Another fabulous cheese was the Sartori Reserve Pastoral Blend:
Though this company does that mid-word, corporate, internet-capitalization thing that drives me nuts (“SarVecchio” Parmesan, “BellaVitano”, etc…) they make some pretty damn good cheese. This is a big wheels of sheep/cow cheese that shows the best flavors of both milks. Nutty and sharp with a great caramel aftertaste.
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Tagged acs 2010, acs favorites, american cheese society favorites, sartori
Yay! My book got chosen for a book club!
Sunday, October 24th, November 21st, & December 19th, 4-6PM, Ticketed
Food Lit Club Meetings
$30 without books; $70 with books
Tickets: https://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/130779
Announcing the fourth 3-month installment of our popular food lit bookclub! We’ve got special guests in both October and December, so read up and come ready for a great discussion! This time we are reading:
October: The Righteous Porkchop: Finding a Life and Good Food Beyond Factory Farms by Nicolette Niman: an in-depth exploration of meat eating from the point of a view of a vegetarian cattle rancher. Extra: Nicolette and her husband Bill will be at the discussion session to talk to you in person about ranching, vegetarianism, and the ethics of eating meat.
November: Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food by Paul Greenberg: a hard look at the effects of world fish consumption on cod, salmon, sea bass, and tuna.
December: Cheesemonger: A Life on the Wedge by Gordon Edgar: a hilarious and honest look at how a local cheese legend came to be. Extra: Gordon will be at the discussion to give you in-person answers to your questions and behind the scenes extras!
Here’s how the club works – please note important DATE changes!
1. By signing up you commit to reading the book of the month and attending the club meeting for three months. At the end of three months you can continue on in the group or choose to give up your spot to a newcomer.
2. Heather Knapp is our fearless moderator and she sends discussion topics/questions to members before each monthly meeting.
3. This time, because of holidays and scheduling, all club meetings take place at 18 Reasons at 4PM on Sundays as follows: October 24, November 21, and December 19.
4. The club tends to organize some sort of rotating snack duty or potluck system (there are no snacks or beverages provided by 18 Reasons).
5. You can choose to pay only to participate or you can purchase the books with your sign-up. If you purchase books, they are available for pick-up from Omnivore Books and 20% of the proceeds will go to benefit the work of 18 Reasons.
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I’m a big fan of River’s Edge Chevre. Their Up In Smoke and Valsetz are staples in our domestic goat section. However, I had never tried the River’s Edge Mayor of Nye Beach until the judging. I had no idea who made this cheese but I scribbled down the number (and took this picture) so that I would be sure to find out.
Washed with a local ale, this cheese has a BIG flavor, pungent, sweet, fruity and tangy. Awesome job.
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Tagged acs 2010, acs favorites, american cheese society favorites, river's edge chevre
Another cheese that surprised me was the Saxon Creamery Greenfields:
The batch at the show seemed to finally reach the bigger flavor and pungency that I’ve always wanted from this cheese. This is true family-farmed cheese from Wisconsin and the price is great for what you get. This is an Oka-style cheese for all you Canadian immigrants out there. Buttery and pungent.
During Best of Show voting I seriously considered this as one of my top 3 cheeses.
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Tagged acs 2010, acs favorites, american cheese society favorites, saxon creamery, wisconsin
Just for new readers of this blog — of which there seem to be a bunch more recently — I also have a facebook which syndicates the entries here. Cheesemonger: A Life on the Wedge facebook page. Since my entries are somewhat sporadic here, a couple of people have asked for an easier way to keep track so there you go.
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Alright, the ACS conference feels like years ago and I’m still not finished mentioning my favorite cheeses. I need to get a move-on, eh?
A cheese that surprised me with how much better it has gotten was the Meadow Creek Dairy Appalachian which took first place in the American Originals (original recipe made form cow milk) category:
I have always loved their Grayson, a raw milk Taleggio-style cheese, and I love that they are a pasture-based dairy from Virginia, but while I always thought the Appalaichian was good, this batch I tasted at the conference was fabulous. I always kind of lumped this in with the other American-made Alpine-style cheeses, but the Appalaichan proved itself to have some very unique flavors. Nutty, grassy, sweet, a little pungent. This is a big success!
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Tagged acs 2010, acs favorites, american cheese society favorites, meadow creek
For the longest time, I couldn’t decide whether to drive or fly to Los Angeles for my reading at Skylight Books. Flying is a little quicker, but I’d need a car down there. Flying would be easier on my body, but my ears are still a little messed up from my last flights. Finally, I decided that since I was bringing cheese, I should just drive so I could bring my whole cheese-party-at-the-bookstore kit, including tiles and my full set of cheese knives. L.A. always appreciates a big show.
Skylight Books is awesome. I’d visited a couple of used bookstores in LA, but never had the opportunity to go to a new one. James Ellroy called it the best bookstore on the West Coast. Really, he told me that last night. But that’s another story. I walked around the store with the happiness one can only find in a well-stocked bookstore that cares about the written word.
Look at all these awesome books that I’m surrounded by*:
The reading was great. My x-country driving buddy Anna was there. Lots of old friends — who now live in SoCal — were there, lots of Internet folks who I’d never met were there, even my sister and brother-in-law were there! Contrary to the popular image people might have eaten more cheese at this reading than any other I had brought cheese to. Go L.A.!
