Dave's Cheese Notes: Thomasville Tomme
Back to Dave’s Cheese Pages.
Another cheese by Sweet Grass Dairy (previous was Green Hill), who have a website and page for the cheese itself:
I’ll quote their description:
"A raw cow’s milk cheese made in the style of a French farmhouse table cheese. This natural rinded, semi-soft cheese is aged at least 60 for a subtle yet complex earthy flavor and creamy texture… a subtle yet complex earthy flavor and creamy texture."
I thought the name sounded familiar when I picked up the cheese at the store, but it wasn’t until I got it home that I saw the "Local" sticker on the skinny side of the wedge and realized I knew the name from the Sweet Grass Dairy website.
If you just eat the innards of this cheese, it tastes like a sharp cheddar.
But after doing some reading and thinking on the subject of cheese rinds in the previous entry, Taleggio, I decided to be brave and eat the rind on this cheese. It’s a totally different experience - much more interesting and flavorful. Like, that acidic sharp cheddar taste is still there, but it’s mixed with a… peppery taste? (I’m not used to describing flavors and I’m realizing I don’t really have the foodie vocabulary for it.) The combo is great!
Basically, I’m cutting the cheese so that the rind is as well distributed amongst the pieces as possible (not demonstrated in my photo above!). That seems to be working. Some of the center pieces don’t have any rind, and that’s totally okay too. They’re not "boring" without it.
So what is a "Tomme"?
The dairy’s description of "made in the style of a French farmhouse table cheese" is a start. My cheese book mentions Tommes several times.
The Tomme (wikipedia.org) entry is useful:
…a class of cheeses produced mainly in the French Alps and in Switzerland… normally produced from the skimmed milk left over after the cream has been removed to produce butter and richer cheeses, or when there is too little milk to produce a full cheese… Tomme cheeses date back to ancient history. There are many varieties of Tommes, which are usually identified by their place of origin.
Pretty straightforward.
What is a "sharp" cheese flavor?
The word "sharp" to describe cheese seems to lead directly to cheddar (as I used in my fumbling comparison above).
The cheddar cheese (wikipedia.org) entry contains a helpful definition:
The "sharpness" of cheddar is associated with the levels of bitter peptides in the cheese. This bitterness has been found to be significant to the overall perception of the aged cheddar flavour
I don’t know if a Tomme has bitter peptides, but I guess the word I was looking for was "bitter" rather than acidic.
As an aside, the Wikipedia cheddar article ends with this anecdote:
In 2012, Wisconsin cheese shop owner Edward Zahn discovered and sold a batch of unintentionally aged cheddar up to 40 years old, possibly "the oldest collection of cheese ever assembled and sold to the public". The old cheese has extensive crystallization on the outside and is "creamier and overwhelmingly sharp" on the inside.
I doff my hat to whoever took the first taste to give us that report.