The Fifth Annual Cheesemonger Invitiational

Picture, if you will, a cold storage unit in Long Island City. Outside it is a grubby wasteland of featureless warehouses and tiny pieces of broken glass, with only a few taped-up signs and a line of suspiciously young and well-dressed people to mark the door. Inside, a man in a cow costume is standing on a stage, calling himself "Mr. Moo" and periodically shouting things like "If you love raw milk, let me hear you say 'Mooo!'" to a moderately responsive crowd. Around the two large rooms of the warehouse tables have been set up, some offering small samples of cheese while others serve dishes like raclette and fondue and a ploughman's lunch with a whole roast pig. Drink tickets are handed out at the door, and then promptly ignored by the servers behind the two bars, who are distributing cans of craft beer and plastic cups of wine as fast as the lines can reach them. On the stage with Mr. Moo a small group of people who sell cheese for a living are preparing to demonstrate their skills. An Australian television personality stands by and tries to make sense of it all. This is the 5th Annual Cheesemonger Invitational, and I really wish I had thought to take some photos.

We did not go to New York with the intention of having surreal cheese-based experiences. We were there to visit with friends, see the city, and maybe do a little shopping. But when the announcement of the event happened to cross my path two days before, I have to admit that I was powerless to resist. You know me.

Thurscheese: Truffle Moliterno

All hail the champion!

Truffle Moliterno. Winner: Best Cheese

Granted, like most championships these days, this one was won with the help of an enhancing substance. In this case: A whole heaping bunch of ground up truffle. Not a light coat of truffle oil, not a sprinkling of dried powder, just deep veins of the stuff running through an otherwise pleasant firm sheep's-milk cheese and elevating it to almost obscene decadence. You can smell it through the plastic wrap. You can practically smell it through the refrigerator door. This is not a bad thing.*

So, while the other cheeses write irate op-ed pieces about the need for improved testing standards, I'll just be over here, truffling it up.

*It has been alleged that I emitted some sort of appreciative noises while consuming it, however these claims remain unsubstanciated.

Thurscheese Special Edition: The Wedding Cheeses

By popular demand!

Big thanks to Crys for getting this picture. I meant to take one, but as you can see, I was busy.

 From the top:

Smokey Blue

All credit for this one must go to the guy at Country Cheese in Berkeley, who was instrumental in putting this selection together. I knew we needed a blue but didn't have one in mind, because a person can only plan so much, and he was extremely helpful and knowledgeable about their cheese selection. I highly recommend it if you are ever in the Berkeley area and need some cheese, or bulk granola, or Vietnamese spring rolls. It's a full-service kind of place. Anyway, all I know about this one was that it was described as the "smokey blue" and it did indeed have a pleasant smokey flavor.


Cave-Aged Gruyere

From a cave! A longtime favorite of mine; if I was going to make a cheese-based greatest hits album this would totally be on the first disc. The fun part about this, besides eating it, was that our friend at the cheese store (I really should have learned his name-- I think he was the owner) very kindly cut a center section, to minimize the amount of rind. Which meant that the way people cut pieces out of it, it ended up looking like one of those rock formations in the background of the old roadrunner cartoons.


Humboldt Fog

One of the very first cheeses I blogged about, though at the time I was under the mistaken impression that it was a blue. (It's not. The line through the middle is actually vegetable ash. No, I don't know why.) There was more of this one left than any of the others, which may have less to do with its popularity than with the fact that I bought an entire wheel, because when else am I going to get that chance?


Pierce Point, Cowgirl Creamery

Another favorite. And I want you to know that there is no truth to the rumors that I insisted on scheduling the wedding for the middle of summer because that's when this cheese is in season. This was the most local cheese we ended up serving, which is terribly un-trendy of us, but I think we can all agree that the whole "all of this food came from within fifty feet of here" deal is getting a little tired. Unlike the delights of cheese, which are unending.


