Bad Bocconcini

Posted on October 29, 2009 | 2 comments

The other day Nick Mamatas asked me what my happiest day was as a cheesemonger.* Well, last Saturday certainly wasn’t it.

We had an in store demo scheduled for the week before. Even though I got about 100lbs of pre-packed bocconcini, we couldn’t sell it because it wasn’t sealed correctly and it was spilling all over the place. I figured we could give it away, but, unfortunately, it was already rancid. Yuck, spit, hawk, spit, yuck, rinse.

Because we’re good little environmentalists, I opened every package and drained it in the sink so we could compost the cheese and recycle the plastic tubs. Luckily my co-worker Minnesota Nice captured it all with action photos on his cell phone.

Mmmmmm, sink full of nasty!
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Bocconcini be gone!
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Into the compost!
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This is the real glamor of working with cheese… Saturday nights spent getting soaked with the smelly discharge of unsellable dairy.

*I told him he’d have to buy the book. BTW, check out this awesome mention in Publisher’s Weekly! (and don’t forget to look at the other books by Allison Hooper and Max McCallman) It even has a small glimpse of the actual cover.

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I’m sick, go elsewhere

Posted on October 27, 2009 | 1 comment

I’ve been sick the last couple of days and too incoherent to write anything here. I am feeling better though — enough to make my shift tomorrow and Thursday for the last two coupon days of the year. CRAZY.

Here’s something to enjoy while I’m absent from the blog. A Cheese Underground post by Jeanne Carpenter about the licensing of cheesemakers that has over 30 comments and much vitriol. Not much in cheese surprises me so I was pretty shocked that this was that much of a hot button issue. Good for Jeanne for writing this and stirring the pot a little.

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Challerhocker 2: the questioning

Posted on October 20, 2009 | 7 comments

I love the Challerhocker even more now than I did last week. Not only is the cheese awesome and the label super creepy:

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But we keep getting Swiss people contacting us saying they don’t believe this cheese even exists! Now, I’m not above making up cheese names for a specific reason — *cough* Tommy Bartlett Tomme *cough* — but seriously, It’s new, it’s a great cheese and it’s really from Switzerland!

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Wisconsin Whirlwind addendum

Posted on October 15, 2009 | 1 comment

I just got sent this one last picture from Wisconsin. Here’s me smearing salt water and bacteria into a Rothkase “Gruyere”:

smearing gruyere

Totally fun! (when one doesn’t have to do it for 8 hours a day)

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Challerhocker

Posted on October 13, 2009 | 3 comments

It’s always fun when Janet Fletcher comes into the store. Janet is one of the few people who can write well about cheese without having been a cheese worker. If that sounds like a backhanded compliment, it’s not. There is a lot of misinformation and hype disguised as authoritative information and I think it’s a lot harder to sort out when you don’t handle, cut, wrap and taste a few thousand lbs. a week.

She does a weekly cheese column for the SF Chronicle so I always try to give her tastes of new cheeses for her to write about. 52 a year is no joke!

I sampled her a cheese called Challerhocker that I hadn’t even unwrapped yet and three weeks later here it is. It is truly an awesome cheese. The only thing Janet didn’t mention is that the name means something like “aged in the cellar” and has a label that looks like a child who’s been locked in the cellar for quite some time.

(I will get a better picture tomorrow)
Challerhocker

Of course the funniest thing is that someone (Hi Laurie!) wrote a pro-Gordon comment in the comments section and someone else felt compelled to write a “whatever to Gordon, have you heard of Mark Todd, The Cheese Dude?” reply.

Long-time readers of my blog may remember Mark as the guy who tasted a cheese at an event and said, “THAT’S PIMP!” in response to its excellent flavor and mouthfeel. I love Mark Todd! He’s one of my favorite cheese people. You don’t have to choose between us!

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Wisconsin Whirlwind 5: Widmer’s Cheese Cellars

Posted on October 8, 2009 | 2 comments

The last cheese factory on our trip was the smallest and most old-school: Widmer’s Cheese Cellars in Theresa, Wisconsin. Joe Widmer is a third generation cheesemaker, another Wisconsin Master Cheesemaker and is still operating out of the factory his grandfather bought 80 years ago. The family has finally moved out of the house above the factory, but that’s about all that has changed.

