This video about artisan chocolateirs Mast Brothers, via The Scout, contains one of the most intense openings for any chocolate-based movie I can remember, Gene Wilder's performance in Willy Wonka excepted.

The Brooklyn-based brothers have gained notoriety not only for their full, silky beards, but also for their utter commitment to hand-manufacture, to the point of commissioning a sailboat to deliver their cocoa beans from the Dominican Republic, New York's first cargo delivery by sail since 1939.

Euro USA's salumier Jeff Stout shows us how to quickly peel a hard salami casing with no fuss. Works on even the wrinkliest, most wizened sausages!

We stopped off at his place this morning to start prepping for tonight's Culture Yourself beer & cheese tasting at Market Garden Brewery. While Lassa and Shannon (from the awesome Heinen's) got started dicing cheese, it was Jeff's job to get enough Creminelli salami ready for 200 people. We were floored when he showed us this tip for getting the skin off, and decided we had to share.

When humans want to make an offspring, it’s pretty simple; egg, sperm, nine month incubation. The Accidental Locavore was wondering while tasting the second piece of the new masterpiece from Point Reyes Farmstead, how exactly do you design a cheese? What's the jumping-off point? Does it start with a cow, goat or sheep, or all of the above? Do you just have a flavor profile in your head and work towards making that real? Once you have a starting point, how do you maneuver such fickle ingredients as milk, mold, temperature and time? In cooking, when you have an idea, you assemble ingredients, cook them and see how the results are to your vision… generally not too time consuming. If you screw up, it's time for a quick re-do, or a call for Chinese delivery. With cheesemaking, I imagine there's a lot less instant gratification. So, do you have several versions at various stages of aging?

A good friend of mine was recently told that her cholesterol levels were too high. She was handed the usual dietary order: Cut out dairy foods—like cheese and butter—that have saturated fat. This has been the standard prescription from doctors for more than 20 years, despite the fact that epidemiological studies and new research don’t support this blanket rejection of dairy. Remember the French Paradox? (Even with all the yummy cheese and butter that’s consumed in France, the natives have much less heart disease than Americans.) And there’s this post from a scientist regarding a 15-year study in Australia that found: “people who mostly avoided dairy or consumed low-fat dairy had more than three times the risk of dying of coronary heart disease or stroke than people who ate the most full-fat diary.”