English Cheddar

Our second selection brought to us by the fine people (person, mostly) at Country Cheese was a very nice cheddar, because everyone likes cheddar. Light color, medium-sharp, not at all crumbly. Went very well with the crackers. I wish I had really thanked the cheese guy adequately for his help and the volume discounts, instead of paying with a credit card like an ingrate who doesn't care how much it costs his small business. My only defense is that it was a very busy Saturday, and it's hard to carry around enough cash to buy that much cheese.


Fromage d' Affinois

Never a bad idea. This is the only one where we had nothing left over, despite the fact that we had an entire wheel when the party started. I hope there was enough for everyone to try some.

Thurscheese: MYOM*

(Off for two weeks and back with my least popular feature! I rock at this.)

Remember that time about forever ago when I spent an afternoon drinking wine and reading Sunset magazine, suddenly decided that I was the kind of person who made things at home and ordered a cheese-making kit and a mushroom log? Yeah, I was a little fuzzy on that one too. But apparently Cameron was getting a little irked about having this unused cheese-making kit hanging around the kitchen,*** so last weekend we went ahead and used it.

And you know what?

It turned out pretty dang good.

Okay, yes, it cost about four times as much as just buying a mozzarella, even before you factor in the time it took. And for all that, if you held a gun to my head,**** I would probably be forced to admit that I couldn't really tell the difference between it and the storebought version.

But whatever. It's cheese and I made it and it is delicious with a little fancy aged balsamic, and I am going to have some more when I get home.

Next weekend, we're making ricotta.

*Make Your Own Mozzarella.**
**How many words can you change in an acronym before the point is lost?
***The mushroom log bloomed once, providing exactly three mushrooms, before returning to its base state of "log." I'm not sure what it says about me that I can't even get something to rot properly, but I'm pretty sure it's nothing good.
****Please don't.

New Year's Cheese

You know what's better than going out on New Year's Eve? Staying home and eating cheese:

Top row: Cowgirl Creamery Wagon Wheel, Blue Stilton
Bottom row: Hirtenkase, Cypress Grove Humboldt Fog, Cave Aged Gruyere
Not pictured: Brillat-Savarin

With the brand new set of cheese knives you got for Christmas:

I'm still not totally sure what the big one is for.

And do you know what's even better than staying home and eating cheese with your new cheese knives, and also quite filling? Staying home and eating graavlax and caviar on blinis* made by Cameron:

It's bad form to sneak too many bites of caviar when someone else is busy cooking. Or so I've heard.

And don't forget the creme fraiche:

It's white sauce!**

Of course, now one may be left of the problem of a great deal of leftover cheese (see above).***

This is what I would call a "manageable problem."


*Modified recipe, because the yeast part seemed like too much work. Basically, pancakes with buckwheat flour, and delicious.
**No, I don't get it either.
***Except for the Brillat-Savarin (not pictured).

Thurscheese: Pierce Point

Pierce Point cheese from Cowgirl Creamery

Confession: I did not take this picture. I know this is not the kind of intellectual honesty you have come to expect from this blog, but I think it's time we all lowered our standards a bit. Don't you?

Anyway, one thing that does not have low standards is this cheese. (Transition! I think that went pretty smoothly.) If you had suggested to me that it might be a good idea to take a soft cow's-milk cheese and slap some herbs and flowers on it, I would have smiled kindly and ask who had been mixing your drinks, but the truth is that it really works. It helps that the cheese itself is quite mild, and so are the herbs, so the effect is less a mouthful of greenery than a breath of spring air in a meadow, but without the cow poop. Kind of the same way a good oyster gives you the sensation of tasting the sea in a way that's very different from getting a mouthful of salt water.

Assuming nobody stops me, this is going on the cheese table for the wedding.

Thurscheese: Tiny brie!

Trader Joe's is a wonderous place, isn't it? Even stupid impulse buys made in a moment of hunger-driven idiocy can turn out well there. Take this, for example.* If person is shopping for frozen lunches on an empty stomach comes across a bag a of individually packed little cups labeled "brie" and buys them because she thinks that sounds like fun and it gives her an excuse to buy crackers, what she deserves to get is some sort of texture-adjusted processed cheese food product that has been flavored according to what a focus group in Chino thinks brie ought to taste like. No reasonable person would expect to get actual tiny rounds of cheese, but that seems to be what has happened here. And they are delicious.

