(Part of) our last Rush Creek shipment of 2013. It’s always a great couple of months…
1. Isn’t this just about the most gorgeous cheese label you’ve ever seen?
2. I love that Rush Creek is now a Thanksgiving tradition. I wish we could get enough Winnimere to make that an Xmas one, but I get it! I get it! Rush Creek for xmas too!
3. Here’s one of my Thanksgiving cheese plates. My family got the more American plate.
(From front left, clockwise: Anton’s Peppered Ass Cheese, Cremeux de Bourgnone, Camembert di Bufala, Scharfer Maxx Extra, Molleux du Revard)
4. Still collecting Cheesemonger Selfies. More are being posted all the time. Email me your pics and I’ll put em up. (gordon.zola.edgar at gmail dot com)
5. If you are local and are not on the invite list for the monthly cheesemonger gatherings, go here, or hit me up at that email as well and I’ll put you on the list. It is not exclusive!
6. I really cannot create any real content you know… it’s that time of the year.
7. I should be able to officially announce my book contract in my next post though. I would be able to now except for a couple of e-book details that weren’t in my last contract. Things have changed!
8. I am going to post a picture a day starting tomorrow. My cheese memories of 2013. You likely have seen ‘em before, but whatever. True beauty doesn’t fade.
I actually made two cheese plates for Thanksgiving this year. One for my parents’ house and one for our little gathering the day after. I only took pics of the one at our apartment so if you are a cheesemaker reading this, be sure your cheese was on the other plate!
This was the Hermann St. cheese plate:
Front row, l-r Beau’s Blend, Bleu des Basques, Benina Crema
Back row, l-r Pau (St. Mateu),* Rush Creek, Prairie Bloom (mislabeled as “cow”. Sorry, it was a long week)
And what the heck, let’s have another picture of the Bellwether Whole Milk Ricotta with pinot-soaked cherries!
If you wanna talk about underrated cheeses, the Benina Crema is definitely under-appreciated. Made somewhere in Merced County the cheese is now being aged longer than the version we carried a year ago and it is tremendous. It’s sweet and sharp like an aged Gouda but organic, hand-made, and from grass-based milk. The Burroughs Family eggs are awesome too, if you can find them!
The Beau’s Blend is another California cheese from down near Watsonville. The Garden Variety organic sheep milk is combined with the milk from the Schoch Dairy down the road. This may have been the most popular cheese on the plate (except for the ricotta/cherry combo).
Rush Creek actually was probably the most popular. It just disappeared so fast it was like it was never there. I’ve written about this cheese before.
Bleu des Basques is another under-appreciated cheese. Think more interesting Istara Ossau-Iraty with blue veins! Awesome.
I will admit that the Prairie Bloom was a free sample. Hey, cheese is expensive, even to me! Still this was a really nice little goat brie from Missouri. I know nothing about it except what we can both read here.
This is what the cheese plate looked like after about 2 hours.
People love cheese.
Please feel free to share any good Thanksgiving cheese stories in the comments. What did you serve?
*Anyone know why this cheese was once called Pau and now is called St. Mateu?
The amazing thing about Wisconsin Cheesemakers is that there are so many great ones close together. The morning after the Gathering of the Cheddar Makers, I headed a half hour down the road to visit Uplands Cheese. Uplands is famous for being the only company to win the American Cheese Society Competition Best of Show more than once for the same cheese. Pleasant Ridge reserve has won three times, most recently last year.
Long time cheesemaker/owner Mike Gingrich is in the process of turning over the operation to Andy Hatch but the cheese is as good as ever. Last year Uplands introduced their second cheese: the seasonal Rush Creek, a Vacherin Mont D’or-like, bark-wrapped, oozy bit of amazing.
Here’s Andy with some aging Pleasant Ridge Reserve:
Unrelated to cheesemaking, Andy used to live directly below the infinity room* at House on the Rock. No one seemed happy when I brought up the proximity of Uplands and HOTR. C’mon dudes, embrace your culture!** Even if they are unwilling to acknowledge the camp-terroir of their region, the Uplands folks make great cheese. The Pleasant Ridge is Alpine style, nutty and grassy, more like a well-aged Comte than a Gruyere. Like Comte, it’s dry-salted instead of brined and it’s one of this country’s best full-flavored big cheeses. Being a grass-based operation, Uplands does not make cheese year-round and they sell all the cheese they make so, while not rare, you won’t find it everywhere.
This looks like a lot, but it’s not enough to meet demand from all the cheese buyers who want it. I could move in here, for sure:
Every batch of Pleasant Ridge has a test wheel so the Uplands folks can see how the cheese is aging. You can see the core holes on this one:
Lastly, Uplands Cheese is farmstead, meaning that all the milk comes from their own grass-based cows. Aren’t they cute?
*The Infinity Room really is awesome.
As is the carousel:
**Though this lack of interest in the local art forms perhaps explains the crappy “monument” to Cheddar that I wrote about in the “Ruminations” section the current issue of Culture Magazine
Hey there. I went into my typical pattern of internet silence around the big food holiday. Too much to do in the week before Thanksgiving, as all U.S.-grocery store workers know. You have to wonder about anyone who works in retail food who has time to blog in the days leading up to Thanksgiving.
On the “Culture Magazine” facebook, they asked, “What cheeses are you serving for Thanksgiving and I responded, “Whatever doesn’t sell!” That’s true to a point. I would have brought, for example, the Nettle Meadow Kunik if we hadn’t have run out but I wasn’t going to buy any out from under customers, at least for Thanksgiving when the cheese is not the main focus of our food table.
But I did buy the Uplands Creamery Rush Creek Reserve, a raw milk Vacherin Mont D’or-style cheese from the folks who are the only three-time winner of the American Cheese Society Best in Show (for Pleasant Ridge Reserve). True, it didn’t sell, but they didn’t arrive in the store until Wednesday at 1 PM so they were hardly neglected.
Anyways, here is artsy photo of the cheese plate from the Thanksgiving thing in our apartment:
Here’s the more detailed picture:
From top left: Cowgirl Creamery Wagon Wheel/Tumbleweed, Uplands Creamery Rush Creek Reserve, French Fromager D’affinois*, Swiss Antique Gruyere, and Croation Paski Sir** You can’t really seem ‘em but there is a huge selection of Potter’s Crackers from Wisconsin that went along with this.
I forgot to take a picture of the cheese I brought to my parents’ house but that’s ok, right? Feel free to share your Thanksgiving cheese thoughts or pictures in the comments.
*As someone once wrote, “like flystrips around dairy cows, the D’Affinois draws the casual cheese eater at parties away from the expensive stuff”
**This was a free sample that I just got so I threw it on the plate. I am breaking a long-held policy here of not mentioning cheeses that people ask me to mention, but this is a really good sheep milk cheese that we will try and carry when it becomes available. You can read about it here
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged antique gruyere, cheese, cowgirl creamery, paski sir, rush creek, thanksgiving, uplands creamery
Gordon ("Zola") Edgar 