Mmmmm, the new Swiss cheeses rock my cheese world.
Tasting with Forever Cheese
Willi Schmid’s Jersey Blue
Pan Forte tower at the Fresca Italia booth
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Tagged cheese, cheese pictures, cheese pron, fancy food show, forever cheese, fresca italia, willi schmid
There was celebrating in the aisles!
Congrats Redwood Hill on 45 years!
Congrats Cypress Grove on 30!
I took a “Master Class” at the cheese school during Fancy Food week. It was taught by the awesome Zoe Brickley of Jasper Hill Farm, the same woman who put together this video:
Anyways the class was “Milk, from Grass to Vat” and it was a great trip through the chemical reactions that make cheese magic happen. While the class acknowledged that milk is just one (important) part of the cheesemaking process, the attention to detail on milk composition and the effects of things like feed, mold, yeast, holding time etc, was impressive.
And the cheese was good.
Before
(From top: Harbison (Jasper Hill milk), Harbison (Andersonville Farm milk), Winnimere (oops, not shown), Landaff, Txiki, Tomme de la Chataignerie, Quadrello di Bufala (aka “Buffalo Taleggio”) Cabot Clothbound (Kempton Farm), Cabot Clothbound (pooled milk from Cabot Co-op)
After:
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Tagged cheddar cutting video, cheese, jasper hill, milk, san francisco cheese school, zoe brickley
What can I say that would be new and exciting about the Fancy Food Show? I have probably written pretty much the same entry about it every year for a decade. The best bits (that I am willing to publish) are already in my book. One can only write about desperation capitalism, food safety no-nos, the hip-marketing of peasants, and vanity projects of the rich and famous so many times, eh?
“We are Specialty Food” indeed
I know, I know. There is more to it than that. There is cheese, which skirts these issues more delicately than many other food products. And it is, one assumes, why you are reading this post anyway.
I like the show because it brings in cheese friends from out of town. I like it because it’s one of two big chances a year for me to talk to cheesemakers from around the country and the world. I like it because the Cheese School Master Classes are pretty awesome. I like it because every couple of years I taste something amazing that rocks my cheese world.*
I don’t like it because… trade show. If you’ve been to one, you know what I mean. I do feel for all the folks who had to set up the show on Saturday and work through their weekends. I’m still exhausted from the food holidays myself. Glad I don’t need to do any behind the scenes work.
But that’s where I was for the greater part of last week… in the Moscone Center with the Fancy Food, the unfancy food, and all the food people. Tasted some great cheese and saw some awesome folks. Now that I can catch a breath, I’ll be writing it up this week.
*BTW, great news about the 2014 ACS conference location. The conference chair told me to spread the word but the ACS people said, “Wait until the contracts are signed” so I will keep it to myself for now. (It’s not SF)
This week my purely arbitrary cheese obsession of the week is the Tome des Pyrenees affinaged by Rodolphe Meunier.
It’s bark-wrapped raw cow’s milk from Basque country. Unlike most bark-wrapped cheese it is not oozy, but semi-soft, at least the versions in the U.S. Now that Americans (myself included) have proven to themselves that they can enjoy strong cheeses, I hope that cheese like this can come into popularity. Tomme des Pyrenees is not strong at all, it’s the — sometimes confounding to shoppers — epitome of a cheese that is mild, but complex.
It’s earthy, woodsy, rich, fruity and just an all around pleasure to eat. You have to take a second to appreciate it because the flavor does not all show itself at once. If you bring it to room temp and let the cheese linger on your tongue, you will be rewarded with a cheese you will keep tasting because 1. You will be trying to isolate all the different flavor aspects and 2., it is just an awesome experience.
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Another well-known cheesemonger mentioned this on his facebook the other day, but the thing that most of us – at least the cheese people who actually still work the floor – have in common is that the last two months of the year are a blur. At the beginning of January we come up for air, look around, and wonder, “I wonder what my friends have been doing for the last two months?”
I don’t want to sound like I’m complaining here. I kind of love it. I like the craziness of the holiday cheese rush, I like watching cheeses that are hard sells 48 weeks of the year fly of the shelves. I like being busy. Plus it is consistent to my life-long work experience. My longest job before Rainbow Grocery Cooperative was at a photo lab. Back in those pre-digital days, the photo X-mas card business was booming and I regularly worked 50-60 hour weeks between Thanksgiving and X-mas. Long hours, but good money and the sense of accomplishment you get from doing more work than you thought possible when you started.
For instance, selling all this (and more) Reading Raclette:
There are many orders a cheesemonger gets in around Nov/Dec and says, “What was I thinking? How can I possibly sell all this stuff?” I will fully admit — for the benefit of the other cheese folks reading this — that I have moments of severe self-doubt, usually alone in the walk-in cooler while trying to make room for all the cheese. Is this the year I was over-confidant? Is this the year that I thought I was smarter than the historic movement reports? Will I succumb to cheese hubris?
Because all of us who have been in the same place for awhile have records of what we purchased and what customers bought the previous year. It may take a little of the romance off to look at one’s notes before making holiday pre-orders, but it sure makes it more successful. And the romance is there anyways. For every customer that comes in to buy only their same cheeses every year out of tradition, there are ten more who want new and exciting cheese, however subjectively that is defined.
