Diary of a Cheese Expert to Be

Heart-shaped Cheese?

It might be because of Valentine's Day or because cheese makers feel they need to use silly gimmicks to differentiate themselves from other cheeses, but what is going on with all the heart-shaped cheeses I saw at Murray's Cheese the other day?

Must... investigate... delicious... cheese...

P.S. Welcome back! The cheese quest is back on!

Cheese Mistress

Maggie: "This lady looks nuts!"
Randy: "You're just jealous becuase you're not the craziest cheese lady on the Internet."

Cheese Guide in Cook's Illustrated

The newest issue of the Cook's Illustrated Magazine sports a cheese-shopper's guide to buying cheese in grocery stores. As with everything that's provided by Cook's Illustrated editors, it is well organized and presented. It is pretty basic, though. You get your parmesan and chevre but not in-depth knowledge.

It was a little cheese-empowering to read this guide since my cheese knowledge seems to have increased rapidly since I started with the cheese expert endeavor. And yet, it was still nice to read about the basic characteristics of the types of cheeses you are most likely to find in a non-gourmet or "regular" grocery store.

The New York Times had an article few months back saying that people are more interested in wine and cheese (and especially cheese) over the past few years. Maybe the fact that Cook's Illustrated had a cheese article is just a symptom of this trend. I am glad though that cheese consumption is on the rise - the more cheese is liked, the more cheese will be available. (And maybe one day we can import unpasteurized cheeses to the U.S., mhm....)

Delicious Grilled Cheese

Granted, grilled cheese is horrendeously bad for you. But oh, it's so delicious.

While researching random cheese-related things on the interweb, I stumbled upon this blog entry (via del.icio.us) featuring a glorious recipe for a grilled cheese sandwich with sauerkraut on rye bread. Oh, man, it looks so good, if it weren't so dreadfully hot today, I'd have one for dinner.

Speaking of grilled cheese, check out the website for the Greatest Grilled Cheese Sandwich in America Contest. Good pictures and awesome-looking recipes.

It's probably somewhat of a heresy to grill some cheeses, such as morbier, but frankly, there's nothing better than hot cheese (well, maybe except raspberries or pickled herring).

Blue cheeses

I've never been a big fan of blue cheese. The flavor is just too powerful. I can see myself eating huge amounts of soft cheeses, nice and creamy, mhm... Yet, for this cheese-exploring endeavor, I've been eating blue cheese. Americans eat blue cheese in a kind of heathan fashion: in salads or as dipping sauce for chicken wings. Terrifying! The French eat it as a dessert cheese and I think that's an appropriate way to eat blue cheese. It is very strong and very powerful - you can't really eat too much of it and the edge is easily taken off by eating blue cheese with fresh fruit, like apples or grapes.

To make blue cheese blue, you have to add the mold to it. This, at least in the case of Roquefort, is accomplished by adding Pennicillium Roqueforti mold. It is added to the cheese curds contained in powdered bread. Then there's the process of aging the cheese, usually in caves. To make the blue part permeate throughout the whole mass of cheese, some flipping of the cheese is required. Since blue cheese is crumbly, this requires a careful approach.

The result is a very sharp cheese with a very specific, almost overpowering flavor. I am learning to overcome it, but it's coming slowly. So far, I have tried French Roquefort, but I will branch out into the milder blue cheeses as well as the more full-flavored ones. Reviews coming soon.

Cheese lunch with Tomette des Alpes

Tomette des Alpes is a cow and goat milk cheese from the Haut Savoie region of France's Rhone-Alpes. It has a quite a terrifying rind, very hard and thick and not really that good (yes, I tried). The cheese is pretty good, "like muddy cheddar" a coworker said. It does sport a cheddar-like flavor but not at all sharp and instead very earthy and mushroomy. I'm not sure I liked this cheese - it felt a little uneven. But it still made a great lunch:

People who claim that cheese is only for appetizers, snacks, or to be melted on things are plain wrong.

]]> I used Ryan's awesome camera to take pictures of this cheese.

The crazy rind:

The insides:

Cheese Making for Beginners

The cheese making for beginners course by David B. Fankhauser, Ph.D. , Professor of Biology and Chemistry at University of Cincinnati Clermont College.

This link has been forwarded to me by Josh. A lot of my friends are very supportive of my learning about cheese and some have even tried to make cheese themselves. I am afraid that cheese making is in my future. Any tips?

