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Reader question: Exactly how many different types of cheese are there in France?

One thing everyone can agree on is that France has a lot of cheese - but exactly how many French fromages exist?

Reader question: Exactly how many different types of cheese are there in France?
France has a lot of cheese. Photo by ERIC PIERMONT / AFP

Question: I often see a quote from Charles de Gaulle talking about ‘246 different types of cheese’, but other articles say there are 600 or even 1,000 different types of cheese and some people say there are just eight types – how many different cheeses are there in France?

A great question on a subject dear to French hearts – cheese.

But it’s one that doesn’t have a simple answer.

Charles de Gaulle did indeed famously say “How can anyone govern a country with 246 different types of cheese”, but even in 1962 when he uttered the exasperated phrase, it was probably an under-estimate.

READ ALSO 7 tips for buying cheese in France

The issue is how you define ‘different’ types of cheese, and unsurprisingly France has a complicated system for designating cheeses.

Let’s start with the eight – there are indeed eight cheese ‘families’ and all of France’s many cheeses can be categorised as one of;

  • Fresh cheese, such as cottage cheese or the soft white fromage blanc
  • Soft ripened cheese, such as Camembert or Brie
  • Soft ripened cheese with a washed rind, such as l’Epoisses or Pont l’Eveque
  • Unpasturised hard cheese such as Reblochon or saint Nectaire
  • Pasturised hard cheese such as Emmental or Comté
  • Blue cheese such as Roquefort 
  • Goat’s cheese
  • Melted or mixed cheese such as Cancaillot

But there are lots of different types of, for example, goat’s cheese.

And here’s where it gets complicated, for two reasons.

The first is that new varieties of cheese are constantly being invented by enterprising cheesemakers (including some which come about by accident, such as le confiné which was created in 2020).

The second is about labelling, geography and protected status.

France operates a system known as Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée (AOC or its European equivalent AOP) to designate food products that can only be made in a certain area.

As cheese is an artisan product, quite a lot of different cheese are covered by this – for example a blue sheep’s milk cheese is only Roquefort if it’s been aged in the caves in the village of Roquefort.

There are 63 listed AOC cheeses in France, but many more varieties that don’t have this protected status.

These include generic cheese types such as BabyBel and other cheeses that are foreign in origin but made in France (such as Emmental).

But sometimes there are both AOC and non-AOC versions of a single cheese – a good example of this is Camembert.

AOC Camembert must be made in Normandy by farmers who have to abide by strict rules covering location, milk type and even what their cows eat.

Factory-produced Camembert, however, doesn’t stick to these rules and therefore doesn’t have the AOC label. Is it therefore the same cheese? They’re both called Camembert but the artisan producers of Normandy will tell you – at some length if you let them – that their product is a totally different thing to the mass-produced offering.

There are also examples of local cheeses that are made to essentially the same recipe but have different names depending on where they are produced – sometimes even being on opposite sides of the same Alpine valley is enough to make it two nominally different cheeses.

All of which is to say that guessing is difficult!

Most estimates range from between 600 to 1,600, with cheese experts generally saying there are about 1,000 different varieties. 

So bonne dégustation!

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FOOD AND DRINK

France and Switzerland locked in conflict over ‘fourth’ chocolate

A fourth chocolate - 'blond' - has been slowly making inroads into French confectionary, but has failed to win official recognition and faces competition from a pink Swiss variety.

France and Switzerland locked in conflict over 'fourth' chocolate

Blond chocolate was born from an accident.

French pastry chef Frederic Bau was demonstrating his skills at an exhibition in Japan, and left his white chocolate warming a little too long in a bain-marie… four days, to be precise.

“By chance, by magic… it became blond! This chocolate appeared with an incredible colour and smell”, recalls Bau, who is creative director for chocolatier Valrhona.

Bau immediately smelled the commercial potential of this happy blunder, but it took seven years of testing to perfect its unique aromatic qualities and consistency.

The recipe remains a secret but has been officially registered by Valrhona, and is sold under the name Dulcey since 2012.

However, the basic chemistry is well-understood. It is the “Maillard reaction”, a sequence of chemical reactions between amino acids and reducing sugars, causing browning and aromas that are close to toasting.

Blond chocolate has the milky fattiness of white chocolate but is much less sweet, with a soft caramel flavour and an aftertaste of roasted coffee.

French pastry chefs tend to snub white chocolate, associating it with the big slabs they gobbled as children.

But blond opens up new possibilities.

“It’s very different from other chocolates. It gives a very biscuity, very delicious taste,” Nice-based pastry chef Philippe Tayac, who combines it with hazelnuts for a tartlet, told AFP.

Bau combines it as a pure fondant dessert with freshly roasted apples and a Tahitian vanilla cream, and he also recommends “breaking it up” with more distinct fruity combinations, such as citrus or red fruit.

Despite efforts, Valrhona has not managed to convince French lawmakers to reopen its legal definitions.

So blond remains formally just another type of white chocolate, which was the last to be legally recognised – after dark and milk chocolate – after its invention in the 1930s by Switzerland’s Nestlé.

And France’s Alpine neighbours are not waiting to be beaten to the punch on a fourth variety.

Valrhona’s key competitor in the world of professional-grade chocolate, Swiss giant Barry Callebaut, launched a marketing campaign in 2017 for its own fourth type: this one bright pink and derived from Ruby cocoa beans grown in Ecuador, Brazil and Ivory Coast.

Barry Callebaut calls its Ruby chocolate “the biggest innovation in chocolate in 80 years”.

The company was diplomatic when asked about the rivalry by AFP, saying in a statement: “The best chocolate in the world is the one that gives you a moment of indulgence – no matter where it was produced and no matter the colour.”

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