Months ago international cheese consultant Ivan Larcher surprised me with this response when I asked what trends he was seeing in the cheese industry: “What I’ve been seeing is that everybody tends to use the same starter cultures. In the United States, Quebec, England, Sweden, or even Northern Africa, they’re using the same starters, and the main consequence is that the final products tend to lose their diversity.” Hearing this, I feared that cheese cultures—the microbes added to...
know
Whether you're among the initiated or just taking your first taste of the world of fine cheese, our know section aims to answer your questions and provide you with insight to make your cheese-loving experience complete. Engage in dialogue with cheesemongers, other aficionados, or with enthusiasts like yourself. Also, culture founder and veteran cheesemonger Kate Arding is just putting the final touches on our comprehensive and ever-growing cheese library.
Recent posts on Ask the Cheesemonger
| Title | Replies | Last Post |
|---|---|---|
| Bufala Gorgonzola | 6 | 3 weeks 4 days ago |
| Cheeses to try in Switzerland | 2 | 22 weeks 4 days ago |
| Visiting cheese farms in Loire Valley | 1 | 2 years 11 weeks ago |
Cheese IQ
Cheese Talk
Be wary of the temperature
While many of us relish the rising mercury, cheese isn’t so keen on it. Left out for too long, oozy, soft cheeses can quickly turn into a puddle on your kitchen table, while harder cheeses can get sweaty and flopsy – neither of which are very appetizing. To avoid this pitfall, only remove what you’ll actually eat from the refrigerator, and let that come to temperature. Once it’s at an optimum warmth, enjoy as quickly as...
Web Exclusive
"I’ll be working in my office, and they’re spreading manure outside my window!” laughs Neal Kolterman, vice president of sales and marketing at Pineland Farms Inc., a farm and nonprofit campus in central Maine. “It’s a stunning property and a beautiful place to work. There’s a real connection between community, agriculture, and recreation here—that’s what Pineland Farms...
Summer 2013
New on the Market
This year, Brie Le Châtelain earned a gold medal at Concours Général Agricole, France’s largest food competition, held annually in Paris. It was chosen from more than 17,000 French food products and judged on its quality and taste, and the win is laudable, as Brie Le Châtelain is crafted...
Coach Farm has introduced a new range of Goat’s Milk Probiotic Yogurts, produced in small batches using live, active cultures and milk from the company’s 900 dairy goats in New York’s Hudson Valley. Extending Coach Farm’s existing line of farmstead goat cheeses, drinkable yogurt, and fresh goat...
It takes guts to put the word “powerful” smack dab in the name of your cheese, but Collier’s Powerful Welsh Cheddar aims to live up to it. New to the U.S. market, this award-winning cheddar gets its name from the men who mined coal in South Wales during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries....
Ruminations
Since one of my husband’s first distinct childhood memories had to do with eating steamers while sitting on someone’s lap, our teenage son’s foodie status should come as no surprise. So when Lucien started to pore over cookbooks—and then food blogs—and to be glued to the TV Food Network, I took it all in stride. His paternal grandparents, after all, always described their travels meal by meal, all other landmarks seemingly incidental...
Spring 2013
The first time I saw udders up close and personal was from the rear of a brown Nubian goat. It was my first day as a volunteer at Sprout Creek Farm in Poughkeepsie, New York. I had my hands on two plastic cylinders protruding from a metal contraption, reminiscent of something from the Jetsons; it was meant to suction onto those two udders to milk the goat. I was terrified to use them. I didn’t grow up around farm animals (or any animals, really, besides a lazy cat), and I feared doing...
Winter 2012
At the age of six, when I was asked to identify my favorite cheese, the answer came effortlessly and without question: blue, and not just any blue—it had to be Roquefort.
I was at this age a recent transplant to the suburb of Harrison, New York, having just moved with my family from Ève, a quiet village northeast of Paris. I began attending a French-American school in the area, where other young émigrés like me often dwelled on the things they missed most. Apart from...
Fall 2012
"Que Dios te serba las manitas” (may God preserve your little hands) is the utmost appreciation a ham hand cutter can receive in Spain.
In that country cutting a whole leg of ham by hand is an artful ritual; those who do it are called cortadores. Technique is the very essence of this art, so it is considered a kind of performance. I know cortadores who handle as many as 400 jamones a year, cutting them during celebrations, expositions, fairs, wedding ceremonies,...
Web Exclusive
When I was growing up in the 1970s, there was always Ski Queen gjetost [YAY-toast] on the table at my grandmother’s house in Brooklyn. She was from Norway, where this sweet, firm brown goat cheese is made by adding cream to a boiling kettle of goat’s milk whey and cooking it for hours and hours. When it has cooled, it is formed into cubes that look like old-fashioned laundry soap or peanut butter fudge.
Gjet in Norwegian means goat; ost means cheese. Most gjetost tastes a lot...
Spring 2012
So I was asked to write about what I do as a cheese importer, how I find my cheese gems. There isn’t one specific way. Often, it’s about recognizing when an opportunity presents itself—“having the eye,” as a colleague once described to me.
Take the goat cheese Leonora, for example, that I bring in from León, Spain. I stumbled on that one at a trade show when I went to say hello to Tomas, the producer of Valdeón cheese. It was a cool-looking white brick tucked away in a refrigerated...
Winter 2011
A Texas teenager recounts his early years of cheese discovery
It started with my mother’s quest to find a snack food that would suit my toddler palate and dexterity. When she handed me a few Cheerios, I tasted one and handed the rest back. A series of other toddler snack attempts followed, but to no avail. Just when it appeared that I was destined for a snackless life, cheese came along, in the form of a fish: cheddar Goldfish, to be precise.
I was hooked. Goldfish were my...
Fall 2011
A cheesemonger recalls his pilgrimage
I asked the woman at the motel desk how I could find the big cheddar.
She replied, “You mean the big cheddar replica?”
For a moment I thought, “Why does the World’s Largest Talking Cow [Chatty Bell in Wisconsin] get to be a real cow, but the World’s Largest Cheese has to be a mere replica?” But I didn’t dwell. Maybe the clerk was a vegan. I had made my friend Anna, a sociologist, drive a couple of hundred miles out...
Summer 2011
It’s no coincidence that eggs are found in the dairy aisle
It’s possible that, even more than cheese, eggs are having their cultural moment. Recently, the Scientist and I attended a talk on home chicken-keeping by Susan Orlean, author of The Orchid Thief, who broke a cardinal actor’s rule by sharing the stage with a pair of charismatic, misbehaving hens. Still, nearly a hundred urban homesteaders turned out to watch the famous writer be upstaged by a pair of squawking...
Spring 2011
I’m not much of a joiner. I’ve got a AAA card, sure, but I gave up on the dance class. I’m not on the alumni committee, either. And this column? Strictly freelance.
But in the cheese world, we Bowling Alone types are far from the norm. With the exception of Kurt Timmermeister, that one-man-dairy from last issue’s Centerfold feature, cheese is a team sport—one of those things that begs for organization.
...
Winter 2010