So the feeling of accomplishment in mid/late December as the walk-in starts to empty out is phenomenal. Every square foot of air is a victory. Every hole on the backstock shelf is a justification of one’s purchases. At least until the retail shelves start emptying out and you have to worry about whether you ordered enough.
The life of a perishables buyer is always intense.
But yeah, If you wonder why I’m not making posts on my website, not teaching cheese classes, not sending out holiday cards and not even self-promoting very well (Cheesemonger is the perfect gift for Valentine’s day!) it’s because the cheese is demanding my full attention. Hello January. How is everyone?
On a side note, since I decided to start my book with the details of my recurring holiday dream,* I now get a lot of people asking “Have you had your dream yet?” It’s ironic that I – as someone who hates to talk about dreams almost as much as I hate hearing about other people’s dreams – have created a situation where I basically begged people to ask me about them, but there you go… I just tell ‘em I am sleeping more soundly since I got my CPAP machine.
* Every year during the holidays I have the same nightmare. I’m in the store’s walk-in cooler, but instead of the cheese area being 12’ x 16’, it’s warehouse-sized. Boxes of Fromage De Meaux, Vella Dry Jack, Valencay, Vacherin Mont D’or, Reblochon, and every other cheese I could ever want — legal or illegal — are stacked to the ceiling on shelves, on milk crates, and in every nook, cranny, and corner.
They’re rotting before my eyes.
Mites are turning the Gruyere into nasty tan dust. Orange, stinky, washed rinds are liquefying and dripping onto the cheese below. White bloomy rinds are yellowing, browning, and spotting. All the beautiful cheese is going concave: hardening or disintegrating, and I am helpless. When I look more closely, I see that the few remaining beautiful and snowy white cheeses don’t have rinds at all; instead, they are covered with seas of maggots.
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Tagged cheese, cheese dreams, farms for city kids, food holidays, holidays, reading raclette
I was in Nashville last weekend for the Southern Artisan Cheese Fest. Combined with my trip to Raleigh, NC for the American Cheese Society Conference, it just solidified my view that the South is one of the most exciting regions for new cheese in the country right now.
I’ve mentioned some Southern cheeses before… while judging this year I gave the Sequatchie Cove Dancing Fern my vote for Best of Show, I wrote about Sweet Grass in my book… but overall there was just a tremendous amount of good cheese. Many of these are too small production to even think about trying to get in SF, but you Southerners should take heart. You can add cheese to your local food culture along with biscuits, grits and sorghum.*
Besides those cheesemakers, there were so many more: Prodigal Farm, Caromont Farms, Homestead Heritage, Nature’s Harmony, Goat Lady Dairy, Looking Glass Creamery, and Noble Springs Dairy all stood out in my mind and I know that I am forgetting half the cheeses I tasted. It was a long day and I actually didn’t even get a chance to hit the booths until everyone was packing up. Don’t be mad if I left you off, just make a comment that you were there. Is there a master list of cheesemaker attendees somewhere?
And special mention to Bonnyclabber Cheese Co. for 1. Having totally unique cheese (raw milk acid-coagulated and pasteurized yogurt-coagulated)and 2. Introducing me to Sandor Ellix Katz whose books I’ve read and who shares my publisher but whom I had never gotten a chance to meet.
I did a little reading for the makers, mongers, and VIPs the night before the Fest and then sold books and did a class during the Fest. I also acted as the unofficial greeter in my position next to the paper plates in the first bank of tables. See:
I, of course, forgot to take pictures of any of the cheeses. Duh. I am such a blogger circa 2002. Sorry.**
Anyways, I thought the Fest was great, especially for an event of this magnitude in only its second year. No lines for the beer and wine(!!!), some lines for the food, but really only for some parts of the Fest. And, bottom line, it was awesome because the cheese and the other food was great. Kathleen, of the Bloomy Rind, did an awesome job as well as all the other volunteers.
The funniest thing? The event was in a space usually used for a flea market but Kathleen had rented it for the day for the Fest. About a half hour before SACF started someone came up to us, looked around, and asked, “Where are all the poor people who are usually here?” “They’ll be back tomorrow,” someone answered. Not everyone loves a Cheese Fest.
And hey, did you guys know Nashville has a Parthenon? Yeah, no joke. They even built it, they didn’t just steal it from Greece like some other countries I could mention. Of course the only people who didn’t mock me for going to see it were the senior citizens.
*I love the sorghum options at so many of the restaurants. Mostly because Laurie is from a long line of Texas sorghum farmers and makes at least $20 a year from the one that she owns a share in. I’m all for sorghum becoming hip and expensive! Help a small (absentee) farmer out!
I have not been to Tennessee since 1986. We actually did — I think — go through Nashville on the way to Graceland but, to be honest, the trip was a bit of a blur.
However, I will return this weekend for the Southern Artisan Cheese Festival. I am doing a class, doing a reading at the “Makers and Mongers” dinner, and selling books. It should be awesome, so if you are in the South, come on over!
BTW, here is proof that 1. I have been to Tennessee and 2. I have gained a couple of lbs in my 20 years in the cheese business. (I am fine with that, btw. One needs a belly to keep the Parmigiano Reggiano in place while cutting it)
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Tagged cheese, cheesemonger, southern artisan cheese fest, tennessee
Some cheese is just so pretty it speaks for itself.
Ready for its close-up.
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Tagged cheese, cheese pr0n, French cheese, moldy donuts, puits d'astier
Gordon ("Zola") Edgar 