Tag: formaggio
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Fresh Cheeses to Freshen up Your Summer Picnics (and Everyday Life)
Fresh cheeses are the wee babes of the cheese world, you might say. Allowed to sit for only a few days before they should be consumed, these youngest cheeses are fresh in all senses of the word. Understanding fresh cheeses requires a quick lesson in cheesemaking. The milk, which must be pasteurized if a fresh…
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Burrata: The Dumpling of Cheeses
Burrata and I have had a complicated relationship since my time in the cheese biz. That’s because it hasn’t always sold the way it was expected, or at least hoped, to sell. In the first cheese shop I worked at, I didn’t really understand what Burrata was. I stocked the few cases we received, it…
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What’s the Deal with Raw Cheese, Anyway?
A woman came into my shop recently searching for “raw cheeses.” She didn’t care what kinds they were, so long as they were raw. This was exciting to me as a cheesemonger, given the hullabaloo this year over raw-milk cheeses. In case you weren’t aware, one person died and seven people became sick with Listeriosis…
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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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Spring Cheeses: What They Are and Why You Should be Eating Them Now
I’ve written briefly in the past about summer- and winter-milk cheeses—wherein two wheels of the same type of cheese will look and taste differently because of what the animal was eating during the time of year when its milk was collected to make the cheese. But there are more than two seasons in a year,…
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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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Musings on an Intensive Three-Days of Cheese
In a bright, naturally lit room lined with six long black tables and headed by a podium, each of the 14 places set at the table is a clockface made of cheese. Three beers headline the place settings, and the tables are strewn at their edges with folders, notepapers, pens, and those folded name placards…
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How to Experience the Bay Area Like a Cheesemonger
One whole, free day to spare in San Francisco before our course at The Cheese School began meant that Alicia and I had already spent an entire day on cheese tourism in the Bay Area before the real cheesiness started. “How cheesy is the Bay Area?” you might be asking yourself. Really cheesy, actually. Aside…
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430 Pounds of Cheese
Four-hundred-and-thirty pounds of cheese. Let that number sink in: 4-3-0. It sounds like it could be a metaphor for my life. Or not a metaphor, but rather my reality—although there are way more than 430 pounds of cheese in my shop. It could also refer to my four days in San Francisco for the Three-Day…
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Upcoming: Three Days of Cheese!
There’s this wonderful thing in the Bay Area called The Cheese School of San Francisco. They offer classes and tastings year-round, but twice a year they offer a three-day intensive course for cheese professionals. It just so happens that two very lucky Seattle cheesemongers are attending the school’s March course, and I happen to be…
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What Makes a Cheddar Cheddar?
I’ve been writing a fair amount about cheddars on here over the past few weeks. It’s a category of cheese that deserves a lot of attention, if only to match its huge presence in the Anglophone foodscapes. After originating in the tiny corner of Somerset and flourishing among the great English cheeses, Cheddar spread not…
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Is My Cheese Still Good?
My parents are pretty lucky; they have a personal cheese specialist they can just dial up whenever they have questions about cheese. (That’s me!) “Hey, we’re at Costco and they have an imported cheese show. Do you know Chimay cheese?” “Hey, we bought a Lancashire Bomb today! How do we open it?” “Hey, can I…
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Cutting the (Night) Cheese
Cutting into a clothbound cheddar is easier when it only weighs 10 or 20 pounds, as opposed to 90. This Beecher’s Handmade Cheese Flagship Reserve is a small-format clothbound cheddar-style cheese, made in Seattle. Flagship Reserve is made with the curds leftover from making Beecher’s Flagship, so it is similar to the famous Cheddar-Gruyère blend.…
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Five Things that are Better with Cheddar
Cheddar has myriad uses in everyday American cooking. That’s a no-brainer. Why wouldn’t you put cheddar into the 1,0001 things we put cheddar in, like macaroni and cheese, casseroles, baked potatoes, stuffed bell peppers, Americanized Mexican food, grilled cheese sandwiches, and apple pie? In much of our cooking, shredded or sliced cheddar is an ingredient—one…