If you have nothing but cheese in your head, you should worry about your mental health - unless you are an affineur and find nothing in thinking of nothing but cheese, even during the fulfillment of lifelong dreams.
This is what happened to Volker Waltmann on a safari in South Africa, during which a tracker from the Zulu people served him a pick-me-up called Makachakaamarula, a frothed coffee with cocoa and the cherry cream liqueur Amarula.
Jakob Strobel y Serra
Deputy head of the features section.
Follow I follow
Immediately the affineur no longer had lion and giraffe in mind, but only pondered how he could refine a cheese the Zulu way. At home he cut a Frisian blue cheese lengthways, removed the inside, kneaded it with cherry and chocolate, then put everything back together and dipped the loaf in a bath of coffee liqueur and cherry juice so that you couldn't see the ugly cut edge - that's it was the Makachakaamarula, the craziest work so far by the cheese-crazy Volker Waltmann.
Germany has long been the realm of the cheese hedgehog and the meat hedgehog, the twin horrors of every cold buffet. That was it when Waltmann's mother, a good cook, great gourmet and hard-working France driver, opened a cheese shop in Erlangen in 1983, which was to become the meaning and purpose of her son's life.
However, when he asked the local Chamber of Industry and Commerce about training as a cheese refiner, he was told harshly that there was no such thing and that he should learn something decent.
Out of necessity, Waltmann was content with an apprenticeship as a retail salesman in a cheese shop and then went on the “cheese rolling” for three years to France, as he himself calls it - to that country about whose residents Charles de Gaulle once sighed: “How should one come in? Rule the people who own 246 types of cheese? "
At peak times, customers have to queue for an hour
Volker Waltmann wanted to get to know them all without exception. He made his home with the famous Parisian affineur Roland Barthélémy and helped out with François Durand, the last producer of real Camemberts. He learned how to bathe the Pont-l'Évêque in cider and calvados at the Plessis Abbey, and was a docile student at the Maison Carles in Roquefort, which is the only cheese producer in the world that includes both the Élysée Palace and Buckingham Palace and the White House and was welcomed like a son by Bernard Antony, King of the Affineurs from Alsace, and initiated into all the secrets of cheese refinement. With a notebook full of recipes and the firm decision to free Germany from the tyranny of the cheese hedgehog, he returned to Erlangen and built a maturing cellar in an old storage gallery for beer barrels.stuffed the basement of his shop with cold stores and bath troughs and began to turn raw milk cheese into culinary works of art.