The Cheese Makers' Breakfast

This afternoon, deep in a jet-lagged comatose slumber, I dreamt of cows feasting in a flower-filled spring meadow, and of cheese made from their milk.

In actuality this wasn't so much dream as memory. A little over two weeks ago Dave and I were in Bogatepe, a village set on a high plateau in Kars, northeastern Turkey. Kars is known for two cheeses: gravyer and kaar. Bogatepe is one of the province's two main gravyer-producing villages. We'd driven some 70 kilometers from the provincial capital to learn about the cheese and its history, and to see how it's made.

Forget everything you think you know about Turkish cheese. Gravyer isn't white or soft or feta-like. It isn't fresh and it isn't aged in a hide. Gravyer would be at home on a northern European table -- not a coincidence, because it was introduced to Kars over a hundred years ago from Switzerland via Russia. Though its name suggests gruyere, gravyer cheese is actually closer to emmental in appearance, texture and flavor: palest yellow with large irregular holes, medium soft, savory and not too salty and mildly nutty.

We spent a long evening and a morning at Koculu Gravyer Zavotu ("zavotu" is Russian for factory) which, ! like Bog atepe's other mandira (cheese workshops) -- there are seven in all, and the majority produce not gravyer but kaar -- uses milk from cows in Bogatepe and a couple of nearby villages. During the three-month cheese-making season Koculu, which dates back to the early 19th century, produces on average three truck-sized wheels of cheese a day, usually two at night and one in the morning. The entire cheesemaking process takes about five hours, from the time peynir mayasi ("cheese yeast", or rennet) is poured into huge copper cauldrons containing milk taken from the animals just hours before, to the initial pressing of the cheese wheels with a stone-weighted wooden press.

After 24 hours the peynir ustasi (cheese "master") and his helpers remove the press and peel the rough fabric "clothing" from the newly minted gravyer wheels. Before sending the cheeses off to a depo, where they will bob in a salt brine, sweat in a hot room and ripen in a cool room for up to half a year, they emooth each wheel's surface by scraping it with the side of a spoon and trim its edges.

Nothing goes to waste in a mandira. The thin milky whey leftover from the cheese making process is turned into food for livestock and given to the village's dogs. The oil that seeps from the cheeses during their weighting and as they sweat in the hot room is collected and distributed to villagers; the women, we're told, apply it as a cream to their faces and hands. ("That's why women in Bogatepe look younger than those in other villages," our host Ilhan Koculu told us.)

And after a long night (the usta and his staff were still working on their second wheel when we left the mandira at 1:30am) followed by an early rise to make yet more cheese the cheese makers take a breakfast that includes those super-young gravyer scrapings and trimmings fried in fresh village butter.

Beyond giving nourishment, energy (and to us gravyer nugget newbies,unspeakable pleasure), the cheese crisps also help the cheese maker to predict the quality of his product. After frying up a batch Ilhan pulled a crisp apart, and was pleased. Its crackly, nicely browned exterior told him that this gravyer would be nicely oily and its long string indicated a sufficiently soft texture.

"This will be a delicious cheese," he said.

And then it was time for the cheese makers' breakfast, which in addition to the cheese nuggets included a bowl of ethereally thick and rich kaymak.

Cheese makers' breakfast: crispy cheese nuggets and kaymak with bread and pekmez

As the cheese makers sat down to eat scrapings from some of the season's earliest cheese, cows gorged on its first wildflowers in a pasture just across the road, making the milk that would make the coming evening's wheels of gravyer.

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