{ Janet Fletcher / Food Writer }
Redwood Hill Crottin, Redwood Hill Bucheret, Redwood Hill Terra…so long. Great to have known you. Rest in peace. Redwood Hill founder Jennifer Bice (above right) has made her last batch of California goat cheese.
After thirty years of production, Bice has decided to cease making the pioneering Sonoma County chèvres that helped launch this country’s artisan cheese movement. I’m sad but not too sad. Bice has taken some unusual steps to ensure that these cheeses will soon live again.
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Shortly before I piled the cheese curds on a platter, sprinkled them with homegrown Espelette pepper and surrounded them with olives, I learned that this was a really lame idea. Cheese curds are supposed to be scarfed down like popcorn, straight from the bag. “They’re the potato chips of dairy,” says Jeanne Carpenter, a cheesemonger in Madison and authority on Wisconsin cheese. Obviously, I did it anyway, because fresh curds are rare where I live and worth some ceremony, and these were the best I had ever had.
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(l to r): Raschera, Taleggio, St. George, Campo de Montalban, Chevre in Blue
Yikes. Does your credit-card balance look like mine? I know January sends many of us into fits of austerity, but cutting back doesn’t have to mean cutting out. Keep eating cheese! I prowled my local cheese counters for tasty options under $20 a pound and had no trouble assembling a list of worthy contenders. These ten selections deliver amazing value and most of them are in shops year-round.
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Anthony-Masterson Photography
Recently the husband-and-wife owners of Georgia’s acclaimed Many Fold Farm posted a dismaying announcement on Facebook: On January 1, they would cease making cheese.
The news rattled the cheese world because the young creamery seemed to be thriving, with a blue ribbon for Condor’s Ruin at the American Cheese Society competition, a second-place finish for the aged Peekville Tomme, and a growing presence for its sheep’s milk cheeses in influential shops.
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Looking for an American cheese for Thanksgiving? Of course you are. You could set out a fine bandaged Cheddar, or maybe some fresh local goat cheese with olives, but if you want to put the most smiles on the most faces, serve pimento cheese. Or as we say in my home state of Texas: puh-menna cheese. It’s so retro, it’s in again.
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Cheese never tastes better than from a fresh-cut wheel, so my introduction to Goat Lady Dairy’s Providence was about as good as it gets. I had stopped into San Francisco’s Cheese Plus just as the monger was making the initial cut into this crusty aged North Carolina goat cheese. What sweet, nutty, caramel-like aromas. I took home a big chunk.
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“I don’t know if we’ve ever introduced a new cheese that has had this much instant acclaim,” said Vermont Creamery owner Allison Hooper about the recent debut of St. Albans. “We didn’t anticipate it.”
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“I stole the idea from George Washington,” admits Bill Owens, the Northern California brewer credited with popularizing pumpkin ale. Historians tell us that our first President was a beer enthusiast, and that he brewed ale from gourds. Now, 250 years later, pumpkin beers are an annual American rite and a sudsy segue into autumn. Pair them with a few of the cheeses they like and there’s your debate-night platter.
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Made from sheep’s milk and wrapped in grape leaves, Ledyard is one of America’s most impressive new cheeses. And if you want to taste it before the year’s supply dries up, hop to it. The sheep are about to go on sabbatical.
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Move over, mozzarella. Burrata—a cheese that most Americans had never heard of a decade ago—is summer’s breakout star. I know that from restaurant menus, from observing grocery carts and from these stats from Di Stefano Cheese, the Southern California burrata producer whose product I adore:
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