{ Janet Fletcher / Food Writer }
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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Franklin Peluso, maker of Teleme (pictured above), is profiled in the new Oxford Companion to Cheese.
Some key facts about the new Oxford Companion to Cheese: 3-1/2 pounds, 325 contributors, 855 subjects (including my entry on Franklin Peluso, creator of the Teleme pictured above). “We hope readers will dip into one entry, only to emerge someplace else entirely,” writes Catherine Donnelly, the project’s editor-in-chief. That certainly happened to me when I first cracked open this tome on tommes and skipped from “bread pairing” to “Piave” to “pregnancy advice.”
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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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It would be impossible to name a favorite cheese, but a favorite style? That’s easy. Aged sheep’s milk cheeses---from anywhere—are the ones that disappear first at my house. They get more savory as they mature, not sweeter, so they’re like salted peanuts to me. One bite and I need another. Good news for like minds: we have a new cheese to love.
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If mozzarella di bufala has been your only experience of water-buffalo cheese, you have homework to do. Of course that’s where most of us started—swapping out cow’s-milk mozzarella in our tomato salad for the more gamy and exotic bufala. Then came burrata di bufala with that luscious cream filling. Could cheese get any sexier?
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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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The Kalish twins, Michael and Charlie, have been building credentials in the artisan cheese world since their college days at U.C. Santa Barbara. Now 34, they are on the cusp of celebrity.
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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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Innovation isn’t a word I associate with Basque cheesemakers, but the sublime sheep’s-milk Arpea is reason to rethink that. Created about three years ago by the Fromagerie Agour, Arpea resembles no other Basque cheese I know. A small, semisoft disk from an area known almost exclusively for hard aged wheels, it represents new thinking in this tradition-bound region.
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