No, it’s not art. It’s a cheese board, and it’s meant to be consumed down to the last pistachio. Cheese artiste Lilith Spencer creates these edible dreamscapes for Cheesemongers of Santa Fe, the year-old store where she works. Wowza. Looks like we’re all going to have to up our game.
Read moreBullish on Britain
If your notion of British cheese begins with Cheddar and ends with Stilton, you have some catching up to do. The diversity and quality of wheels coming into the U.S. from the British Isles has been nothing short of remarkable in recent years, reflecting a renaissance of artisan cheese making there. But American consumers don’t seem up to speed on this—perhaps because they have low esteem for British food in general. Wake up, people.
Read moreShow Time
The annual Fancy Food Show in San Francisco in January is equal parts delight and dread for me. While it’s energizing to see so many amazing cheeses and cheese people in one place, my appetite always peters out before the cheese does. It’s agonizing at the end of the day to look at gorgeous mountain wheels from some new Swiss affineur and think, “I just can’t.”
Read moreGreat Lady of Goat Cheese
Late last year, Jennifer Bice announced the sale of Redwood Hill Farm, her goat milk products company in Sebastopol, California. The purchaser? Emmi, the Swiss dairy giant, which also bought Cypress Grove Chèvre, makers of Humboldt Fog, from founder Mary Keehn five years ago. With the sale of Laura Chenel’s Chèvre to a French firm in 2006, the country’s pioneering producers of goat cheese are no longer American owned. Recently, I spoke to Bice by phone about the sale and its ramifications.
Read moreChèvre with a Sweet Note
If you like salted caramels—everyone nodding?—you will love Stanislaus Caprine. Dense, sweet and salty, this aged goat cheese reminds me of dulce de leche, the concentrated goat’s-milk caramel. The cheese’s name is slightly unwieldy, but Californians will recognize Stanislaus as a county in the state’s fertile Central Valley. Walter Nicolau, the cheesemaker, is a fourth-generation dairyman there who started his own farm and made his first cheese at the age of 20. Nicolau Farms is less than five miles from where Walter’s great-grandfather had his cow dairy.
Read moreTriple Play
Introduced in March of this year, Tomales Farmstead’s Teleeka is already outselling the four other cheeses made by this California creamery. I’m not surprised. Inspired by La Tur, the wildly popular bloomy-rind cheese from Northern Italy, Teleeka has a luscious factor that’s hard to resist.
Read moreYet Another Feta to Love
How can Greece have an economic crisis given all the Greek feta that I buy? I’m never without some in my fridge, but my usage spikes at this time of year, when the deluge of tomatoes, cucumbers, eggplants and peppers makes feta a must-have. At $11 or $12 a pound, it’s the best value at the cheese counter.
Read moreGroovy Goat Cheese Takes Blue Ribbon
At this time of year, I’m happy to eat Greek salad every day. I’m not tired of those garden tomatoes and cucumbers yet. But last week I shook things up a bit, replacing the feta with PsycheDillic, the little dill-scented goat cheese that just took a blue ribbon at the American Cheese Society competition.
Read moreIt Stinks So Good
One sign of a true cheese enthusiast is a refrigerator full of little wrapped nubbins, pieces too big to throw away but too pitiful-looking to serve to a guest. Recently, my husband and I had an entire cheese course of nubbins—probably 10 different two-ounce remnants making their last stand. The one I kept coming back to was Cabra Raiano, a semisoft Portuguese goat’s milk cheese. I nibbled at some of the others, but this one I polished off. Even as a days-old leftover, it was sublime.
Read moreAsh Gets Trashed
Not again. For the second time in a month, a cheese that I had requested for a class would be a no-show, the distributor informed me last week. The French producer had declined to ship any Couronne de Touraine, concerned that the goat cheese might be detained by the FDA. The issue? The ashed rind.
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