Here’s the “factory” with my trip mates in the foreground for scale
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I had visited once before (on a road trip in 2005 and I actually can’t believe I didn’t write about it). Joe Widmer is one of my favorite cheese people: funny, friendly, and non-pretentious. Just look at him standing over the Brick Cheese brine tank!
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What is Brick Cheese anyway? Why is it called Brick? If you are not from the Midwest you shouldn’t feel guilty about not knowing. Like real Colby, and fresh curds, it’s kind of a regional cheese. It’s another washed rind cheese, very stinky and strong if allowed to ripen to its full potential. Widmer actually makes two versions. They start the same, but one is annattoed up to differentiate it. That (orange) one is plastic wrapped and meant to stay milk. The uncolored one is aged longer and paper-wrapped. It’s as stinky as you want it to be.

Why Brick? Well, it’s because real bricks were/are used to weight the cheese and push out excess moisture. Here’s a third generation brick!
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Here’s the process! (Germ-worriers please note: the brick lie on top of stainless steel forms.)
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Plus the cheese – in a whole block – resembles a brick too. Here it is aging. Please note slimy bacteria on shelves. That’s what makes it great.
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I don’t know why I started talking Brick cheese so early in this entry since we sell a whole lot more of his cheddar. Joe Widmer is one of the best block cheddar-makers in the country, managing to make very sharp cheddars that remain moist and creamy. Not brittle like Vermont cheddars, with (I hate to say this as a Californian) more flavor than any California blocks I’ve had. Some are scared of the orange annatto coloring to which I say, this is a Wisconsin tradition. Respect diversity!

Here it is being made:
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And here is my favorite picture of the trip. Still life of bricks for Brick cheese at rest. Timeless, eh?DSC00252

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Best dairy protest photo ever!

Posted on October 6, 2009 | 2 comments

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New York Times article on European Union Ag protests here

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Wisconsin Whirlwind 4: Crave Brothers

Posted on October 5, 2009 | 4 comments

The next stop on our journey was Crave Brothers, a farmstead dairy in Waterloo Wisconsin. It’s a big farmstead* dairy – nearly 1000 cows – and they make some of the best mascarpone in the country and one of my favorite American cheeses: Petit Frere.

This was the first time on our trip that we got to see cows. On the way there we hit massive thunder storms and thought we might not be able to visit them, but the weather cleared just as we arrived and we got the tractor tour by one of the Crave Brothers: George Crave.**
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We were too late for the cheesemaking – they were already hosing down the plant – but just in time for the cows. We got slimed by the baby cows who were very excited to see us.
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One of the best things about the Crave Brothers farm is that they have the most productive dairy farm methane digester that I know of*** producing all the energy needed to power their cheese plant as well as 120 local homes.**** They titled their press release about this “From Cow Pies to Blue Skies”. Heh.
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It was an awesome tour. The only thing we didn’t get to see was the manure lagoon.

As for their cheese (which I feel funny writing about after typing “manure lagoon” in the last paragraph) I love their little washed rind cheese called Petit Frere (little brother). It’s rich, creamy and – if you let it ripen right – oozy and pungent. I’ve been experimenting around with them at the store and would say give it 60-65 days after the make-date on the box and it will be perfect.

*Farmstead means that the cheese is made on the farm and only from the milk of cows that live there.
** They made a point of telling us that, yes, that was their real name and not a clever marketing ploy “Crave Brothers” could go either way, eh?
***Other dairy farms are also doing this. Local dairy heroes at the Straus Family Creamery were – unsurprisingly — one of the early innovators.
**** They even made the news with this and there’s a nice little video (sponsored by Glaxo, heh)

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Wisconsin Whirlwind 3: Roth Kase

Posted on October 1, 2009 | 5 comments

While I am kind of a whiner in real life, I try to keep it off my blog. I know no one wants to read that. Still, the Cheesemaking day at Roth Kase deserves a little whining.

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I often work at 7 AM so I don’t mind getting up early. We had to get up at 4:30 to go make cheese at Roth Kase. That would not have been a very big deal except that we were on Wisconsin time so to us it was really 2:30 in the morning. I was so obviously falling asleep on the cheese tour that I became the designation person of ridicule for the entire day. Oh yeah, now I remember why I hated school.

