Some of the blue-ribbon winners from the recent American Cheese Society competition in Pittsburgh will never make it to your local cheese shop. They are small-production cheeses that hardly leave their region. On the bright side, many do travel. Why not treat yourself and guests to a blue-ribbon cheese board this week? Your area’s best cheese merchant will likely have at least three of the victors, possibly even those pictured above. Alas, to get the winning cheese I want most, I’ll have to go to Colorado.
Read moreWe Have a Winner
Harbison, a spruce-banded cow’s milk cheese from Jasper Hill Farms in Vermont, topped nearly 2,000 entries to take Best of Show at last week’s American Cheese Society judging. As if that feat weren’t impressive enough, another Jasper Hill creation—Calderwood—placed second. For one creamery to produce the competition’s two top cheeses is beyond astonishing. And Jasper Hill wasn’t done yet. Bayley Hazen Blue, the company’s Stilton-like wheel, earned a blue ribbon in its category.
Read moreHow Rich Can Cheese Be?
Triple-cream cheeses are the industry’s gateway drug. Who isn’t seduced by all that buttery goodness? Cowgirl Creamery’s Mt. Tam, Brillat-Savarin, Explorateur—these luscious creations take cheese to the limits of richness. Pass the walnut bread. But now the triple-cream niche has a new challenger for the butterfat crown. Are you ready for quintuple-cream cheese?
Read moreBumpy Ride for Cheesemakers
This is not the Manhattan skyline. It’s the average price of milk paid to America’s dairy farmers between June 2012 and March 2018. Who can operate a business with price swings like this? Not surprisingly, many dairy farmers can’t. Between January and July of this year, 338 Wisconsin dairy farms stopped milking cows.
Read moreIs A2 Yogurt for You?
Yogurt. Blueberries. Now’s the moment. I’m a cheerleader for plain whole-milk yogurt because it’s so easy to add fresh fruit myself. The challenge, in some markets, is finding yogurt that meets my specs: plain, whole milk, stabilizer-free (no pectin, no gelatin) and not Greek. Straus Family Creamery is my go-to, but a new California yogurt checks all those boxes as well. What’s more, it’s made with A2 milk.
Read moreThin is In
The last time I was in France, visiting Comté producers in the Jura Mountains, I thought I might find a beautiful old cheese plane in an antiques shop. But I didn’t know how to ask for a cheese plane in French, and my French host—a veteran of the cheese business—was no help. He had no clue what a cheese plane was.
Read moreNow Here’s a Fresh Idea
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.
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