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Janet Fletcher

180 Stonecrest Dr
Napa, CA, 94558
(707) 265-0404
{ Janet Fletcher / Food Writer }

{ Janet Fletcher / Food Writer }

Janet Fletcher

  • Home
  • About
    • About Janet
    • Media
    • Client List
    • Contact
  • Planet Cheese
    • Planet Cheese Blog
    • Planet Cheese Signup
    • Cheese Library
  • Store
    • All Items
    • World Cheese Tour
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    • World Cheese Tour Classes
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  • Recipes
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Grill This Cheese, Please

July 28, 2024 janet@janetfletcher.com

Receiving a new sheep cheese wrapped in grape leaves was all the excuse I needed to fire up the Green Egg. But receiving cooking instructions from the cheesemaker made the decision inevitable. “I recommend grilling it for 5 to 6 minutes, until it gives when you pick it up with tongs,” says the maker. “I love grilling peaches with it.”

Read more
In From: U.S., Milk: Goat, Milk: Sheep Tags grilled cheese, sheep cheese, fresh cheese, grapeleaf wrapped cheese, Blakeville Creamery, Wisconsin cheese, Veronica Pedraza
6 Comments

Missing Cheese is Back in Action

January 2, 2024 janet@janetfletcher.com

Well, cheese fans, the year is off to a great start. A beloved French cheese—one of my favorites—has returned to the U.S. after a five-year absence. To be honest, I had given up hope of ever putting it on a cheese board again, but I hadn’t realized its very survival was in doubt. Now, thanks to some out-of-the-box thinking, this magnificent sheep cheese is on more secure footing and has a future.

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In From: France, Milk: Sheep Tags Abbaye de Belloc, sheep cheese, French cheese, Pyrenees cheese
10 Comments

Basque-ing in Glory

October 31, 2023 janet@janetfletcher.com

If you were limited to eating cheese from only one region (perish the thought), where would you choose? I’m going with the Pyrenees, preferably the French side. The cheeses we get from the Basque Country and neighboring Béarn are so consistently appealing that I don’t even think I would feel that deprived. Two new imports from the region make the choice even easier.

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In From: France, From: Spain, Milk: Sheep Tags Basque cheese, Pays Basque, sheep cheese, Pyrenees cheese, Planet Cheese
6 Comments

What Tradition Tastes Like

September 5, 2023 janet@janetfletcher.com
El Abuelo Ruperto - sheep cheese from Murcia

It’s possible today to make commercial cheese that hands never touch. Milk is trucked to the plant and goes in one end of the production line and packaged cheese comes out the other. How dreary is that?

The cheeses I write about aren’t made like that, but they aren’t often made by old-time methods either—on a farm, from the raw milk of the family’s flock, with hands cutting the curd and flipping the wheels and humans making decisions at every step. The exceptional new Spanish cheese pictured above is an example of the distinction a cheese can achieve when made the hands-on, purist way.

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In From: Spain, Milk: Sheep Tags sheep cheese, Quesos Ruperto, El Abuelo Ruperto, Forever Cheese, Lacaune sheep, Spanish cheese, Spanish sheep cheese, raw milk cheese
2 Comments

Dutch Sheep Cheese for Gouda Fans

April 25, 2023 janet@janetfletcher.com

You don’t see sheep cheese from the Netherlands every day, so I leaped on this one as soon I learned of it. The Dutch make mountains of cow’s milk cheese—about 2 billion pounds a year—but not much else. Goat cheese amounts to less than three percent of the country’s production and sheep cheese is barely a blip. But maybe that’s changing. Ewephoria, a sheep Gouda crafted for the American market about 20 years ago, found an instant fan club (not surprising—it’s like cheese candy), and this newcomer deserves a warm welcome, too. Made with organic milk and matured for six to eight months in the Treur Kaas cellar, this Gouda-like beauty—christened Beppie—is as creamy as a caramel.