I blanked when asked a question so I had to stand in a cheese corner and write “We leave the vat alone while we wait for the proper PH level and for the curds to knit together,” 100 times.

We were supposed to “make cheese” and we did… kinda.* We were a large (exhausted) group doing the work of one person so it wasn’t like we were breaking sweats. We did cheesemaker things though. We cut curd, we took breaks*, we flipped havartis. It was a good day.

After making cheese we got to go down to the aging areas. We got to rub paprika into the Gran Queso and – best of all – smear bacteria into their gruyere. It’s always amusing to be in a factory “working” while the real workers get to take it easy and mock from the sidelines. If I did nothing else, at least I made one day easier for a cheese factory worker.

Roth Kase gruyere-style cheeses are really something to be proud of. Except for maybe the Pleasant Ridge Reserve (which has only a fraction of the production of Roth Kase) no one widely distributes an American cheese with a Gruyere flavor profile. We got to taste their 15 month-aged cheese and it really is everything you want in a Swiss-style Gruyere: nutty, sweet, oniony, and just a touch of pungency.

I would have taken a photo of their wall of aging gruyeres but they requested no photos for technology security reasons.*** So, instead of floor-to-ceiling cheese, here’s a picture of the hand towel in the Roth Kase bathroom:
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I didn’t take my camera in at all because I didn’t want to drop it in a cheese vat while I “worked” but I should have more pictures soon.

*Don’t worry cheese consumers, the have a couple of old vats segregated from the rest of the cheese equipment for people like us. ( Oh, here they are!) You might eat our cheese, but only if it worked out.
**excuse me, we didn’t take breaks, we waited for the proper PH level and for the curds to knit.
***I couldn’t give you just a hand towel pic, so here’s a picture of Gruyere de Savoie in a similar aging warehouse in France. The French cheese is about 4 times bigger than the Roth Kase gruyere.
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Wisconsin Whirllwind 2: Edelweiss, Maple Leaf, and robots

Posted on September 29, 2009 | Leave a comment

I thought I would be bored at the slicing and shredding factory. This part of the tour was definitely organized for Lunardi’s, not us. As a one store operation, we aren’t big enough for private labels or custom blends. Still, I love factories so I was happy to go. Plus we were promised cheese robots!

First though, we got to meet more master cheesemakers. Jeff Wideman from Maple Leaf Cheese Cooperative and Bruce Workman from Edelweiss Creamery*. We carry the Maple Leaf smoked Gouda because it’s a natural cheese (unlike most smoked goudas) and I have always admired the Edelwiess Emmenthal, made in copper vats and in 180 lb. wheels like the real Swiss version.

However, the most exciting thing about the visit was the revelation that Workman had helped start the Edelweis Grazier Co-op, made up of five farmers doing rotational grazing for pasture-based milk. I had actually already ordered a cheese of theirs without knowing the whole back-story because it tasted so good! In the absence of regulation for “grass-fed” dairy** the Edelweiss Grazier Co-op members agree, by being members of the co-op, to such restrictions as 1.5 acres of pasture for every cow and to not milk at all in the winter, non-grazeable months, giving cows a much needed rest that lets them produce high quantities of milk and live , for much longer than the average dairy cow.

While grass-based dairy has obvious health benefits for the cheese-eaters, the farmers, and the farmed, the lack of any unified definition leaves is ripe for abuse in the future. Hopefully we are a few years away from Jack in the Box offering “grass-fed” *** cheese on their “local”,“artisan” ciabatta bread, but that is only as far away as the creation of a sizable market that desires “grass-fed” cheese. I hope the grass-based dairies all over the US can create some kind of agreed upon definition before this concept gets abused.

But you don’t want to hear that negativity… Look ! Robots!!!! (Unfortunately, I realized too late that you can’t rotate videos on flickr. Put your computer on its side!)

((Hmmmmm, I can’t seem to get this video to embed at all here actually, try looking for it here on my flickr It’s only 9 seconds long))

*OMG, I love the slogan “You know it’s real when it’s cut from the wheel!”
**”grass-fed” meat is regulated, just not dairy. Meat animals and dairy animals have some different needs.
***there wouldn’t be any fine print since there is no regulation, but perhaps if there were it would say, “Grass fed cheese comes from cow that get at least 1% of their daily feed through grazing (or silage).”

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