nice holes in it.

It's.

Yeah, it's good.

I mean the idea behind these is that they're supposed to taste kind of meaty.

So they kind of have like a brothy umami kind of vibe.

These are the ones.

Probably the only washed rind cheese that most Americans will have encountered is.

Is Limburger.

I don't know what that is.

It's.

If you grew up in like a German American family.

No, it's, it's, it's the German.

It's.

It's very stinky.

This one's a lot more mild mannered than that.

And any orange rinded cheese that you see in the States is probably colored orange with annatto seeds.

So you're not, you get here and you're like muenster.

That looks delicious.

And it's completely different.

This is tasty though.

This is tasty.

Yeah.

It doesn't ruin my life.

Which I think is good.

Let's compare these two calendars.

Yeah.

Seriously.

Because we need to see.

It's even if you blindfolded anybody and said okay.

That you can tell the difference between these two cheeses.

So.

So, I mean, even when you sniff it, the first one smells like bleach.

Yeah, a little bit.

Yeah.

So that ammonia kind of.

And then you get a lot on bloomy rinded cheese.

Like.

Like the sea almost.

Yeah.

There's like a briny, I think.

And you can also see on a real raw milk camel bear, you do get some like brown on it in addition to the white.

So you have just plain white on the industrial.

On the pasteurized one.

Is the brown from.

Oh, no, there is.

There are some other.

There's a little bit of orange mold on this too.

The thing with this white rinded.

These white rinded cheeses and this whole.

There was this whole hubbub about camel bear and brie are dying.

And everybody said, oh, it's because this white mold is dying.

And it's not dying, but it's because it's being cloned constantly.

People are worried about what happens if there's a pathogen that comes after this one mold.

Well, then we're all fucked.

Yeah, well, I mean, any monoculture is a risk.

Exactly.

And so these days, a lot of smaller producers.

I don't.

I'm not personally familiar with the producer of this cheese, but a lot of small producers of raw milk, Pasture of raw milk Camembert are working on cultivating a more natural sort of medley of molds.

That might mean that we're going to have camel bears that are slightly more colorful, but they're going to be more easy, they're going to be more protected.

I just want to take the moment of having this crappy camom bear to actually show.

Please.

A crime against cheese.

Oh, do it.

This is for YouTube.

My, my husband would divorce me if I did this at our dinner table.

So if you've ever done that, you're an asshole.

And.

Am I the asshole?

Yes.

Yes.

Yeah.

And actually cut.

Will you cut a normal human piece of this like a normal human being?

God.

Oh, it's a very different texture.

Yeah, it's really dry on the outside.

Yeah.

And this is what we want to see.

Yeah.

Oh, this has a lot more holes.

It's also more yellow.

Yeah, Those holes are proof of the hand ladling.

Interesting.

Because it's gonna.

When you're.

When you've got an.

And this is so perfectly aged.

It's not super ripe, it's not overripe, it's not melty.

A little bit in the middle, but not really.

I wouldn't say, I wouldn't call it nice.

We have to try the Awful one, too.

Okay, fine.

I'm sure it's fine.

I mean, it just tastes like nothing, right?

Probably.

Let's see.

Okay.

French people are going to see this.

Be so mad.

This.

Honestly, like, on the outside, it did smell.

Smell bleachy.

On the inside.

Smells like nothing.

Feels like nothing.

Like it's completely antiseptic.

And this is what people are mean.

Tastes creamy.

It tastes exactly what I'm used to.

This is what Americans are carving up filling with cranberries, honey, and walnuts and baking in the oven.

I was gonna say.

I understand why Americans have to wrap it in pastry.

Because it doesn't taste like anything.

No, it's not bad, though.

It doesn't taste bad.

There's nothing wrong with it.

It just doesn't taste like anything.

No.

This, though.

Let's see.

Oh, my God.

This definitely smells grassier, nuttier.

The texture is very visibly different.

The crust is thicker.

Yeah.

And the inside has those little air bubbles.

It smells like.

Smells good.

Cauliflower.

Yeah, it has a little bit of that brassica cabbage stank, you know, but it's not super stinky.

No, it's not, like, unpleasant.

Like, I. Ooh.

It has a lot more flavor.

Wow.

And like a nice stick to your teeth kind of texture.

That's really good.

But this.

We're not putting this in the oven.

A French person wouldn't put this in the oven.

The only.

Would they.

I mean, do French people bake brie?

The only.

I did it.

I did it myself.

Do French people bake Camembert?

They do, yeah.

Um, I. I've also seen a lot of French people in the summer, they'll, like, bar.

They'll wrap it in tinfoil and put it in the end of the.

Because French people eat their cheese after their main.

So when your coals are dying down after your barbecue, you wrap your camembert in tinfoil and stick it in, like, the dying coals.

That's cute.

That's nice.

And you can get in, like, restaurants.

