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giant wheel of comté — a thing of delight — can sometimes become mysteriously flat. Despite all the care that has gone into making it, its brightness and complexity vanishes, and it completely loses its spark. Cheesemongers know that. That’s why they have a tool called a cheese iron, which they insert deep into the wheel to extract a sample from its core to find out if bitterness has crept in, or worse, it’s just blah.
There are ways of reviving a beautiful cheese. Sometimes it’s as simple as a good trim, peeling away ribbons of oxidised cheese to reveal the vibrant colour sheltering within. Other times you need to make a more dramatic cut.
No one is more surprised than me that I’ve ended up a cheesemonger after leaving journalism, the career I’d started straight out of university. After many years working in radio, some as an editor at the BBC, I finally got my own breakfast programme in my home town of Montreal (I am originally from Canada). Then one day, sitting alone in the cinema — a precious window of freedom after the radio show had finished for the week — I realised my job was eating my life.
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