Not many years ago foreigners in Taiwan constantly griped about the difficulty of getting decent cheese. Now, with the advent of Jason's, City Super and gourmet supermarkets at Breeze Center, Mitsukoshi and other department stores, there is no shortage of the best cheeses the world has to offer.
Breeze Center offers over 100 kinds hailing from France, Germany, Italy and Spain, and among this wide range of cheeses, a new contender has emerged: cheese made in Taiwan.
Last year Peter Frauchiger, the chef and owner of Ticino, a highly regarded Swiss restaurant in Tienmu, embarked on a venture to produce cheese in Taiwan. It has been no simple task and Frauchiger admits that he is still experimenting with his products. But despite competing against the originals from Europe, these "Made in Taiwan" cheeses are gradually establishing themselves in the local market.
The first question any cheese lover will ask: "Are they as good as their European equivalents?"
For Frauchiger, the question is largely irrelevant. "The main thing is that they are fresh," he says. "For some people, a camembert can only come from France. They will not even try it before saying it is not right."
To get around this attitude, Frauchiger's Tenero cheese is described as "camembert-style," and you'd have to look at the top-shelf imports to find anything comparable.
The same applies to his Calido, a rachlette-style Swiss cheese, and Ticinella, which is a handmade and aggressively fresh mozzarella.
The cheeses are predominantly based on Swiss recipes, and Frauchiger invited a Swiss cheese-maker from home to fine-tune the production process in the early stages of the venture.
For Frauchiger, the great irony of cheese making in Taiwan is that because of the high price of quality milk here, his cheeses are not that much cheaper than regular imports. But then, he is competing on quality rather than price and offers tastes that are only possible when a cheese was made just a few weeks ago.
Of his mozzarella, Frauchiger says, "You know immediately that this is not some Danish imitation. This can compete with the best Italian product. It is also completely handmade."
It also hasn't been sitting around customs and transshipment areas for weeks on end.
It is early still for Frauchiger's cheeses, marketed under the name of his restaurant, Ticino. "We are still experimenting with humidity and other controls," he said.
But even though the cheese-making project only got off the ground last August, Frauchiger is already selling 150kg of cheese each week.
While cheese is the most exciting part of the venture, it is not the only new product, and Ticino is also releasing a range of flavored and plain yogurt drinks. Frozen yogurt is in the works, along with healthy whey drinks that make use of the byproducts of cheese making.
Here again, Frauchiger believes that freshness, the smaller quantities of sugar and the absence of additives and artificial flavoring will have a stronger appeal than fancy marketing.
Why did Frauchiger get involved in cheese making? "To make cheeses and to sell them," he says, before admitting to a more exulted mission: a question of cultural education.
At Chococheese, a new restaurant built around the cheese-making venture, Frauchiger has also held classes in cheese making. It's not like you can then go home and make your own cheeses, he admits, but it teaches people what is involved in making cheese and how it should be appreciated.
The degree of control over the cleanliness of the environment, humidity and temperature makes cheese making significantly more difficult to manage than say, cultivating yogurt at home. The necessary precision makes modern cheese making a rather clinical, rather than a sexy enterprise. At Chococheese, it takes place in a white-tiled, fully washed-down room with lots of stainless steel trays and plastic molds; all this is visible to diners who are separated from the kitchen only by windows and so are reminded that the cheese is made on the premises.
Milk is the key to making cheese and Frauchiger said it was difficult to find suppliers able to provide the quality required. "The milk cannot have antibiotics in it," Frauchiger emphasized, "or it is no use for cheese making."
Penicillin injections for sick cows are more than enough to ruin a batch, and the milk is rigorously tested for purity before it is put into the 500-liter churn, where it is mixed with rennet, an extract from a calf's fourth stomach that causes the milk to coagulate.
What emerges after about an hour is something like soft tofu, which is then chopped up and pumped into molds for pressing. Timing is the key for producing different qualities of cheese, and Frauchiger's creations range from super-soft camembert styles to semi-hards like rachlette.
Cheeses are soaked in salt water to facilitate the formation of a rind and some are exposed to fungus.
Depending on the cheese, the process takes between 15 days and four months, Frauchiger said. The results are a worthy addition to Taipei's claims of being a sophisticated culinary center.
Frauchiger has also developed a cheese-oriented menu for Chococheese, so if you want to see what can be done with cheese besides putting it on a slice of bread, the restaurant is certainly worth checking out.
Chococheese is located at 34-1 Chihshan Rd, Sec 2, Shihlin, Taipei (台北市至善路二段34-1號). Call the place at (02) 2882 6399 and find further product information at www.chococheese.com.tw.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
The following three paragraphs are just some of what the local Chinese-language press is reporting on breathlessly and following every twist and turn with the eagerness of a soap opera fan. For many English-language readers, it probably comes across as incomprehensibly opaque, so bear with me briefly dear reader: To the surprise of many, former pop singer and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ex-lawmaker Yu Tien (余天) of the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA) at the last minute dropped out of the running for committee chair of the DPP’s New Taipei City chapter, paving the way for DPP legislator Su
It’s hard to know where to begin with Mark Tovell’s Taiwan: Roads Above the Clouds. Having published a travelogue myself, as well as having contributed to several guidebooks, at first glance Tovell’s book appears to inhabit a middle ground — the kind of hard-to-sell nowheresville publishers detest. Leaf through the pages and you’ll find them suffuse with the purple prose best associated with travel literature: “When the sun is low on a warm, clear morning, and with the heat already rising, we stand at the riverside bike path leading south from Sanxia’s old cobble streets.” Hardly the stuff of your
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist