Tag Archives: cheese

Cheese of the Week

Posted on August 1, 2011 | 6 comments

Avalanche Cheese Lamborn Bloomers

One of the best new (to me) cheeses that we’ve had in a long time is the Lamborn Bloomers from Avalanche Cheese in Colorado. Seriously, this is one of the best U.S.-made, soft-ripened goat cheeses I’ve ever tasted. Basically it’s a goat Robiola: oozy, milky, fattily satisfying, but it has a depth and complexity not often found in this type of cheese. Lamborn Bloomers is grassy, vegetal, potato-y, and has just enough goaty-tang to remind you what you are eating. Seriously awesome cheese.

Unfortunately – outside of Colorado – the name is somewhat baffling and is one of the ones that makes customers laugh at you when you recommend it (See “Ewephoria”, “Ewe-nique,” and “Fromage-a-Trois”). Using “lamb” in any cheese name will make people assume it is made with sheep milk, especially with the mandatory pun-names assigned to sheep milk cheeses according to the CFR.* Secondly, it sounds like something you would put on baby sheep to ensure their modesty. Third, I was also secretly worried that perhaps the cheese was named after Colorado’s idiot Tea Party Congressman. If it was, I didn’t want to know. The cheese is just that good.

But no, half a minute of internet research shows that the dairy and farm have beautiful “views of Lamborn Mesa”. Whew… I can eat it without worrying again.

*Just kidding. And I don’t mean that as a goat pun.
**I think I’ll just break down and get a new charger for my camera battery instead of just hoping I’ll find it soon. I think this would be better with pictures, don’t you?

(I decided that every week after I work a Saturday behind the counter that I will make a post about my favorite cheeses of the week. This is not a promotional thing; sometimes they may even be out of stock by the time I write this. I just want to share the cheese love. There will be pictures if I remember to bring my camera. If I don’t there won’t. Basically, these will just be the cheese that I most enjoyed sampling out to cheese lovers over the weekend.)

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Wisconsin Day 4: I love Milwaukee

Posted on July 21, 2011 | 4 comments

I love Milwaukee.

I have loved Milwaukee since I went to the ACS conference there. Sheana and I stayed in the Presidential Suite, put on a party, went to the Spy Bar, we saw the pre-scandal John Edwards, I got food poisoning from someone’s bad cheese the night before I had to be on a panel… Good times!

As much as I love Milwaukee, I was worried about my reading there. The only two people who I am good friends with in the whole town (besides the folks putting on the event) couldn’t come so I was resigned to it being Steve and Patty from Larry’s Market and whoever would be trapped in the store when I started reading. I was counting on the Midwestern Nice thing to obligate people to stay and watch me so as not to be rude. After all, Madison was good, but there was only one person there who wasn’t a friend, or friend-of-friend.

Instead, Milwaukee was one of the best book events I’ve done.

Good product placement or editorial comment?
garbage only

Steve and Patty did a great job of promotion and lots of local food writers came out for it. Lucy Saunders, Jeanette Hurt (and her lovely child), Pam Percy and Martin Hintz were there. I got a nice blog post from Thomas Geilfuss. Arthur Ircink from Wisconsin Foodie interviewed me about Wisconsin Cheese and taped my whole reading (Boy I hope those California cheesemakers don’t hear what I said about them!).

US Champion Cheesemaker Katie Hedrich was even spotted in the audience. Someone managed to get a grainy paparazzi-like photo of her and her brother Greg.
Katie and Greg Hedrich @Larry's

But the whole crowd was fun. They asked interesting questions and laughed at all the right places. Since I had pretty much decided this would be my last reading, I just read the funniest parts of the book. I figured they could read the more narcissistic and political bits in the privacy of their own homes.

I can’t think of a better way to end my year of self-promotion.

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Wisconsin Day Two: Gathering of the Cheddar Makers

Posted on June 28, 2011 | 4 comments

I went to Wisconsin mostly to attend the gathering of cheddar makers hosted by Chris Roelli of Dunbarton Blue fame. I went partly because Chris invited me, partly because I’m doing research for my next book and partly because I am too much of a cheese geek to turn down the opportunity to hang out with an estimated 350 years of cheesemaking experience when I get the chance.

This event was actually a follow up to the visit of a bunch of Neal’s Yard folks last year. Someone floated the idea of setting up another gathering where a couple of different vats of cheese — one clothbound, traditional-style Cheddar and one 40-lb block-style Cheddar — would be made so everyone could taste the differences. Slightly different cultures and recipes were used, but the milk was the same. Hopefully, a year from now, I’ll get invited to the tasting event as well!

Here’s Chris Roelli working while a bunch of master cheesemakers give him a hard time:
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Watching people make cheese is awesome. Making the cheese is hard work. Cheddar is especially hard work if one does it the way it is traditionally done in the US, cutting up the coagulated curds into slabs and piling them on top of each other to press out more whey in order to give the cheese the texture we expect. The cheese room is humid and there is a lot of lifting, cutting, and pushing that needs to be done from non-optimal ergonomic positions.

I was lounging off to the side with my camera. I had a week off from non-ergonomic lifting:
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Slabs of curd, Cheddaring in their vat
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The thing that struck me, being in a room with so much experience and mastery of craft, is how California (my home state) lacks this kind of generation-to-generation passed down, hands-on knowledge. With the passing of Ig Vella recently, this issue is even more acute. Ig was the resource to cheesemaking history in California for many, many people. In Wisconsin, being a third generation cheesemaker isn’t common, but it’s not like finding a raw milk Brie either. Widmer Cellars, Roelli Cheese, Carr Valley, and Hennings Cheese come to mind right away and a google search reveals many more who I’m less familiar with, their cheese not getting out West regularly.

Spending a day with cheese people, eating steak sandwiches, drinking New Glarus beer and talking cheese? A pretty great way to spend the day.

*Here’s the group shot that I stole from Jeanne Carpenter, a much better journalist than I. She wrote about the event as well so check it out. What I love about this picture is that it’s color coded. With the exception of Willi Lehner, everyone who makes cheese is wearing white and only the culture sales people, the distributors and the retails are wearing colors.RoelliCheddarDaygroupshot.small

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Wisconsin Day One: From urban to rural

Posted on June 27, 2011 | 6 comments

My first day in Wisconsin was all about transportation. I got a direct flight from SFO-Milwaukee — on what I later saw was a kinda scary airline — and my trip was fast and pleasant. I got my rental car in my after-flight daze and just said no to all the scare tactic extras (“If you don’t spend $24/day more for supplemental coverage we will leave you and your car in whatever ditch you drive into. In fact, if this situation arises we will hire a local farmer with a backhoe to bury you alive in the rental vehicle and then sue your estate for a new car. Would you like to add the supplemental insurance so we don’t have to do this?”) and was on my way.

In fact, very soon after landing I was driving out of Milwaukee, listening to their local punk station, and heading west to Schullsburg which is in the South West corner of the state, closer to Illinois and Iowa than Madison or Milwaukee.

I wasn’t just going there so I could experience Gravity Hill, that was an added benefit:

No, I was going to visit Chris Roelli who makes the Dunbarton Blue and attend a gathering of Cheddar makers for a day of cheesemaking, fellowship, and education. Driving through small town Wisconsin was a great way to acclimate to a few days of cheese talk.

Unfortunately, as I got to Darlington, where I was staying I realized my big city ways had not prepared me for small town life. It was 9:15, I hadn’t eaten and nothing was open. Well, nothing except for the gas station McDonalds, and it was about to close too. I had to think fast… cobble together a meal of Pringles, powder donuts, and cookies from the gas station mini mart, or get my first McDonalds meal in about 20 years.

I’m an American. I did what I had to do. This may be one of the only food blogs in the US where the author will admit in print that they ate fast food but there you go. Oddly, or perhaps not oddly at all, the Big Mac tasted exactly the same as the hundreds of Big Macs I had growing up. Everything just seemed a little smaller than I remembered.

The mini mart did carry New Glarus beer so I bought a 6-pack of Spotted Cow to pair with my Big Mac just to prove I really was a snobby urbanite. It was terroirific.

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Cheese worker still life #3

Posted on June 9, 2011 | Leave a comment

Fet(t)a in a can
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Cheese worker still life #2

Posted on June 7, 2011 | 3 comments

Receiving on a Friday. Where will it all go?
Cheese Daze

(is it a still life if a person is in the picture? I need help from an art history major out there)

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Cheese worker still life #1

Posted on June 6, 2011 | 1 comment

The cheese list at the end of a Saturday night:

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Harley Farms farm dinner!

Posted on May 10, 2011 | 2 comments

I’m going to see Dee Harley a lot this month. That’s awesome because she is truly one of my favorite cheese people. I can never get enough of her. That’s why I brought my parents to her farm as a present.

It was a Christmas present, actually. But the Harley Farms farm dinners are so popular that even though we arranged it in December the first available spot was May 7. Now that I’ve attended one, I see why!

