A Japanese maestro of melted cheese is enjoying sudden stardom after becoming the only non-Swiss medal winner at the first Raclette World Championships.
Miti Yamaguchi took silver in the raw milk raclette category at a tournament that proved to be a fiasco for French cheesemakers, who emerged empty-handed on Sunday.
Raclette, which is among Switzerland’s national dishes, is made by melting cheese of the same name before scraping it onto boiled potatoes.
“We are looking for a creamy, unctuous raclette with a beautiful aspect and a beautiful colour,” said Eddy Baillifard, a Swiss restaurant owner known as the “pope of raclette”, who was on the eight-strong jury for the final. Jurors had to consume up to 15 melted cheeses per session, eating apples and drinking tea to clear their palates between them.
More than 90 cheesemakers entered the event held in Morgins in the Swiss Alps, with Switzerland triumphing on home soil. “The French went home with their tail between their legs,” said 20 Minutes, the French daily newspaper. Ten French dairy farms, mostly located in the Alps, entered but only Les Noisettes, from the Haute-Savoie region, won a medal.
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The cheesemaker at Les Noisettes is Yamaguchi, who was born in Tokyo where he went on to study medieval literature before developing a passion for dairy cows.
“It’s incredible,” he said after receiving his silver medal. Yamaguchi, who is in his mid-forties, left Japan in 2002 after growing exasperated with the country’s intensive farming. He chose to move to France after watching the Tour de France, and arrived speaking only a few words of French. He has now mastered the language and the cheese.
He tried his hand at beaufort cheese and abondance before persuading Les Noisettes to let him have a go at raclette.
“He didn’t know anything about the trade at all,” a spokesman for the championships said. “He learnt and through perseverance managed to do an incredible job. Now he has entered the history of raclette.”
Yamaguchi told La France Agricole, the agricultural journal, in an interview in 2021 that he had fallen for the Savoie when the Alpine region was shown on television during the Tour de France. “And I saw that there were cows there.”
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He added that having settled in the Alps, he got up at 4am every day to look at the stars. “It’s paradise,” he said.
The world championships also drew candidates from Belgium, Canada, Italy and Romania.
The Kappacasein Dairy, which is based in London’s Borough market, and Montgomery’s cheese, which is in Somerset, were listed as Britain’s joint representative on the tournament website. Their “raclette and toasted cheese sandwiches are the stuff of legend,” according to Borough market.
