Tag: cheese blog
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Get Your Goat with Queso Ibores
One of the most frequent requests we receive at my cheese counter is for raw-milk goat cheese. While there are plenty of raw-milk options among our cow’s milk cheeses, there are ridiculously few options in the sheep-and-goat set. We recently brought in a cheese to help fill the void—and add a bit of color to…
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CSAs: A New Way to Get Cheesy
Step aside, grocery stores and online shopping. The CSA is here! You may already be familiar with the acronym CSA as it relates to fruits and vegetables. CSA stands for “Community Supported Agriculture,” and it is a way for folks to buy shares of a local farm’s harvest. Think of it as everyday people helping…
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10 Intimidating Cheese Names and How to Say Them
A specialty cheese counter can be an intimidating place. You walk up and are presented with 400 different types of cheese all sitting together, begging for your attention. If you don’t know what you want, it can be a struggle to pick something out from the multitude before you. (Luckily, that’s what cheesemongers are for—to…
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Can Dogs Eat Cheese?
Google search trends will tell you that pet owners aren’t sure whether to feed their cats and dogs a lot of things.[i] The reason for that is dogs, cats, and other animals metabolize foods differently than humans. So not everything that we love to eat is something they should eat, even if they seem to…
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What in Consternation is a Tomme?
Literature nerds may chuckle softly to themselves at the title question, “what in consternation is a Tomme?” Even the Oxford Companion to Cheese starts its explanation of the name with a reference to words: “The name most likely derived from the Greek word tomos or the Latin tomus, meaning a cut, slice, or section of…
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Burrata: Bathing Beauty of the Cheese World
Luscious, voluptuous, silky, oozy, creamy butteriness. If you aren’t already turned on to Burrata, you should be. Hailing from the region of Puglia, Italy, this gorgeous little cheese’s name means “butter.”[i] Burrata is a member of the pasta filata family of cheeses: those stretched-curd cheeses related to Mozzarella, Oaxaca, and Provolone. Yet in a twist,…
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Tasting Notes: Métier Brewing Company Beers and Cheese
This year has wrought its share of terrible things, but one bright spot in the darkness is the beautiful foods that are still being produced for us to enjoy. Just as animals don’t stop producing milk, plants don’t stop growing and people don’t cease needing to eat—even when lives are threatened by a pandemic, social…
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How to Pair Cheese and Beer
The first beverage pairing that comes to mind for many cheese eaters is wine. But humans have been eating cheese with both wine and beer for a very long time. Humans started making cheese between 6500 and 6000 BCE.[i] Then they started making the oldest-known wines in 5980 BCE[ii] and the first beers around 5000…
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How Small Creameries Hang in the Balance of Quarantine and Coronavirus
(with Links to Support Local Producers) It was a drizzly Friday afternoon in mid-March when Lynn Swanson received the call that Seattle’s farmers markets were closing. Lynn was distraught about the news for good reason: she makes sheep’s milk cheeses on the farmstead creamery that she and her husband own on about 80 acres of…
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Why You Should Stop Describing Cheeses as ‘Sharp’
Did you ever have an elementary or middle school teacher ban a word from the classroom, saying that everyone was using the word too much and you all needed to try to find other words to describe what you were trying to say with the now-banned word? I did; I remember having an elementary school…
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A Wisconsin Cheese Journey: Part 3
[This is the final post in a three-part series on the Cheesemonger Invitational winners’ trip to Wisconsin in October. You can read the first part here and the second part here.] My third full day in Wisconsin started off by jolting me with the hard, cold reality that I had already acquired a lot of…
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A Wisconsin Cheese Journey: Part 2
[This is a continuation of a three-part series on the Cheesemonger Invitational Winners’ trip to Wisconsin in October. You can read the first part here.] After two nights in Madison, I found myself charmed by Wisconsin. The landscape was not as boring as I imagined it would be, the people were friendlier and more open…
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Fantello Farmstead Creamery: A New Washington Cheesemaker to Know
It was a grayish, early spring day in western Washington when I set out to spend my day off doing what I do best: getting cheesy. I drove from my home in Federal Way through the town of Auburn and into an agricultural area beyond that I had never before explored. The space between Auburn…
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The Non-Melting Cheese That Should Be a Staple in Your Kitchen
One of my favorite cheese puns is a joke about Halloumi: “What does cheese say when it looks in the mirror?” “Hallou-mi!” I’m not just a fan of this pun because it teaches you how to pronounce the name of a cheese that is obviously sassy and feeling itself, but also because it is about…
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Lost Peacock Creamery: From #ThatFarmLife to Fabulous Farmstead Cheese
In a recent post, I briefly explained the difference between artisanal and industrial cheeses. But among artisanal cheeses, there are also differences. There are cheeses that boast of being ‘farmstead’ cheeses, and there are those that are simply ‘artisan’ or ‘specialty.’ Artisan cheeses should be made by hand, or with as little help as possible…