Starting at 4 PM with a full tour of the farm, you really get a sense of how much love goes into the care of the goats and land, and how much effort goes into the cheesemaking. Here are my parents walking through a field of goats. They hadn’t yet discovered how much these beauties can pee and poop!
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Here’s my dad trying to extricate himself from one curious lady:
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We got to meet some milkers, the llamas, and some babies. Here’s Laurie pushing the head of a baby male goat. She said that they love that and she should know since she raised goats herself awhile back. I didn’t catch the names of these goats, but since they are males, let’s call them Birria and Meatloaf.
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Then we got to go to the cheese room. Now, there are a million pictures of me in a hairnet. There’s even one on the top of my website. But I’d never gotten a picture of my parents in hairnets before. Thanks Laurie!
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I suppose if I was really a food blogger instead of a cheese worker I would be giving you the details of the Harley Farm acreage, the number of goats, the volume of output and throwing lots of silly adjectives around. But I’m pretty sure I’ve done some version of that before and I don’t know whether people ever really read that stuff anyway. I know I don’t unless I’m making signs for the store. No, the thing to know about Harley is that it’s a small, sustainable farmstead dairy where the goats are well cared for and they make great fresh goat cheese.

After we tasted cheese, we went upstairs for the dinner. I meant to take pictures of the food, but I was having too good a time (and too much BYOB wine) to remember to pull out my camera. What did we eat? OMG. First, a warm carrot, beet, asparagus salad, with feta. Then goat cheese raviolis. This was followed by the main course of spring lamb with mint sauce. We finished with fresh, warm ricotta with strawberries. Everything was awesome. Even better was sitting around the big, hand-carved wooden table and meeting all the other folks who were in attendance. The Harley folks put on a great event.

If you are going between Santa Cruz and San Francisco on HWY 1 and don’t stop at the Farm Store (and at Duarte’s Tavern for ollalieberry pie) I don’t know what you are thinking.

But May is truly Dee Harley month for me. We will be together at the New Leaf Cheesemakers day (along with Garden Variety and Schoch Farm) on Sunday May 15 (New Leaf Community Market Westside 2-5, free) and then at the California Academy of Sciences NightLife event where I’ll be reading, Dee will be talking and there will be a ton of cheese to eat (Thursday May 26 in San Francisco, $12, $10 for members)

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Cheese on the Street

Posted on May 9, 2011 | Leave a comment

My San Francisco book release party was over a year ago, but remnants of the evening remain.

While looking at Flickr cheese photos, I found this portrait of a cheese left over from the reading. Abandoned on Valencia, the picture is certainly evocative. A sad, neglected cheese, used and discarded, all alone and alienated in an overcrowded city.

Late Night Mission Cheese (Photo by Jutta, click through for lots of awesome pics)

I’m glad I could help contribute to the urban art world and the ongoing story of the struggle of cheese to come of age in the Mission.

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Open letter to the Wisconsin Milk Marketing Board

Posted on February 22, 2011 | 18 comments

Wisconsin Milk Marketing Board, Inc.
8418 Excelsior Drive
Madison, Wisconsin 53717

cc: Governor Walker, Senator Fitzgerald, House Speaker Fitzgerald

James Robson, President
Stan Woodworth, Vice President

WMMB,

The current Wisconsin budget crisis has caught the attention of many people outside of Wisconsin. The proposed budget, as it stands right now, seems to many of us as an unprecedented and undeserved attack on one of the most basic rights of organized labor: the right to collectively bargain. Customers at our store have been asking about what they can do. Some have even brought up their willingness and desire to boycott Wisconsin products if this current budget passes.

You know me. You know I have been a long-time supporter of Wisconsin cheese and that we carry a lot of it, especially for a California supermarket. I have no wish to stop carrying any of your numerous cheeses that we have on our shelves. (It varies of course, but right now we have about 40 different cheeses from about 15 Wisconsin cheesemakers.) I love Wisconsin cheese.

However, if this current budget passes it will make Wisconsin a bad word among many people who shop and who work in our store. Since you are in the marketing business, you can well understand that the kind of result a political decision like this can have in many of the cities that sell a lot of specialty cheese. You know that it doesn’t take much of a decline in sales for a perishable food to lose its place on the shelves; that’s the nature of the business. It doesn’t even require an organized boycott, just the change in consumer perception from Wisconsin being a “friendly state of cheese lovers” to “that mean-spirited state that hates unions and teachers”. Because I care about Wisconsin dairy farmers on a personal and professional basis, I do not want to see that happen.

For the good of Wisconsin cheesemakers I personally ask that you put what pressure you can bear on the legislature to not pass a budget that strips organized labor of their rights. This is an issue that goes beyond Democrat or Republican and beyond state lines. Taking a budget crisis (that many see as manufactured for this purpose) as an excuse to end the right to collectively bargain is wrong.

This is not a threat. I am not speaking for my workplace because, as a cooperative, my workplace is a democracy and does not have an official position on this issue. What I am saying is that the Wisconsin state budget has ceased to be a local issue. What happens next may very well affect every business in the state. Since Wisconsin’s most visible business is cheese, I think you owe it to your members to take a stand against this budget.

Thank you,
Gordon Edgar
Cheese Buyer

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