Maybe you have made gougères in the past. Maybe you like your recipe. But you’re going to like this one better. I got it from Napa Valley caterer Sarah Scott, who cooks dinner parties for a lot of the local wine families. If I’m invited to a party and find Sarah in the kitchen, I am so happy. Her gougères are perfection: crunchy outside, airy within. With that first glass of sparkling wine, they’re just what you want.
Read moreIt’s Back!
Meg Smith Photography
Two years (and then some) without the luscious Gabriel Coulet Roquefort. How did we survive? Now this much-missed Roquefort is back in the U.S., armed with all the lab analyses and clean bills of health that the FDA requires. If you were worried about consuming France’s most famous blue cheese (I wasn’t), worry no longer. Imported raw-milk cheeses like Roquefort get more scrutiny than raw chicken, and you can guess which one has the better safety record.
Read moreThree's No Crowd
Meg Smith Photography
Does the world need another truffled cheese? Probably not, in my estimation. Too often, these cheeses seem gimmicky to me, with a heavy-handed or artificial truffle scent and unremarkable cheese underneath. Oh, but wait. I think I’ve just found the star of your New Year’s Eve cheese tray.
Read moreAcclaimed Cheesemaker Calls It Quits
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.
Read moreYou Could Look It Up
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.”
Read moreBefore the Turkey, A Little Cheese
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.
Read moreSecret No Longer
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.
Read moreHome on the Tuscan Range
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?
Read moreFirst Cut is the Sweetest
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.
Read moreDouble Vision
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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