The American Cheese Society 22nd Annual Conference

The American Cheese Society is holding its 22nd Annual Conference July 20th through July 24th in Lousiville, Kentucky.

The registration fee is about $350 for the whole conference (early bird) or about $200 per day at the site. It looks really interesting.

The ACS is made up mostly of cheese makers and retailers, but individuals interested in cheese (e.g. cheese writers and cheese experts-to-be) are also welcome to join. The annual cost of membership for an individual is $90 or $160, depending on the kind of benefits one wants to receive.

In addition to all sorts of talks about cheese marketing, starting and running a cheese-making business, etc, the agenda for the conference contains talks such as "From Center Plate to Center Stage: American Artisan Cheese Takes the Spotlight", "Cheddar: from the British Traditional to the American Original" and "Traditional Cheese Styles Compared: American Artisanal Cheeses and Their Models".

The conference brochure lists recommended audiences for each presentation, so you can refer to it to find the cheese-enthusiast presentations instead of being bored by marketing babble in cheese retail presentations.

Best of all, "over 700 cheeses will be on display and available for tasting, along with specialty foods, wines and dishes prepared by some of Louisville's premier chefs."

Link for more information.

Some Thursday cheese links

It's hot today and I don't feel like eating cheese. All I want to do is lounge around. So instead of a new cheese, here's some links:

Matching Cheese and Wine - A pretty good list of cheeses and related general and specific wine recommendations. (Bonus! If you scroll down, you see a picture of Saint Marcellin like the one I reviewed last.)

Bingham Hill - Colorado cheese makers. I've already tried their Harvest Moon and soon will review another one of their cheeses so stay tuned!

I Love Cheese. Period. (And make sure to check out their Cheesemakers Map of the USA!)

Saint Marcellin (not Banon)

Small confession - I bought this cheese on a whim and only because I liked the little ceramic dish it was in. Little did I know what kind of a treat I was in for!

Let me give you a little background. Saint-Marcellin and Banon are two cheeses which used to be made primarily from goat or milk. Nowadays, Saint-Marcellin is usually made from cow's milk while Banon can be either cow or goat milk. They are both French cheeses, soft, so soft that they might actually fall apart if not handled carefully. I guess this explains the little dish that the Saint-Marcellin I got came in. However, the more traditional way of providing structure to this cheese is by wrapping it in grape or chestnut leaves. The leaves are usually pre-dipped in wine. This gives the cheese a very deep flavor, almost bitter, but in fact very nutty and fruity. (I don't know, maybe these descriptions such as "nutty" and "fruity" come natural to a cheese expert. It is starting to seem that it just kind of clicks - learning about cheese as an epiphany!) It spreads on bread like soft butter and tastes delicious!

]]> Saint-Marcellin - view from the top:

Again:

Saint-Marcellin wedge, cut out:

Note: the pieces of bread featured in the picture are miniature pumpernickel bread cocktail slices. They are about an 1.5"x1.5" wide. This makes the cheese about 2-3" in diamater. It might look big and it tastes big, but it's tiny!

Steven Jenkins recommends eating this cheese with olives, which turned out to be the right thing to do. It was, in fact, really good.

I am not sure exactly where the particular Saint-Marcellin I got was made. The cheese came with no label and even Murray's Cheese didn't provide any information. I'll have to ask them next time I go, but in the meantime, if you know, please tell.

Morbier (the real deal)

The time has come to try some really weird cheeses. Morbier is here! Why is Morbier weird? Well, it is made from two milkings (of a cow), one from the morning milking and one from the evening milk. The legend, as it were, goes that a cheesemaker who "invented" Morbier, simply ran out of curds and had to wait for another milking. In the meantime, not wanting to waste the curds he already had to go to waste, he covered them with ash. The ash was to prevent the cheese from drying out, but probably also to keep away bugs (ick!)

]]> Steven Jenkins in his Cheese Primer goes at length about the very subtle difference between the morning milk and the evening milk. Surely, "the evening milk may be fruitier or more pronounced" and as far as morning milk is concerned, "there should be a fleeting, subtle difference in the flavor of a milk coming from a cow that has been [...] motionless through the night". Yes, he goes on for a bit and there's talk of "ruminating in the field" - I guess nothing a cheese lover makes but happy cows (or something)!