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In Milk: Sheep, From: Ireland Tags sheep cheese, Dutch cheese, Gouda, sheep Gouda, cheese from Holland, Treur Kaas, Ewephoria
Comment

Corsican Treasure

April 11, 2023 janet@janetfletcher.com
Planet Cheese - Fleur du Maquis

My husband and I spent three weeks in Corsica a few years ago (do it!), and our visit happened to coincide with a two-day cheese fair celebating the island’s shepherds. We ate a lot of rustic and wonderful sheep cheese and I met at length with Catherine Le Beschu, then the director of an organization that was trying to protect these vanishing cheeses. She told me, to my surprise, that Corsicans don’t eat the herb-coated sheep cheese that is the island’s most famous export. Fleur du Maquis (pictured above) and Brin d’Amour—so similar they’re often mistaken for each other—are insanely delicious so I don’t get why Corsicans disdain them.

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In From: France, Milk: Sheep Tags Fleur du Maquis, Brin d’Amour, Corsican cheese, sheep cheese, herbed cheese, maquis
2 Comments

New Year, New Ewe Cheese

January 3, 2023 janet@janetfletcher.com

Fresh sheep cheese wasn’t even a thing a decade ago. Now we have options, including this newcomer from Spain. Like a buttery cream cheese, it’s all ready to schmear on your morning bagel. Or marinate with extra virgin olive oil and garlic confit for wine o’clock. To savor this cheese at its most seductive, warm it until it quivers.

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In From: Spain, Milk: Sheep Tags sheep cheese, fresh sheep cheese, schmear, bagels, wine o’clock, marinated cheese, Spanish cheese
4 Comments

Fresh Sheep Cheese is Rye Bread Ready

April 26, 2022 janet@janetfletcher.com
Fresh sheep cheese on rye bread

With May on the horizon, it’s prime time for fresh sheep cheese. The ewes are back on the job after some winter R&R and they are giving their all right now. To manage the surge of spring milk, a few creameries produce a soft, rindless, spreadable sheep cheese that I vastly prefer to fresh chèvre. This category hardly existed a decade ago. Now your favorite cheese counter should have (or can get) at least one of these lovelies. Slathered on whole-grain toast, stuffed in pasta, dolloped on pizza…what an endlessly useful cheese.

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In Milk: Sheep Tags sheep cheese, toast, fresh cheese, American cheese, Bellwether Farms, Green Dirt Farm, Hidden Springs Creamery, Shepherds Way Farm, Nettle Meadow, Icelandic rye bread, rye bread, rúgbrauð
6 Comments

Shave This Cheese in Spring Salads

March 15, 2022 janet@janetfletcher.com
Ricotta Salata & Asparagus Salad

Topping my list of cheeses that deserve more love than they typically get: ricotta salata. With spring imminent and asparagus beckoning, this savory sheep cheese should be in your fridge. It’s so useful! I don’t snack on it—it’s not meant for that—but I do shave it in salads and grate it on pasta with spring vegetables or lamb. It loves asparagus, fava beans, peas, fennel, zucchini, beets. Basically, it’s ricotta with moisture removed so it will last longer.

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In From: Italy, Milk: Sheep Tags ricotta salata, ricotta, Saradinia, Sardinian cheese, spring salad, asparagus, asparagus salad, sheep cheese, pecorino, Sardinia
3 Comments

Next-Gen Gouda

March 8, 2022 janet@janetfletcher.com
Sheep mild Gouda

A Dutch gentleman in the cheese business once told me that the reason his country’s cheesemakers put so many different spices in Gouda—cumin, caraway, fenugreek, mustard seed—was because the Dutch eat Gouda every day. You have to change it up or lunch gets boring. Goat Gouda, which didn’t gain traction in the Netherlands until the 1980s, provides some variety in the modern Dutch diet. But sheep Gouda? “I am aware of no exported cheeses from the Netherlands made of sheep’s milk, nor, to my knowledge, is there any dairying of sheep there at all,” wrote Steve Jenkins in his authoritative Cheese Primer twenty-five years ago. Time to strike that, Steve. A new Dutch sheep Gouda has landed and it’s on the march.

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In Milk: Sheep, From: Holland Tags Gouda, sheep Gouda, sheep cheese, sheep’s milk cheese, Betty Koster, Dutch cheese, Friesland, the Netherlands, Rispens
6 Comments
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