My great love in life, besides all things wine, puppies that stay puppies forever, food, and my husband, is cheese. For my money, there is no better thing to eat stacked or slathered on bread, except butter sprinkled with fleur de sel when one forgets their purchases at the cheese shop. My name is Kirstin Jackson Ellis, and I am your cheese and wine Engyne columist. When not at Engyne, I am either focusing on my wine and food pairing blog, Vin de la Table (Vindelatable.blogspot.com), writing for publications, managing a wine bar, acting as a wine and food consultant, or just simply, eating and drinking, preferably on a balcony.
La Tur: Eating Cheese with a Spoon
Although numerous sophisticates allege that it is the harder, aged cheeses that are the best and most nuanced examples of fermented milk, I’ve always secretly preferred cheese that I can eat with my favorite baby spoon. One closest to my heart is La Tur.
The first time I tried La Tur was at the end of my workday at a cheese specialty counter. Too ripe to sell, but too good to toss, the manager suggested that I take an older, gooey La Tur home to sample.
Enveloped in this cream-colored cylinder, I discovered, were all the best characteristics of a soft goat, sheep, and cow’s milk cheese. Crafted with expert amounts of each animal’s milk, the flavors in La Tur miraculously highlighted one another’s flavors without competing for attention. Grassy and lemony like a goat cheese, mildly nutty like a sheep’s cheese, and rich and buttery like a cow’s cheese, La Tur had more texture and flavor variations than Mariah Carey has pink shoes.
About two inches tall and three inches across, La Tur has a rippled surface that calms one’s heart like lapping ocean waves at night. Directly below this exterior reminiscent of a French natural-rind goat cheese is a layer of pure cheese silk. When the young, the layer is around one-eighth of an inch thick. During the height of ripeness, this silk completely takes over the cheese’s interior, at the point which La Tur’s center is similar to a soft sheep’s milk cheese like Old Chatham’s Nancy’s Camembert, or the European Brebis or Spanish Nevat. This is when to dip your spoon directly in the cheese. Before La Tur achieves this ripe state, its center is lightly flaky, with a fresh goat cheese like paste.
And the flavors? They range from lemon to herbal, from mushroom to nutty, and from sweet and buttery to tangy and milky. They offer as many nuances as its texture and change as cheese matures.
Produced in the Langhe region of Piedmont, Italy, La Tur is made by the Caseificio Dell’Alta Langa company, craftspeople of softer style Italian cheeses. After the milks have been combined, pasteurized, and the fermentation process has been invoked, the cheese is ladled into molds, where they age for ten days before they makes their way home to our fridges.
Knowing La Tur is a fresh cheese from the Piedmont region of Italy helps with wine pairing. Try La Tur with a low-oak red wine like a Dolcetto or Nebbiolo, from the same Piedmont region as the cheese. If you want to branch out, one could pair the cheese with a equally bright, low oak wine like a Cru Beaujolais (Gamay) or Loire Valley Red (Cabernet Franc). As for whites, try a minimally oaked grape, such as a Chenin Blanc aged in stainless steel, a Sauvignon Blanc, an un-oaked Chardonnay, or a another white from Northern Italy. Or, try a white wine also from the Piedmont region like a peachy, fresh sparkling Prosecco.
Whatever you do, give the cheese a chance to shine. Let it come to room temperature, when it will charmingly stick to the cheese paper with which it’s packed, and then enjoy it’s engaging simplicity. La Tur is one of the classiest cheeses you can dip your spoon in.