But I'm joking. Morbier is truly wonderful, take a look:

This cheese is so good that there are many places that make "Morbier" while it's not technically Morbier on the grounds that it is not even made in a proper place (Franche-Comte Jura or Doubs should are ok, Poitou and Auvergne are a big no-no). These impostor cheeses are made from pasteurized milk and way cheaper, but also much more bland. Morbier is supposed to be deeply fruity and nutty and complex and the fakers don't live up to it. This particular Morbier was made in the Jura Mountains in the town Roanne by Herve Mons and it lived up to its hype. It is recommended to be eaten with ham or salami, maybe on a sandwich, but it is quite delicious on its own, too.

A gathering

I'm slowly finding out that becoming a cheese expert is best when accompanied by friends for the following reasons:

Most cheese stores have a minimum when it comes to cheese purchases. Murray's Cheese, for example, expects that you buy at least a quarter of a pound of each type of cheese. That much cheese is really all one person can eat in one sitting, but, if you have friends over for cheese tasting, you can get lots of different kinds of cheese and not end up feeling sick from overeating. Hooray!

As a relative beginner to the cheese world, it is difficult to come up with correct words to describe the cheese you're eating. Comments from your friends will allow you to better understand the cheese (how profound!)

Eating alone kind of sucks.

A few weeks ago, I invited friends for dinner to taste four cheeses:

Fromage d'Affinois - cow milk, soft, young (2-3 weeks) cheese. Made without using rennet and ripened in a humid cellar. Kind of like Brie, but better.

Fresh Crottin - sheep milk, soft, fresh cheese. Great with white wine!

Oka - cow milk, semi-soft, washed-rind cheese. Comes from the village Oka near Montreal, Canada and has been made since 1881 (originally by monks, but not anymore). Aged 2 months, lower fat as far as cheeses go. Sports a "full, fruity, earthy flavor", according to Murray's Cheese. Delicious. It's supposed to resemble Avergne and Savoie traditional in flavor, so I'll have to check those out.

Hoch Ybrig - cow milk, washed in brine with white wine, pressed cheese. This Swiss cheese comes from a little town near Zurich called Ybrig. It's definitely fun to say. Takes slightly sweet and a bit nutty. Good with heavy red wines.

I am not sure yet, but I think I am developing a taste for what cheese experts describe as "nutty" cheeses. I'm also partial to soft cheeses, like the above-mentioned Fromage d'Affinois, but it seems that soft cheeses are liked by more people than hard cheeses with very defined and strong flavors.

Cheese Vocabulary

One of the harder things I'm finding when it comes to learning about cheese, is picking up the vocabulary used to describe cheese attributes. And I don't mean things like "soft cheese" and "goat milk cheese" but rather things like "this cheese tastes nutty", "this cheese is very fruity" and "rich". It seems that there is a formula somewhere that lets you use these vocabulary words to match cheeses to go together at dinner or when looking for appropriate wine, but online search yields little to no relevant results. It is quite possible though that I'm looking in wrong places. I've been reading Steve Jenkins' Cheese Primer and it's pretty good so far, but it's a lot of information (and cheese) to digest in one sitting. A new sub-goal in learning about cheese: when I find a sane vocabulary for describing cheese, I will post a coherent list of these words on this blog.

Aged Manchego

The first sheep milk cheese since starting this learning about cheese endeavor. It made me slightly nostalgic for oszczypek made in the mountain ranges in the South of Poland (relatively near Krakow, where I was born). Unfortunately, I have to keep my oszczypek eating until next year when I visit Poland. It is made from unpasteurized milk, and, therefore not available in the U.S.

Ok, so manchego, aged - not a bad cheese. It is a pressed cheese from Spain made from raw sheep's milk using only the milk of La Manchega sheep. It is aged over a year and ends up being creamy with a little big of tang to it. It would probably be delicious with dried fruit, like figs. However, it's not extremely remarkable - that is, you can use it in bigger amounts than other, more adventurous cheeses. I feel that this un-remarkableness (is that a word, even?) makes it pretty good for sandwiches. Yes, I could go for an aged manchego sandwich for lunch today...

Chase the Cheesemeister

As you can see, changes in design are forthcoming (and some already happening) to the blog. Most importantly, say hello to Chase the Cheesemeister. Chase is a mouse drawn by James King and named by Derrick. Thanks for helping out, guys!

I'm thinking of Chase having a thought balloon - any ideas what it should say?