Gruyère
A hard cheese whose flavour ranges from mild to strong depending on ripening, from five months to over a year. Gruyère AOP is produced from raw milk in village cheese dairies and, in summer, on the alpine pastures of the Fribourg Prealps and the Vaud Jura.
In early October, in Charmey, the herds leave the mountain. The cows parade decked with flowers, heavy bells round their necks. In the village, the cellars gather what the herds leave behind: the wheels made all summer in the nearby chalets, over a wood fire.
Origin
Culinary Heritage of Switzerland dates the birth of a cheese close to today’s to around the 15th century. On the pastures, cows were then taking over from sheep, and the more plentiful milk made large wheels possible. Rennet, which comes from the calf’s fourth stomach, appears in 1411 in the account books of the Abbey of Hauterive. From 1620, during the Thirty Years’ War, the cheese began to be exported, and it was its buyers who named it after its region; locally, people simply say “fromage”. The Académie française admitted it to its dictionary in 1762.
Making
The raw milk, delivered after each of the two milkings, is heated to around 31 °C, inoculated and then curdled. The resulting curd, cut into pieces the size of wheat grains, is cooked at 54 to 59 °C. Moulded, pressed and then salted, the cheese goes to a humid cellar, on boards. A wheel weighs between 25 and 40 kilos. At first, it is turned and rubbed with salt water every day to form its rind, the morge. Gruyère is called doux at five months, mi-salé at around eight, salé at ten and surchoix after a year.
At the table
Because it melts well, it lends itself to fondue, gratins or chalet macaroni with double cream. On the alpine pastures, the canton of Fribourg reports, the typical meal is still a soup of bacon, macaroni, cheese and milk.
Today
Protected since July 2001, Gruyère AOP comes from Fribourg, Vaud, Neuchâtel, the Jura and the Bernese Jura, from six Bernese municipalities bordering Fribourg and, under the specification, from some fifteen named cheese dairies outside these areas. In 2006, 192 cheese dairies produced nearly 28,800 tonnes of it, a good half of it in Fribourg. The alpine pastures supply only about 2%: in Fribourg, the chalets that make it, seven towards the end of the 1970s, numbered thirty in 2010. Each wheel bears on its side, in relief, the name of the designation and the number of its cheese dairy.
Sources: Culinary Heritage of Switzerland, entry “Gruyère (AOP)”; Swiss PDO-PGI Association, factsheet “Le Gruyère AOP”; Canton of Fribourg, Traditions vivantes, “Saison d’alpage en Gruyère”.