🧀 Comté

Comté is a French hard cheese with a protected designation of origin (PDO), made exclusively from raw cow's milk. According to the specification, it is a cooked, pressed cheese, salted on the surface or in brine; the only permitted ingredients are milk, cultures, rennet and salt. After at least 120 days of ripening its paste is ivory to yellow and may have an eye up to the size of a small cherry.

Wheel and rind. Comté is a wheel weighing 32 to 45 kg and 55 to 75 cm across, with a straight or slightly convex heel 8 to 13 cm high and a solid, grainy, rubbed rind from ochre-yellow to brown. It contains 45 to 54 g of fat per 100 g of dry cheese and at least 62 g of dry matter per 100 g of cheese.

Milk and making. The milk comes only from herds of Montbéliarde or French Simmental cows, or crosses of the two. Silage and other fermented fodder are banned on the whole farm all year. The cheese is made in open copper vats; the curd and whey are heated to 53–57 °C and the cheese is pressed for at least six hours. It ripens on spruce boards for at least 120 days from the date of manufacture shown on the casein plates on the heel.

Taste. The specification calls the taste complex: fruity, milky and roasted notes in every wheel, within six aroma families (fruity, milky, roasted, vegetal, animal and spicy) covering more than 90 nuances. No two wheels are strictly identical.

Production area and marking. Milk production, cheesemaking and ripening take place in a defined area of eastern France that includes the Doubs, Jura and Ain departments. Each wheel carries a green elliptical casein plate marked France, Comté and the dairy number, and is graded before sale: a score of at least 12 out of 20 is needed to sell it as Comté.