Topping my list of cheeses that deserve more love than they typically get: ricotta salata. With spring imminent and asparagus beckoning, this savory sheep cheese should be in your fridge. It’s so useful! I don’t snack on it—it’s not meant for that—but I do shave it in salads and grate it on pasta with spring vegetables or lamb. It loves asparagus, fava beans, peas, fennel, zucchini, beets. Basically, it’s ricotta with moisture removed so it will last longer.
Read morePecorino & Favas Last Call
Fava bean season is winding down where I live. Time to make one of my favorite salads before the beans vanish. Favas and sheep cheese, sweet and salty, in the soft folds of butter lettuce. A sharp shallot vinaigrette brings it all together. Choose a sheep’s milk cheese you can shave with a plane. If it has peppercorns in it (like Bellwether Farms’ Pepato), so much the better.
Read moreFour-Star Cacio e Pepe
The classic Roman dish, spaghetti cacio e pepe, seems to be having a moment. I have no idea why. Americans tend to prefer pasta with more stuff on it. This sauce is about as simple as it gets, although it’s easy to screw up. With Valentine’s Day on the brain, I bought a truffled pecorino recently and started to wonder if it would work in cacio e pepe. Genius, I must say.
Read moreIt’s a Cheese Marathon
One of these years, I’m going to take a clicker to the Winter Fancy Food Show so I can count exactly how many cheeses I sampled. Sixty? Seventy? My self-discipline melts like hot mozzarella at this three-day extravaganza. I’m looking for trends and the next big stars, so I soldier on. Eighty cheeses?
Read moreThin is In
The last time I was in France, visiting Comté producers in the Jura Mountains, I thought I might find a beautiful old cheese plane in an antiques shop. But I didn’t know how to ask for a cheese plane in French, and my French host—a veteran of the cheese business—was no help. He had no clue what a cheese plane was.
Read moreA Sheep at the Wheel →
For years I ignored Fiore sardo, the Sardinian sheep’s milk cheese, because I considered it too salty, smoky and sharp. Then, this past summer, I went to Sardinia, where you can’t ignore it.
Read moreAntipasto Presto
“The main object of an hors d’oeuvre is to provide something beautifully fresh-looking which will at the same time arouse your appetite and put you in good spirits,” Elizabeth David wrote. The eminent English food writer, who died in 1992, had simple tastes but no tolerance for mediocrity. Alice Waters adored her. (I was a lowly cook at Chez Panisse Café when David came in for lunch.)
David believed that a good hors d’oeuvre includes something raw, something salty, something dry or meaty and something gentle. I always think of this when I serve fava beans with pecorino. Although David barely mentions this antipasto in her book on Italian food, it has all her required parts: raw favas, sea salt, aged cheese (although young pecorino works, too) and fruity olive oil. You dip the peeled favas in oil and salt and alternate with a nibble of pecorino.
Bellwether Farms Pepato, a peppercorn-studded sheep’s milk cheese from California’s Sonoma County, is magical with favas. Inspired by Italian pepato, Bellwether’s rendition is moister, less salty and less acidic—just as cheese maker Liam Callahan intended. Following Italian tradition, Callahan uses raw milk and animal rennet—increasingly rare choices here and in Italy. Animal rennet is expensive and a vegetarian turn-off, but Callahan is convinced it improves the outcome. He also stopped waxing the wheels a few years ago, so the cheese develops more concentrated flavor.
Released at about four months, Pepato has a firm, crumbly, butter-colored interior. Personally, I don’t eat the peppercorns, but I love the floral aroma they contribute. Pepato has a subtle fruitiness and a tangy, sour-cream finish—an appealing contrast to sweet favas. I also enjoy it shaved in a salad with butter lettuce and fava beans.
Look for Bellwether Pepato at Rainbow Grocery, Cheese Plus, Bi-Rite Markets and Cowgirl Creamery in San Francisco; Oliver’s Markets in Santa Rosa; Big John’s in Healdsburg, Oakville Grocery; Whole Foods Sonoma; and Pasta Shop in Oakland and Berkeley. Pour a lean, minerally white wine—I’m loving the 2013 Massone Gavi—and use a good olive oil. Now is the last hurrah for fresh fava beans so seize the moment.