For anyone who missed last night's Ustream event online, you can still watch it here! Cathy Strange gives a solid lesson on Parmigiano Reggiano (the king of cheese!) and answers viewer questions:


Video streaming by Ustream

The Irish Times has the story on Cashel Blue and the Grubb family, who are plugging along through hard times, and doing just fine:

For the Grubb family, making a living from an 80-acre dairy farm in the 1980s was no joke. With butter mountains and milk lakes dotted across Europe, they knew they needed to add value to the milk they produced.

And so Cashel Blue, Ireland’s first blue cheese, was born. Making cheese at the kitchen table and maturing it under the house, the Grubbs quickly realised they were on to something.

“Nobody made blue cheese on a farm in Ireland,” says Sarah Furno, daughter of Cashel Blue’s founder, Louis Grubb, and now both general manager and “cheese maturer” at the company.

This spring, read about the venerable Comté in an article by culture's publisher, Stephanie Skinner, who covers the unique structure of the Comté community, as well as the flavor of the cheese itself. Use this page to find Comté fruitières and and affineurs, as well as some tasty Comté recipes suitable for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Serves: 8
6 tablespoons cold, unsalted butter
2 ½ cups all-purpose flour, plus more for dusting
1 tablespoon baking powder
½ teaspoon Kosher salt
2 tablespoons sugar
3 tablespoons currants
1 ¼ cups packed grated Comté
(about 3 ½ ounces), divided
1 egg
¾ cup cold half-and-half, plus additional for brushing

Comté & Currant Scones

Coming soon!

See how brown cheese is made in Norway

These students at Cambridge School of Culinary Arts have lots to say about Culture's spring centerfold cheese Tanasi Tomme from Bonnie Blue Farm in Tennessee. We paired the cheese with two wines from Windsor Vineyards to round out the experience. Without further ado, enjoy the video!

Watch the video on YouTube

Here's a great video from the BBC featuring a premature calf named Clementine who's being nurtured to health in the farmer's house. She's all legs at the moment. Click through to watch the video:

Farmers in north Devon are hand-rearing a calf in their home after it was born prematurely and its mother had no milk. Richard and Tracey Martin from Torrington have discovered that pedigree Ayrshire Clementine is a real fighter despite arriving 12 days early.

Watch a video of Clementine the calf and her new friend, the household dog

George Washington liked ice cream too, or at least the stuff they were calling ice cream back then. Where'd he get his ice? The Potomac River in the dead of winter. The Salt has the story on that, along with Washington's other eating habits. Note: the family had Double Gloucester Cheese imported on the regular:

That ice was stored in a dry well or ice house until milk and cream became available from dairy cows in the spring.

Max McCalman writes more on the recent anti-cheese movement. He has something extra for Dr. Neal Barnard, author of the article "Cheese and the Obesity Epidemic:"

Madame Fromage has created a new dish using Spring Brook Farm Tarentaise, butternut squash, and eggs. It's a time investment, but it may just be worth it:

At our house, we have squash issues. My beau and I love to stock up on butternut and acorn every fall, but unless we make time to cook with them they stack up like heads on the counter. On a recent Sunday, I decided to have at them. I invented Eggs Tarentaise.

Tarentaise is a sweet, Gruyère-like cheese from Vermont that is much loved at the cheese counter. It’s nutty, bold, and full of caramel notes, which got me thinking it might taste good against roasted squash.

Because it was a Sunday morning, I imagined cracking a fresh egg into each butternut half once it was baked and the seeds scooped clean. With some garlic, fresh thyme, and a pinch of grated nutmeg, this dish came into being.

Massimo Calabresi at Time, has a written what can easily be read as a motivational speech for all cheese lovers (cheese haters, too). The message? Eat more cheese to save the earth:

Americans eat a lot of cheese, reports “Amber Waves” the USDA’s award-winning eZine on the economics of food, farming, natural resources and rural America: “Average annual U.S. cheese consumption nearly tripled between 1970 and 2003, from 11 pounds per person to 31 pounds,” reports Amber Waves.