Typically, at the end of a cheese class, I’ll ask guests to vote for their favorite. It helps me understand where people’s palates are. By now, I know that creamy usually wins, but I’ve rarely had such a lopsided result as I did in a class last week. Among a field of strong contenders, the creamiest cheese prevailed in a landslide. The victorious French beauty pictured above was new to me—I had never tasted it until I served it—and you can bet I’ll be bringing it back for an encore. My own vote went to the aged sheep cheese (L’Estaing), but the people have spoken.
Le Tentation de Saint-Félicien, a cow’s milk cheese, is the invention of an 80-year-old creamery just south of Lyon. The creamery makes well-known Rhône cheeses like Banon, Rocamadour and Saint-Marcellin, among others. They dreamed up Tentation (“Temptation”) about 30 years ago.
It’s a riff on the basic Saint-Félicien, which itself is a near-twin of Saint-Marcellin, just larger and with cream added. Tentation is richer yet, with enough additional cream to bring it close to triple-cream status. The curd is hand-ladled into the forms, a labor-intensive technique that is disappearing, and the 180-gram (6-ounce) disks are matured for about two weeks before leaving the creamery.
Delicate business: hand-ladling curd for St. Félicien
No wonder they’re sublime, with a soft, delicate, wrinkly skin and an interior like pastry cream. The aroma hints at mushroom and the flavor suggests sour cream or crème fraîche. Salting is perfect and, unless you get an overripe sample, you won’t detect any of the ammonia that cheeses like this can emit in decline. The cheeses I served in class weren’t as ripe as the one pictured above but still delivered a memorable experience, as the vote demonstrated.
I enjoy reading and recounting cheese origin stories even if they don’t always ring true. (Shepherd leaves lunch in a cave, comes back days later, finds his cheese riddled with blue veins and, lo, it was good.) Like many such tales, the beginnings of Saint-Félicien don’t entirely make sense but let’s suspend disbelief.
According to the creamery’s website, a long-ago merchant operated a dairy and cheese shop on the Place Saint-Félicien in Lyon. Before filling his customers’ jugs with milk, he would skim off the cream and set it aside. If he had any unsold milk at the end of the day, he would add the reserved cream back to it and make an extra-rich cheese.
Did this gentleman’s customers not realize they were buying skimmed milk? In France, of all places. But however it happened, the results enrich us. Le Tentation de Saint-Félicien is wonderfully silky and clamoring for bread; I love its thin profile and flimsy rind. Most of the familiar triple-cream cheeses, like Brillat-Savarin, have a firmer rind and a higher proportion of paste (the inside). A slice of Brillat-Savarin can feel like a mouthful of whipped butter—a bit much for me.
Look for Tentation de Saint-Félicien at these retailers.