Menacing clouds have gathered over Paris. It’s getting chilly, and it looks like rain is on the way. We don’t care. We’re ensconced in a cozy wine shop in the Marais district, getting ready to taste the goodies we’ve collected today on our Parisian foodie tour.
Our excellent guide, Deniz, has been picking up items from the stops we’ve made on the tour. We’ve done some sampling along the way, but now we’re going to sit down and really dig in.
Deniz started unloading her shopping bag. There were baguettes from Tout Autour du Pain bakery, and a sampling of cheeses from Jouannault cheese shop. With our bread and cheese, we would sip wine from La Cave de Turenne wine shop, where we were having our little indoor picnic. For “dessert,” we would munch on macarons from Pierre Hermé.
Le Fromage
Our cheese selection was diverse. We tried a goat cheese from the Midi-Pyrénées that was shaped like a doughnut. It was very mild, and it had a little hazelnut thing going on. We tasted a brie from Île-de-France they’ve been making since the 12th century.
There was a cheese called “Époisses” that comes from Bourgogne, (Burgundy). They’ve been making this cheese for a thousand years or so. The aroma is said to be reminiscent of meat, and in particular, bacon and eggs. (I didn’t get that, but then, I wasn’t in a breakfast mood, anyway).
We also had one of my favorites – Morbier. Back in the day, farmers sprinkled ashes from wood fires over the morning curd, then covered that with curd from the evening milking. The resulting cheese has a distinctive dark line running through its center, so its easy to spot.
Le Vin
As mentioned last time, the proprietor of the wine shop is into “natural” or organic wines, so we tasted wines that were unlike anything we’ve had before. The first was a sparkling wine, (a “cremant”), from the Loire region. It’s made from grapes grown using biodynamic methods. It was delicious.
Then we tasted two “organically produced” red wines – a young one from the Rhône valley, and an older wine from the Provence region of France. They were both really good. REALLY good.
I had read that organically produced wines can be pretty, uh, shall we say, “different.” Think “smelly socks.” There was something a little different about these wines. Not “smelly socks” different. “Good” different.
One of the neat things about a good foodie tour is that you usually learn something about what you’re eating or drinking. Deniz did a great job being as informative as the group wanted without going over the top. She certainly sparked my interest in what we were tasting.
Take fermentation, for example. The baguettes we had this morning were the product of fermentation. So was the cheese, and so was the wine we drank at our last stop. The word, “fermentation,” kept popping up.
Le Yeast. (Les Yeasts?)
And yeast. I’ve always had questions about yeast. I know that, as far as wine goes, it appears naturally on the skins of the grapes. I know it’s “alive,” and that it feeds on sugars, producing alcohol and carbon dioxide in the process. But what is it, exactly? What does one look like? And if it’s really “alive,” how can it stay alive in those little sealed Fleishmann’s Yeast packages for who knows how long?
An interesting point was raised in the natural wine argument. (See previous post). It has to do with all that naturally-occurring yeast on the grapes. If the goal is to create wine that represents its terroir, wouldn’t that yeast be a big part of the terroir? But wine producers today use their own custom yeasts instead.
I didn’t want to get kicked out of the group, so I kept most of these questions to myself during the tour. But afterwards they were bugging me, so I did some research. It turns out that yeast are single-celled organisms in the fungus family.
Just about every famous chemist in your history book made a contribution to what we know about yeast, but it was Louis Pasteur who figured out that yeast are living organisms. That was in 1857. He knew they were alive, but he didn’t know what was in ‘em. A bunch of other microbiologists have been figuring that out over the years. It gets seriously complex. We don’t need to go there.
Le Dessert
Anyway, it’s time for dessert. In addition to the items already mentioned, Deniz had purchased macarons from Pierre Hermé. Ooh la la. We were already stuffed, but there’s always room for a macaron or two. And then it was time to say “au revoir.”
If you’ve been reading along, you may have gotten the idea that this has been an excellent foodie tour. Deniz was great. Everything was delicious, of course, and interesting, too.
Even though there was a light rain and it was quite a hike back to Montorgueil, we decided to walk. We had some digesting to do. There would be no need for dinner that night. Ouf!
To be continued…
Note: We opted for a tour from Paris by Mouth for our Foodie Tour. See additional comments here.
