"Quebec to allow raw-milk cheeses"

INGRID PERITZ

MONTREAL— Globe and Mail Update

Published Thursday, Jul. 31, 2008 7:12PM EDT

Last updated Tuesday, Mar. 31, 2009 8:23PM EDT

Quebec has taken a new step toward culinary uniqueness: It will allow its cheese makers to produce the kind of stinky, oozing, unpasteurized bries and camemberts that are illegal in the rest of North America.

The government has modified regulations to allow the production and sale of raw-milk cheeses that have been aged for less than 60 days.

Elsewhere, such young cheeses are verboten due to health concerns. But producers in Quebec, which leads the country in raw-milk cheese consumption, have been lobbying the province for years to change the rules.

They believe such raw-milk cheese is not only healthy, but pasteurization destroys microbes that give their product a deep, palette-pleasing flavour.

“We are very pleased by what is being put on the table. It will bring about a new wave of soft cheeses and raise them to a completely new gustatory level,” said Nancy Portelance, who represents 17 artisan cheese makers in the province.

Cheese lovers maintain that certain soft cheeses like camembert reach their peak ripening point at 21 to 30 days. “At that point, the cheese is creamy, a lot more flavourful and more complex at the level of aroma,” said Ian Picard, master cheese ripener at La Fromagerie Hamel in Montreal.

Cheese ripening has proven a sticky matter between Quebec and the federal government, and an Ottawa attempt in 1996 to ban the sale of raw-milk cheese raised a political stink in the province. Gastronomes pointed out that Europeans have been consuming such products with no ill effects.

Quebec's new initiative appears to place it at odds with those in English Canada, where raw-milk products remain controversial. Quebec Agriculture Minister Laurent Lessard hailed his new regulations as “a veritable revolution” and a North American first. Yet Jean Dalati, a microbiologist at the Quebec agriculture department, says he discussed the changes with counterparts from the rest of Canada and those from the West balked.

“It's as though it's taboo,” Mr. Dalati said on Thursday. “I find it bizarre, because this is common in Europe. But when you talk about it [in Canada], they're afraid.”

(Mr. Dalati said Health Canada was open to Quebec's initiative when he raised it this year. The federal agency said Thursday it would not comment.)

The province's change is accompanied by strict new rules to ensure the safety of the raw-milk cheeses, including monthly quality checks of producers' milk and veterinary inspections of cattle herds.

Until now, regulations required cheese makers using raw milk to ripen the product at least 60 days on evidence it eliminated harmful bacteria in the milk.

Mansel Griffiths, a dairy microbiologist at the University of Guelph, says the 60-day limit has become arbitrary, since it is no longer a guarantee of destroying pathogens. Still, he believes raw-milk cheese continues to pose health-safety issues over potential pathogens.

With the cheese-making overhaul, the province is gaining one distinctive gastronomic trait as it loses another: Beginning this week, Quebec is also ending its ban on yellow margarine.

Source:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/article700358.ece