Favorite Fromage: Comte

For a long time our favorite cheese has been manchego, that salty, straw-colored sheep's milk cheese from Spain, but recently we've headed in another direction with comte, a cow's milk cheese from the Jura mountains of eastern France. The best comte is aged from 14 to 17 months and develops a rich golden color, with a deep flavor and silky texture. It's fabulous as an appetizer served with a sauvignon blanc or an Alsation pinot gris.

Which leads me to another discovery, the weekly (Thursday) cheese column in the San Francisco Chronicle by Janet Fletcher. You can download a pdf of her comte article here. You can bet I'll be putting her column on my regular list. This week she's writing about another French cheese, Livarot. Now to find some of that!