Tag: cheesemaking
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A Wisconsin Cheese Journey: Part 1
Wisconsin: it’s America’s dairy land, the state that generally comes to mind when people think about cheese in the US. As a champion for locavore eating, I have appreciated Wisconsin’s (and Vermont’s, California’s, etc.) cheesemaking heritage, but have focused my attention on the fantastic cheeses made close to home in the Pacific Northwest. Nonetheless, I…
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How Blue Cheese is Made at Twin Sisters Creamery
Looking at a wedge of blue cheese with lines of blue mold rippling through it, you might assume that the mold got there by being injected into the cheese. I have heard this from time to time as an explanation to children or from one adult to another, of how this family of cheeses is…
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Finding the ‘Taste of Place’ in Cascadia Creamery’s Cheese
This is a story about some of Washington state’s finest cheeses and the fairytale-perfect land where they are made. If you drive south on Interstate 5 from Seattle until you cross the Columbia River into Oregon, take Highway 84 East at Portland. The highway meanders along the south bank of the river, treating you to…
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Three Reasons to Treat Yo-self to a Cheesemaking Class
About a year and a half ago, we hired a new baby cheesemonger named Janna at the shop I worked at in West Seattle. One of her previous cheese qualifications was that she had taken a cheesemaking workshop from another local grocery store, PCC Community Markets. Listening to Janna talk about the class, it seemed…
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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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Clothbound Cheddars: Unveiled
We all know what cheddar is; we’ve seen it, we’ve eaten it, we (most of us) like it. But while the name “cheddar” already conjures a place (England), a process (cheddaring), and a style of cheese (duh), the types of cheddars are diverse—adding layers of meaning to a common term. Today I’m interested in just…
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Cow, Sheep, Goat: What’s in a Milk?
Milk is milk, is milk, right? Well, no. All milk serves the same basic purpose of nourishing a mammal’s young, but how that milk accomplishes its goal is different for each animal. Cheeses made from cow’s milk are perhaps the most prevalent in the United States, but goat’s milk cheeses and sheep’s milk cheeses are…
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How to Stretch Mozzarella Curds at Home
If you’ve ever been browsing through a nice selection of cheese and stumbled across a container of stark-white curds simply labeled “mozzarella curds,” you may have wondered, “what do you do with those?” We sell such a thing in our shop, and customers ask that same question at least once every day. While there are…