I had planned to say something about LA while I had the mic. I usually talk about the cities I’m in. In Mendo I talked about my co-worker Anna buying her first book at the bookstore I was doing my reading. In Seattle I talked about the Rainbow Grocery that they used to have. In Portland I talked about how happy I was to be at an institution like Reading Frenzy.
But it’s so fraught when you’re from the Bay Area. You see, we have a rivalry with LA that LA doesn’t know about. I feel like I’ve outgrown it — I really enjoy visiting LA – but it was certainly in the air (or perhaps the water**) growing up and I had to unlearn it. And really, it isn’t that LA doesn’t know about it. It’s that they don’t participate in it and kind of laugh it off… which is of course far worse!
I was gonna do the reverse, I’m-from-Northern-California-and-don’t-hate-LA thing, but in the end I decided it was a no-win thing and left it out. When I told my LA friends afterwards they agreed with tired eyes. “Everyone does that,” they said.
Anyways, the reading was great, the Skylight staff was awesome, and Anna and I eschewed the trendy new restaurants and went to the House of Pies for dinner. I had a club sandwich and a chocolate chip cheesecake. Not very foodie of me, I know…
Then on the way to my sister’s my car broke down and I ended up on the side of a deserted part of Sunset Blvd for about an hour waiting for a tow truck. I’m back in SF and my car is in LA. If I was a real blogger, I would have taken a photo of my car with the hood up, but I didn’t think about it. It would have made a poignant picture.
*Hey, who’s going to see Danbert Nobacon at the Marina Books Inc? 9/28. The most anarchists in the Marina since the “Celebration of Slaughter” back in 1991!
**oops, I couldn’t help myself. I’m a backslider.
Hey, this is uncommon for me, but I’m gonna post a non-cheese related entry today.
Yesterday on Mission Mission I read a post and felt old. Someone had posted a photo from 1989 and they were treating it (somewhat tongue-in-cheek) as an ancient artifact.*
1989 was when I moved to San Francisco and I lived right on Dolores Park until mid-1991 (when I moved to 20th and Mission). I have a favorite picture of Dolores Park from that era so I thought I’d scan and post it.
A week or two after Bush Sr. started the first Gulf War San Francisco had a huge protest. We watched the crowd grow outside our window (and let people in to use the bathroom since no one rented honey buckets for protests back then) and I finally took a picture when the crowd got huge. Then we rushed downstairs and joined the march.
Oh yeah, all the people in the park were there for the protest, not sunbathing. The park was empty by the time we got to City Hall.
Here’s me in the park in 1989 with a slightly different SF skyline:
Here’s the northeast corner of the park before the soccer field was put in:
Oh, and here is the world’s worst vegetarian Chinese restaurant, Real Good Karma (now the Dolores Park Café):
This has been a public service announcement.
*My favorite part of the Mission Mission post was the line “Nobody’d quite heard of Nirvana back then!” Actually, we had, but we were denouncing them for signing to a major label. Heh, youth…
How about some blues? I’ve written about a lot of the good ones in this category over the years so here are two that surprised me.
North Hendren Cooperative Dairy Black River Caraway Blue. All I can say is, I never thought of putting caraway in blue cheese but it was surprisingly good.
This was the biggest surprise though. My cheese buddy and fellow cheese judge Emi was judging the blues as I walked by and he said you have to try this. I looked at it and thought to myself, “Wow, that looks like the Blue cheese that Bravo Farms used to make years ago.” When I tasted it, I thought, “It tastes a lot like that cheese, but much creamier and with a much bigger blue flavor. Oh, how we need a high fat/high moisture blue in California… I wonder who makes this.”
During the awards ceremony, I couldn’t wait for the winner of the “Blue-veined made from cow’s milk with a rind or external coating” category to be announced, because whatever it was already on my list of cheeses to seek out after the conference.
What a shock when I found out it was the Bravo Bl’u!* Evidently they started making it again, although in such small quantities that it is not in distribution. Pretty!
If you’re in the Central Valley, stop by the farm store and pick some up. He’s the Bravo Owner Bill with some unidentified cheese person “borrowing” his blue ribbon for a picture.
*no, I don’t understand the apostrophe either
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Tagged acs 2010, acs favorites, american cheese society favorites, black river, bravo
Ok, it’s been a couple of weeks and I’m still reviewing the ACS. It’s all good, right? I mean, what else do we have to write about in cheese land?
I’m going to first review a bunch of cheeses that I liked a lot but did not vote for in the Best of Show. Then I’ll discuss which ones I voted for and which ones won. You with me?
Ok, in the soft-ripened categories I had two favorites. I’m always so happy when I’m into a cheese that I’ve never tasted or seen before. It makes it so obvious that there are so many good cheeses in the country (and world) that I still have yet to try. It kinda gives you hope about everything, ya know? I had tasted neither of these before last month.
The first was in my judging category of “flavor-added, soft-ripened”.
Here’s the Appleton Creamery Camella from Maine:
Isn’t it pretty? I wish I had known about them when I visited Maine a few years ago, I would have loved to visit.
The other soft-ripened cheese I’d like to mention was the Fromagerie Fritz Kaiser Soeur Angele which won for “sheep and mixed milk”:
The Soeur Angele is a mix of goat and cow with added cream. Not a strong cheese, but a perfectly ripened and tasty wheel. Makes me hope I can go to Montreal for next year’s ACS and try all those Canadian cheeses we never get here.
Gordon ("Zola") Edgar 