Category: Cheese of the Week
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Willoughby: An ode to the ‘Stinky’ Cheese I Brought to an Idaho Wedding
Never travel without a cheesemonger. Or, always invite a cheesemonger to your party. I’ve said one of those things before, and I will likely do so again. I’ve been pretty quiet online throughout most of the month of May. In part, I needed a sabbatical from the interwebs (which means I needed to be left…
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Rivers Edge in the House
You know it’s a good day when a Rivers Edge Chèvre shipment arrives. True Love, Up in Smoke, Peony, Sunset Bay, and Pave Yaquina Bay all make my case happy. This is not just because they are fine examples of a spring cheese by virtue of being soft goat cheeses that were, until about a…
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Reasons Why Red Hawk is Hot
This week’s cheese of the week is a special little guy I picked up in California, its native homeland. The cheese’s name is Red Hawk, and its birth was totally accidental. Red Hawk is a washed-rind triple-cream. It was born out of Mt. Tam, which is Cowgirl Creamery’s organic triple-cream soft-ripened cheese. Mt. Tam was…
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A Cheese I Cantal Love Enough
It’s not enough for the French to have 6,000 types of native cheeses. They have to compete with the English on the one cheese that couldn’t get more English: cheddar. That’s right; the French have a cheddar, too. And it’s delicious. Really, ridiculously delicious. Sure, it’s not really a cheddar—and the French would probably not…
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A Couple of Reasons to Try Coupole
Let me tell you something about my current Cheese of the Week, Vermont Creamery’s Coupole. This petite little brain of a cheese comes in a neat little wooden crate, its delicate exterior protected to a certain extent from the pressures (and cheese pressers) of the world. Its name borrows from the French word for cupola,…
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The French Like Reblochon, But the FDA Prefers Préféré
There are a lot of cheeses we can’t get in the US, thanks to the FDA’s strict rules on importing raw-milk cheeses. Anything aged fewer than 60 days can’t legally make it into the country, which rules out all name-protected bries and camemberts, as well as a whole slew of soft-ripened, fresh and young cheeses.…
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Ricotta: It’s Whey Better than it Seems
Growing up, I thought ricotta was kind of gross. It looked like cottage cheese, which reminded me of snot, and it tasted funny. Oh, how wrong children are about food. Or at least, how crazy it is that our tastes and preferences change and evolve so much as we age. Child-Courtney, in her pre-PhCheese primordial…
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Why Shropshire Gives Stilton a Run for its Money (and Yours)
Orange cheese has a bad rap right now. But not all orange cheese is created equal. As I’ve mentioned in an earlier post, orange cheese came about in order to stop customers from exclusively choosing summer-milk cheeses over winter-milk cheeses. Since winter milk tends to be lighter in color and more subdued in flavor, and…
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Why My Heart Beats for Mahón
There are a few cheeses in my arsenal that are my go-tos—the ones I can gush and go on about to anyone who will listen (or who will pretend to listen). I wrote a few months back about Robiola Bosina being one such cheese. You might call them my favorites. It makes sense, then, that…
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On Selchkäse and Other Smoked Cheeses
People have been asking for smoked cheeses left and right over the past week or so. I’m not sure what’s driving this interest in the headier flavor-set, but I suspect the recent cold Seattle weather has something to do with it. (It snowed here on Monday, and is supposed to again on Thursday. Nothing stuck,…
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Robiola, O Robiola. Wherefore art thou, Robiola?
We recently got in a case of Alta Langa’s Robiola Bosina due Latte. Shrieks issued from the cheese counter as soon as the box was opened and its contents discovered. We were THAT excited about this cheese. Let me put it another way: IT’S MY FAVORITE!!! As in, totally worth gratuitous page formatting and three…