Bread, right?

Oh, yeah.

You dip bread in it.

People bake mondo a lot, which is the cheese that gave us box.

Yeah, Mondor.

They bake for sure.

That's bigger.

But that's also super melty and unwieldy.

Like, you can't really remove it from.

From its box.

I don't know how to deal with this.

Whatever this is.

So I'm going to leave this to the expert.

How do I. Yeah.

Chamomile.

Calvin, I just saw that.

I was like, that looks so foul.

Emily's going to love it.

So it's soaked in Calvados and then rolled in breadcrumbs.

Okay.

I was wondering about that very strange texture that I'm seeing.

It smells like booze.

Yeah.

So it's.

It looks horrible.

This is honestly my favorite.

I love it so much.

I'm glad that my surprise worked out.

It looks disgusting.

It looks delicious.

No, but, like, the.

The breadcrumbs are alarming.

I'm glad that that's breadcrumbs because I was like, what the fudge?

Is that soaked in booze?

Okay.

The breadcrumbs are soaked in booze.

No, the cheese is soaked in booze and then rolled in breadcrumbs to soak up the booze on the outside.

It smells beautiful.

It smells like Calvados.

Like apples.

Yeah.

And.

And so Calvados and Camembert from the same area, so it totally makes sense.

What grows together, goes together.

Mm.

This is delicious.

And this Camembert is not overly ripe either.

No, it's not.

No, no.

It's.

Well, it's also a little cold, so should you ever end up with a cheese that is too cold, you can always kind of massage it, and then you warm it up a little bit, then it'll taste, like, more weird.

That's what we do.

Okay.

That's the cheese expert's tip.

Try doing that at your next dinner party.

Guys, don't do it at dinner party.

Fondle your cheese.

Delicious.

Um, I like this more than I thought I would.

This.

This would be something that super scary.

No, it's delicious.

This is something that I think would be a really nice dinner party cheese.

If you had a really intentional menu and this was your only cheese.

You know, if you had four people, this is a four person sized cheese, I think.

And you had a really intentional, you know, cheese course that wasn't multiple cheeses.

This would be a really nice choice because it's a scene stealer.

Mm.

You know, it doesn't.

You could serve it with other stuff, but actually, like, something like this.

You bring a cheese like this out, you tell the story about it.

It's so interesting.

It's so different.

It's so unusual.

I've never seen anything like this before.

I'd never encountered it.

Didn't know it existed.

I just was buying Kevin Bear from the cheese guy and I saw it.

I was like, well, I guess I gotta get it, you know?

And so I'm very delighted to have discovered it.

It is.

I'm delighted.

Yeah.

I mean, I think that.

I think that's also a really cool idea in the context of the way that French people think of Camembert.

I have a.

We have a friend, Allison Zinder, friend of the podcast, who is sort of realized that French people would not typically serve or bring camel bear to somebody else's house or, like, buy Camembert for dinner party because it's just so ubiquitous.

Everybody has their own opinion about, like, how done do you want it?

I mean, when you go into the supermarket and people are in the Camembert aisle, they will open up the box of Camembert and kind of push the heart and smell it.

Yeah.

To see if it's done enough.

Well.

So, you know, you just don't see it very often at a nice restaurant even, or on a cheese board because 95% of it is industrial.

Right.

And only 10% of it is actually the AOP.

Yeah.

That's crazy.

And it's funny because it is so mild.

It's something, I think children eat a lot.

And it's something that's so ubiquitous in the culture that they even use it, like, anytime.

You're talking about, like, a pie chart is a chemombear, right?

Yeah.

It's like the little camel bear wedges.

Yeah.

The Trivial Pursuit.

And you can buy individual wedges of the President camel bear.

Right.

And that's for, like, for kids, for like a. Yeah.

Or you get it.

Or you get it on Air France in your.

In your meal, you get like, a little individually wrapped wedge of President.

That's.

And that's where I think it's.

It's so hard when people come over from the States having tried this sort of, like, version of it that's so heavily pasteurized, sanitized.

Exactly.

And so when you see that, like, you could go to your cheesemonger and.

Same cheesemonger, same cheese.

Two producers, if you bought two different Camembert, or even as you've done, bought, like, a camel bear and a camel barrel.

It's completely different.

It's completely different texture.

It's a different taste.

All of these are really different.

And they're all.

Honestly, even the crappy Camembert, there is a nostalgia there.

It's funny, I can't.

I can't muster nostalgia for bad baguette, but I can muster nostalgia for normal Camembert.

But if you have been calling this, this small circle of boring white cheese brie all your life, today is your signal to stop, Please, for the love of cheese, stop.

Until next time.

Au revoir.

And a biento.

This has.

This has been?

What do you want me to say?

I don't know.

Until next time.

Au revoir and habiento.

This has been the real Fishwives of Parrot.

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