My fava bean crop was a disaster this year—diseased leaves, low yield. I have no clue why, but the best gardener I know had the same issues so I’m not taking it personally. The upshot is that I have had to be miserly with the favas and the harvest is ending way too soon. In my garden, it’s now or never.
Read moreSlumping Beauty
New York’s Meadowood Farms specializes in sheep’s-milk cheese, which means the creamery is idle for several months each year. Sheep don’t produce milk year-round in any case, and Meadowood’s practice is to milk them only when they’re on pasture. In Cazenovia, just east of the Finger Lakes, that’s a lot of down time.
Read moreNo Trivial Pursuit
If ever a cheese had promising genes, it would be this Wisconsin goat Cheddar. Introduced earlier this year, Trivium has more than two parents, actually—but that hardly raises eyebrows these days. “It’s the love child of our threesome,” claims Arnaud Solandt, one of the dads.
Read moreRaw Milk Manifesto
Always Raw: (clockwise from top) 5 Spoke Tumbleweed; Meadow Creek Grayson; Matos St. George; Grafton Village 2-Year Cheddar
Aged cheeses made with raw milk are dwindling in number, in part because FDA scrutiny makes the future uncertain for cheesemakers who choose to work in this traditional way. Even so, some persist. I’ve asked several leading cheesemakers who work exclusively with raw milk to tell us why they bother.
Read moreWhy So Expensive?
(left to right) Oveja Negra Manchego ($30/lb); Pecorino di Filiano ($20/lb); Bellwether Farms Pepato ($40/lb)
“For years, we’ve held our price down,” the cheesemaker told me. But he couldn’t hold the line any longer. The economics of aged sheep’s milk cheese was forcing him to bump up prices, and not by a little. What I didn’t understand, and what the cheesemaker convincingly explained, was why comparable wheels from Europe often cost much less.
Read moreA Century in the Making
I’m always intrigued to learn how a cheese goes from idea to reality. This luscious newbie from West Marin can trace its roots back more than a century, to the day when 17-year-old Fredilino Lafranchi left his home in the Swiss canton of Ticino to try his luck in the U.S. He had $35 in his pocket
Read moreSharp Attack
Seriously, what is “seriously” sharp? You’ve seen mild, medium and sharp Cheddars at the supermarket. Maybe you’re the extra-sharp type. For some time now, I’ve been pondering what sharpness means and where it comes from. People ask me all the time what make Cheddar sharp, and I don’t have an answer.
Read moreBoard Games
No, it’s not art. It’s a cheese board, and it’s meant to be consumed down to the last pistachio. Cheese artiste Lilith Spencer creates these edible dreamscapes for Cheesemongers of Santa Fe, the year-old store where she works. Wowza. Looks like we’re all going to have to up our game.
Read moreShow Time
The annual Fancy Food Show in San Francisco in January is equal parts delight and dread for me. While it’s energizing to see so many amazing cheeses and cheese people in one place, my appetite always peters out before the cheese does. It’s agonizing at the end of the day to look at gorgeous mountain wheels from some new Swiss affineur and think, “I just can’t.”
Read moreWhere Cheese Begins
During college, I spent half of my sophomore year studying in Aix-en-Provence, in the south of France. That’s where I learned to love cheese in all its forms, from stinky puant de Lille (literally, the “reeking cheese from Lille”) to rock-hard chèvres. I often ate lunch in the university cafeteria because it was so tasty, and more often than not, the meal ended with little containers of Petit Suisse, a super-fresh cream-enriched cow’s milk cheese that you sprinkled with sugar and ate like yogurt. What a delicious and wholesome dessert.
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