The American cheese my French husband actually approves of

The rule that shaped American cheese

To sell raw milk cheese in the United States it must be aged at least sixty days at no less than 35°F. That single line is why the American cheese counter looks the way it does. Hard aged raw cheeses clear it easily — Comté, Gruyère, Beaufort are all well past sixty days before they leave the cave. What cannot clear it is anything meant to be eaten young and soft. The rule does not ban raw milk. It bans a shape of cheese.

Why real Camembert can never be legal here

This is the part that surprises people, because it is not a safety judgement about any particular dairy. Camembert de Normandie, Brie de Meaux and Brie de Melun are required by their protected-origin rules to be made with unpasteurized milk and sold well before sixty days. The FDA requires sixty days minimum. The two rulebooks are mutually exclusive by construction, so the authentic version cannot be imported no matter how clean the farm or how careful the maker. What Americans buy as Camembert is a pasteurized cheese wearing the name — which is a different product, not a worse batch.

What Americans did instead

Here is where it gets interesting, and where I expected him to be rude and he was not. Faced with a rule that outlawed the entire soft-young-raw category, American cheesemakers did not give up on it. They engineered through it. The clearest example sits two and a half hours north of us in Greensboro, Vermont.

Jasper Hill, and the cheese built to clear the rule

Jasper Hill Farm was built from a run-down 200-acre farm bought by the Kehler brothers in 1998. They make raw milk cheeses — Alpha Tolman, Bayley Hazen Blue, Whitney and Winnimere — at their Greensboro creamery, and pasteurized ones at a second site. Underneath sit seven vaults of cave-aging cellars that also finish cheese for other creameries. Winnimere is the one that makes the point. It is their answer to Vacherin Mont d’Or: raw milk, winter only, when the Ayrshire cows are on hay, wrapped in spruce bark cut from their own woods. Mont d’Or itself cannot be imported into the United States. Winnimere is spoonably soft at sixty days. That is not a coincidence. That is a cheese designed to be legal without being lesser.

The trophies are not participation prizes

In 2024 Bayley Hazen Blue — raw milk, from their own herd, an American original rather than a copy of anything — was named Best American Cheese at the World Cheese Awards and finished fifth in the world out of 4,786 cheeses entered by 1,032 companies. Nine Jasper Hill cheeses medalled that year. A decade earlier the same cheese was named World’s Best Unpasteurized Cheese in London. In 2026 Winnimere took Best of Show at the American Cheese Society, the fifth time Jasper Hill has won it.

The one he could not argue with

In February 2014 the Obamas held a state dinner for François Hollande. The cheese served was Bayley Hazen Blue. An American raw-milk blue from a Vermont hillside, put in front of the President of France, at his own state dinner. My husband’s response to this fact was to look at the ceiling for a while and then say that it was, he supposed, a reasonable choice. I am recording that as approval.

The part that complicates your assumption, and mine

I started this believing what most people believe: raw milk cheese is the good stuff and pasteurization is what ruins it. Two things got in the way. The first is that Jasper Hill’s most decorated cheese is Harbison — Best of Show at the American Cheese Society in 2018, Best American Cheese or Super Gold at the World Cheese Awards in 2015, 2016, 2018 and 2023 — and Harbison is pasteurized. The second is that when researchers ran blind sensory testing, they found no reliable difference in ratings between pasteurized and unpasteurized cheese, even though consumers consistently pay more for raw. So the premium is real and the taste claim is, at best, unproven. What raw milk gives you is variability and the possibility of something extraordinary. It does not guarantee it.

What actually separates good cheese from supermarket cheese

Not pasteurization. Herd, feed, season, handling and aging — and someone who cares at every stage. Jasper Hill manages milk production specifically for cheesemaking and propagates ripening cultures found on their own land. That is the thing the French call terroir and it has nothing to do with whether the milk was heated. The individually wrapped square he complains about is not bad because it is pasteurized. It is bad because nothing in its production was trying.

A note for anyone pregnant

Raw milk cheese is on the list of foods advised against during pregnancy, because of listeria risk. The FDA’s own sampling of raw milk cheeses aged sixty days found pathogen contamination rates under one percent, so the risk is small — but it is not zero, and the consequences are serious. If you are pregnant, Harbison is pasteurized. So is a great deal else that is worth eating.

The verdict, such as it is

He will not concede that American cheese is good. He will concede that this American cheese is good, which from him is the same sentence with the pride removed. And the honest shape of the story is that the rule Americans complain about — the one keeping real Camembert out — is part of why Vermont now has cellars full of cheese that wins in Europe. Being unable to import the thing is a reasonable incentive to learn to make it.

Jasper Hill, raw and pasteurized

He judges America weekly on Instagram, and Le Bulletin collects the best of it once a month.