And just in case you think I'm making this whole thing up and that picture is actually of a regular-sized round of brie and a really large plastic knife, I give you this final proof:

I hope that's settled, then.



*Actually, you can't, because I already ate it.

Thurscheese Fashion Report

I love cheese. I love clothes. I do not think these are things that should go together.

Although, I have to admit that I appreciate the efficiency of having the hostess and the appetizer tray as an all-in-one deal.

Thurscheese: Roomano

There are a few things I ask for from my cheese. One is, of course, to be delicious*. Others, in no particular order, include spreadability, failure to make the refrigerator smell like a lower class of toxic waste dump, and help with my taxes.** It hadn't occurred to me to ask for a name that is fun to say, but that one's going on the list now. ROOmano!

I assume this is some sort of relative of the more common Romano, as in parmesan, but I lost the Handy Information Sheet and I'm in kind of a hurry so I don't have time to look it up. Supporting this theory is the fact that it tastes quite a bit like a good parm, smooth and salty and toothsome. And, as someone who has for most of her life eaten the parmesan rinds as a kind of special treat and didn't realize this was weird until she did it in front of someone else, I think I know whereof I speak.

Speaking of non-sequiturs, I'm off to Boston (and nearby Worcester, which is much more annoying to spell, and possibly also to visit), so blogging is going to be kind of sparse for the next few days unless I can get blogger to cooperate with my iPad. On the other hand, there will probably be a fair amount of tweeting, mostly on the subject of how boring work events are, so stay tuned! Or not.


*That's really the main thing.
**Hey, it never hurts to ask.

Thurscheese: French Raclette

A Case of Mistaken Cheesedentity

It's not that I doubt the labeling. If my cheese-club provider claims that this is a slice of "French Raclette," who am I to dispute that? It's just that I have some very specific ideas of what raclette should taste like, and I think it should be more along the lines of this and not, well, this. Not that it wasn't perfectly nice. Smooth, creamy, a little nutty, very mild rind, all good things for a cheese to be. But it's like opening a jar of almonds and getting cashews: perfectly fine, just not what I was expecting.

Thurscheese: Le Moulis

Well, after that last little cheese meltdown* I think we'd better take it easy with this one. And brief, because there just isn't much to say, aside from that it is a nice cheese. Nice and mild, nice nutty finish, nice smell. It had small, evenly-sized air pockets spread evenly through it, which were nice enough, I guess, assuming they were meant to be there. You could serve this at a party and people would say, "Hm, that's a nice cheese." And you would say, "It is isn't it?" and then you could go back to talking about how you kind of miss American Idol since you stopped watching it, but not enough to spend your time actually listening to Steven Tyler talk, and they would agree, and point out that J.Lo isn't exactly one of the great thinkers of the age either.


See? That was much better.


*There's some kind of fondue-based pun to make there, I just know there is.

Thurcheese: Defeat at the Hands of Munster

In the life of every cheese lover there comes a Moment.* That magical point in time when you are faced with the cheese that will test your resolve, that will prove whether you are a true connoisseur or merely a Velveeta-eater with pretensions. In that moment, the truth of your desire to consume and enjoy the cheeses of the world is laid bare.

Friends, I have looked into the Heart of Cheese, and I blinked.

It did not begin well. As soon as I opened the shipping box, before I even took any of the cheeses out of their wrappers, I could already begin to smell it. If I had just received a package of normal food that smelled like that, I would have sent it straight back with an angry note and probably complained about it on Twitter, but cheese isn't like that. Sometimes, cheese smells, I reasoned. This must be one of those times.

So I unwrapped the cheese and took my picture, and the smell grew steadily stronger. It was a horrible, sour, rotten smell, a stink that could wake the dead, and make them say thanks anyway, we'd rather be dead. But still, I held out hope. After all, it could turn out to be like durian, the famously foul-smelling Asian fruit that actually has a surprisingly mild taste**. Maybe the cheese wouldn't taste as bad as it smelled.

