From Turin to San Francisco is 9,500 miles, a long journey if you’re a cheese. Fresh cheeses like ricotta and mozzarella have to travel by air, which makes the cost spike. Inspections or missing paperwork can delay entry, further shortening the precious selling time. So here’s one Italian creamery’s solution to the fresh-cheese challenge: produce it in California. Northern Italian know-how meets West Coast milk.
Read moreShow Canada Some Love
The Canada-bashing coming from the White House lately will do nothing to help achieve my goal for U.S.-Canada relations. I want to see more Canadian cheese in the U.S., not less, and the heated rhetoric has me worried. I felt bad about the name-calling from our side, so I picked up a pound of aged Canadian Cheddar, just as a one-woman show of support.
Read moreRogue Creamery’s Next Chapter
Rogue Creamery the Oregon producer of some of America’s most acclaimed blue cheeses, has a new partner: the French dairy giant Savencia. Good news? I wasn’t sure. I’ve been a huge fan of Rogue since David Gremmels and Cary Bryant bought it, in 2002, from Ig Vella, whose father founded it. Gremmels and Bryant had zero cheese experience. But Gremmels had the marketing chops and Bryant, who knew microbiology, quickly mastered the cheesemaking. Ig mentored them both until his death in 2011.
Read moreBuffalo Stampede
You’re not imagining it. Buffalo are roaming all over American cheese counters these days. Buffalo ricotta, mozzarella, Camembert, blue. I haven’t spotted a buffalo Cheddar yet, but surely any day now. From a curiosity to (almost) mainstream in a decade, cheese made with rich water-buffalo milk is having its moment. Many are good; a few are great.
Read moreCheese for the Salad Days
A few weeks ago, I taught a class on pairing rosé with cheeses. I chose the wines, ordered the cheeses, showed up at the venue, composed the plates. And then I looked at the plates and thought: What on earth have I done?
Read moreMasterful Cheese from Magic Milk
Dinner guests don’t usually bring me cheese. Coals to Newcastle and all that. But recently some friends showed up with a new Oregon creation, and let me just say they are welcome back any time. The wedge was luscious, aromatic and unusual—potentially a great new American cheese. But could the cheesemaker repeat the feat? Yes. Would I love it as much the second, third and fourth time? Yes.
Read moreEmbarrassment of Riches
A few years ago, I walked into Eataly, the Italian food mega-emporium in Manhattan, for lunch and became so overcome by all the choices that I left without eating. Lame, I know, but I’m starting to feel like that at some cheese counters, especially when it comes to Swiss cheeses. I have way too many number-one favorites. And matters just got worse. Jumi, a respected Swiss producer, has recently targeted the U.S. market, and the cheeses are landing. You need to know them: all raw milk, all sublime. Steel yourself for some hard choices.
Read moreTwenty Years and Counting
Twenty years ago, many Americans had never heard of sheep cheese. (You can milk a sheep?) I’d say we’ve made progress, thanks in part to pioneer cheesemakers like Jodi Ohlsen Read. Despite a tragic setback just as her sheep farm’s notoriety was spreading, Read and her husband, Steven, are about to celebrate 20 years of cheesemaking at Shepherd’s Way Farms in Minnesota. I’ve admired her cheeses from the get-go and ached for the couple when tragedy struck. The path back to a healthy farm and normal life has been arduous and, to those of us watching, inspirational. “I’m not good at quitting,” says Jodi.
Read moreCheese Meets Rosé
I’m not a bumper-sticker person, but if I were, mine would read, “I brake for ethnic markets.” I love poking around shelves with unfamiliar condiments, grains and cooking implements to see what my kitchen might be missing. Middle Eastern markets are my favorite, but I have rarely spent much time looking at the cheese selection in these stores. Now I’m wiser.
Read moreBlue Debut
The mission: to create a luscious Gorgonzola-style cheese, more creamy than crumbly. An American Gorgonzola dolce, the young cheesemaker imagined. He had tried that spreadable Italian cheese for the first time and fallen in love. “And that’s how it started,” says Joe Moreda of the first cheese he has shepherded from idea to reality. “I told my mom I would like to make it, and she said, ‘Let’s go for it.’” Three years later the world has a new blue cheese.
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