One Woman s Quest to Create Truly Japanese Cheese atlasobscura.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from atlasobscura.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
“‘
Terroir‘ means the taste of place. But in Japan, cheese is a foreign product,” Shibata says. “Most Japanese cheesemakers import their bacteria from overseas and use a process from overseas. But if we can use our own bacteria with a unique method, we can make a distinctly Japanese cheese with its own special taste.”
Shibata, a trained microbiologist and owner of the cheesery Fromage Sen, believes these domestic microbes are essential for her award-winning cheeses.
Shibata first tasted cheese in 1989 when her father, a mechanic with Air France, began taking the family to Paris each summer. Inspired, she studied fermentation and microbiology at Tokyo University of Agriculture’s Okhotsk campus in Abashiri, Hokkaido, and apprenticed with French cheesemakers in Besancon and Alsace. When she returned in 2008, her plan to work for a Japanese cheesemaker fell through.