And the truth was, it didn't. It tasted worse. I don't know exactly how to describe the flavor, except to say that this was one of those times when it was really very clear to me that what cheese is is, essentially, milk that has been allowed to spoil so completely that it turns into a semi-solid, runny, lump. My taste buds, under the influence of hundreds of generations of selective pressure not to let me eat something that was clearly going to kill me, reacted violently. Even Cameron, who regularly eats kimchi straight out of the jar, almost spit it out.


I have faith in Artisanal, my cheese club source, that they are only sending me the best examples of the kind. I am sure that there are cheese-lovers in the world who would have clapped their hands in glee upon being presented with a Munster of this quality. But, dear readers, I am forced to admit that after that one small taste, I took that cheese straight to the trash and threw it in.

And then I took the bag out to the garbage chute before it stank up the whole apartment.



*At least, I assume there does. Maybe it's just me.
**A little like strawberry, with a touch of gas leak on the finish.

Thurscheese: Brillat Savarin

Tell Me What You Eat and I'll Tell You That It's Cheese.

I'm not sure if I should be feeling pleased with myself or cheated, but I've had this cheese before. It showed up on a cheese plate at a restaurant a few years ago, and I liked it enough to remember the name and find it in the store. Actually, remembering the name was the easy part, because I was already familiar with it. Brillat Savarin was a French lawyer, essayist and gastronome and, more to the point, he was prominently quoted in the opening of every episode of the original, Japanese, Iron Chef, with which I developed a long-running and only somewhat ironic obsession with in the early 2000s*. I even threw an Iron-Chef-themed party at one point, during which I burned my hand trying to cook satay on the barbecue grill.

Which brings me to the really important news: Don't tell the cable company, but we have somehow gotten a free upgrade to the better cable package, which includes, among other things, The Cooking Channel, which appears to be basically the Food Network before they discovered reality shows and they show the old Iron Chef episodes. So I am reintroducing myself to those simpler times, not to mention the wide wonderful world of premium cable that has suddenly become available.**

Oh, and also we had some cheese. I recommend it.


*It is one of the great failures of our times that we never managed to come up with a decent nickname for that decade.
**BBCAmerica! Which shows Star Trek: The Next Generation reruns in primetime for some reason! But also Top Gear, so all is forgiven.

Thurscheese: Grassland Blue

Cow's milk, Minnesota

Can anyone actually tell different blue cheeses apart? We've had three now, because that's how far behind I am in keeping up with my cheese shipments, and I've enjoyed them all, but I couldn't really tell you the difference between them. I mean, sure, they don't all taste like blue cheese dressing, or blue-cheese-flavored Laughing Cow cheese, and I suspect I could tell them apart if I had them side-by-side, but tasted a month apart I honestly don't think there's much I can say to distinguish one from another.

I'm starting to suspect that I may not be a very good cheese-blogger.

Thurscheese: Hoch Ybrig

cow's milk, Switzerland

The tasting notes say "washed in white wine brine, aged by 'master affineur Rolf Beeler near Zurich.'" I say "Raclette!" because that's what it tasted like.

Thanks to my mom's Swiss heritage, we would have raclette occasionally when I was growing up, cooked on a lethal-looking contraption that melted the entire side of a quarter-wedge of cheese with an exposed heating element that is probably the reason they don't sell them here anymore. (Although a similar item does seem to be available from Europe.) It's a wonderful thing-- who doesn't enjoy a dinner of melted cheese?-- but the downside was that just when the melting process really got going was about the time when everyone was too full to eat another bite. Which is part of the reason these newfangled models are less fun; there's nothing Swiss about portion control. Also: no giant cheese wedge.

I wonder if there's such a thing as a Giant Cheese Wedge of the Month club?

Thurscheese:

Rocky Sage (goat's milk, New York State)

(Please ignore the label, that's from the last one. My skills as a set decorator are sadly overrated.)

What is it with cheesemakers and plants? Last time it was vegetable rennet and wood ash, this time it's Salvia* under the rind. It doesn't make a lot of sense to me-- when you are after some cheese, the first thing on your mind is not generally, "I hope it comes with vegetables."

