Late last year, Jennifer Bice announced the sale of Redwood Hill Farm, her goat milk products company in Sebastopol, California. The purchaser? Emmi, the Swiss dairy giant, which also bought Cypress Grove Chèvre, makers of Humboldt Fog, from founder Mary Keehn five years ago. With the sale of Laura Chenel’s Chèvre to a French firm in 2006, the country’s pioneering producers of goat cheese are no longer American owned. Recently, I spoke to Bice by phone about the sale and its ramifications.
Read moreHigh Spirits
I know I’m late to this party, but I’m just learning how appealing a fine brandy can be with cheese. Not every cheese, of course, but many firm aged cheeses have roasted nut, caramel and brown-butter notes that complement the heady aromas in a brandy glass.
Read moreStrong Bread
I’ve never met a fruitcake I didn’t like, but panforte is first among equals. I only make it at Christmas time for some reason, although it’s a nice companion for cheese year round. I’ve tweaked this recipe over the years to get the spicing just where I want it and the right proportion of fruit to nuts. (Lots of nuts.) It keeps a long time, but not at my house.
Read moreSchloss is Boss
With immigration such a hot-button issue, it’s worth pondering what the American cheese industry would look like if “secure the borders” had been the policy in the past. Immigrants were this country’s first cheesemakers— British, Dutch and Germans in the East and Midwest; Italians, Swiss Italians and Portuguese in Northern California. These European transplants didn’t just make our cheese; they were the customers, too, especially for smelly cheeses like Marin French Schloss.
Read moreWas Cheddar Ever Better?
It’s the people’s cheese, an item on grocery lists everywhere every week. Cheddar makes the ooze in mac-and-cheese and the molten blanket on many a burger. But that’s the cheap stuff. The other Cheddar, made by hand in clothbound wheels, is cementing America’s reputation for craftsmanship.
Read moreIt's a Whopper
This cheese is big. No, it’s ginormous. It’s Edelweiss Creamery’s Emmentaler, one of only two Swiss-style cheeses still made in the U.S. in the traditional massive format.
I learned a few things about Emmentaler recently from Bruce Workman, a Wisconsin Master Cheesemaker and owner of Edelweiss:
Chèvre with a Sweet Note
If you like salted caramels—everyone nodding?—you will love Stanislaus Caprine. Dense, sweet and salty, this aged goat cheese reminds me of dulce de leche, the concentrated goat’s-milk caramel. The cheese’s name is slightly unwieldy, but Californians will recognize Stanislaus as a county in the state’s fertile Central Valley. Walter Nicolau, the cheesemaker, is a fourth-generation dairyman there who started his own farm and made his first cheese at the age of 20. Nicolau Farms is less than five miles from where Walter’s great-grandfather had his cow dairy.
Read moreRaw Deal
Will you miss them when they’re gone? America’s raw-milk cheeses haven’t been outlawed—yet—but they are definitely under threat. The FDA is currently scrutinizing this tiny sliver of the dairy world and considering heightened regulations. Although an outright ban strikes me as unlikely, the agency may well make compliance so onerous and expensive that many raw-milk cheese producers will toss in the towel.
Read moreCheesemongers Talk Value
Watching prices for some cheeses top $40 a pound is making me anxious and cranky. I still buy them because it’s my business to taste them, but I worry that many people are being priced out of the experience of great cheese. Of course, a lot of people are priced out of luxury restaurants, too, but it just seems that fine cheese, such a fundamental foodstuff, should not be reserved for the one percent.
Read moreTriple Play
Introduced in March of this year, Tomales Farmstead’s Teleeka is already outselling the four other cheeses made by this California creamery. I’m not surprised. Inspired by La Tur, the wildly popular bloomy-rind cheese from Northern Italy, Teleeka has a luscious factor that’s hard to resist.
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