That said, this one was nice, and I wouldn't have noticed the plant-aspect if the HSoP hadn't pointed it out to me. It's a young goat cheese, fresh and quite light in flavor, a little crumbly for spreading but nice with bread. And wine.

Any psychoactive properties went entirely unnoticed.


*I was wondering why that plant name sounded familiar to me. Then I remembered.

Thurscheese: The First Shipment

In my last post before the holidays I mentioned that I had fulfilled a life-long* ambition and joined a cheese-of-the-month-club, with shipments to begin shortly.

They began:

This is the December shipment-- four cheeses of varying hardnesses and intensities and a handy tasting sheet so you know which is which and what to drink with it. For whatever reason I decided to start with the second one on the intensity chart:

According to the Handy Sheet of Paper (HSoP), it is a raw sheep's milk pecorino, made with a wild artichoke vegetable rennet, with its rind covered in wood ash. Which probably combine to explain a flavor to the cheese I could best describe as "green," not in terms of age or maturity but more along the lines of tasting like vegetation. Still very tasty, but I think it's telling that this is the only one of the cheeses that we didn't entirely finish.**

Also, that ash on the rind gets everywhere.




*At least, for the part of my life when I knew that cheese-of-the-month-clubs existed.
**We did come pretty close.

Thurscheese: By The Book

I don't know if I've mentioned this, but I got an iPad* for my birthday. (I did? Well, you might have forgotten.) And the first thing I did, after holding it up over my head and dancing around with it like Clara at the beginning of The Nutcracker, was to install the Books app and get to downloading.

Because I am cheap, one of the first things I did was to check out what was available for free, because who doesn't like things that are free? And, along with some surprise bonus Agatha Christies and obvious essentials like Sherlock Holmes and Winnie the Pooh, I came across the book that may change my life forever.

By Robert Carlton Brown, The Complete Book of Cheese really is just that. Written in 1955, it covers every aspect of the world of cheeses, from culture** to history to tasting notes on the complete range of products, domestic and international, to recipes. For it to be any more complete, we'd have to invent new kinds of cheese.

Obviously, this is going to be a great reference for this blog, especially when my cheese-of-the-month-club shipments start arriving.*** And I will get to the meat of the book later, but as an introduction I would like to share a few highlights of cheese poetry, of which there seems to be a surprising amount.

Goats 'n' Honey

Is there anyone who doesn't like the Trader Joe's Fearless Flyer? It's so counter-intuitive. I mean, when you think about supermarket flyers it's all big pictures and bright colors; sale prices in 32-point font and no concepts more complicated than "pork butt." But none of that for TJ's. No, they put out a multipage, two-color opus of dense text and occasional line drawings. Essays on the spice trade! Treatises on meatloaf! And people read it!

Well, I do, anyway. And it works, because after I have read it, I want a lot of the things they list in it, which is the point of an advertising circular, after all. Which goes a long way towards explaining why I showed up at writing group this week with (among other things) a bottle of seven-dollar pinot noir and a log of honey-infused goat cheese.

Which was every bit as tasty as promised in the flyer, consumed by the majority of the attendees (including one alleged vegan) and is now sitting in the fridge, waiting for me to come home and calling softly.

Thurscheese: The Unexpected Combination

You can learn interesting things when from leftovers. For example, you can learn that orange juice has an expiration date for a reason, and not all Chinese take-out can be resurrected by stir-frying. But sometimes you learn good things too.

For example, did you know that if you take some whole wheat pita bread:

Cut it into sixths, toast them and split the sides apart, you basically end up with pita chips:

Which serve very well as a base for Cowgirl Creamery Triple Cream "Mt. Tam":

Which makes a very nice counterpoint to Amy's Kitchen organic vegetarian chili*:

And you have a dinner that is not bad at all? 

Well, now you do.

(You also know that we are a household of obnoxious yuppies, but I'm guessing you could have probably figured that out anyway.)

*Not leftovers, but bought by the case at Costco for easy dinner-making. Some days you just don't want to try.