The Cheese Chronicles

Last Thursday R. and I attended a meeting of the President Street Forum, which is dedicated to "changing the status quo from the bottom up" by sharing meals and conversation and inspiring one another to greatness. So it seemed perfectly natural, then, that the focus of the evening should be cheese. And more specifically, a cheese tasting of U.S. cheeses led by the brilliant and lovely Liz Thorpe.

Her new book is called "The Cheese Chronicles: A journey through the making and selling of cheese in America, from field to farm to table," and if you have even a small interest in cheese, or artisanal foods, or connecting a source — a place, a person, ingredients — to what you put into your mouth, I can't recommend strongly enough that you do Liz and yourself a favor and buy this book. Anyone who simply likes good, straightforward writing about interesting people, you might also want to pick up a copy.

I learned quite a bit that evening. Did you know, for example, that sheep's milk has twice as much fat as cow's milk? You might say it's more concentrated, since sheep's milk has a season — which also makes the stinkers an expensive enterprise; you feed them for 12 months, but they only produce milk for five to seven. Their milk starts in the spring, which is nearly always when they give birth (such planning!) and when there are delicious new grasses and flowers and herbs for them to eat and pass the nutritional goodness of on to their young — versus the grains or hay or whatever they'd eat in a barn during the winter.

If we are to trust my scribbled notes, there are only eight sheeps' milk cheese makers in the United States. Fascinating, yes?

Another tidbit: the closer to the rind you get, the stronger the flavor of the cheese. (So don't eat the rind of a cheese you don't much like the center of, since it'll be a concentration of that flavor.)

Finally, Liz also taught us that tasting cheese is a three-part undertaking. First you look at it, then you smell it, then you eat it. Which makes perfect sense, of course. I wouldn't drink wine without smelling it first — since so much of what we taste is actually what we smell, as anyone with a stuffed nose can tell you — and still all these years I've just been shoveling in the cheese...

That night, however, with the other Forum goers, I dutifully looked and sniffed and nibbled — and it was all delicious.






























We tasted some Adele, a sheep-cow cheese from the Ancient Heritage Dairy in Oregon (off-white, goat-cheese like in texture; saddle leather smell, creamy but without the tang of goat's cheese).

Some Humboldt Fog, a goat's milk cheese from Cypress Grove Chevre in Northern California (white-white, with a black vein down its center; creamy; slight tang), which is made like a double-layer cake: the cheese covered in vegetable ash, then another slab added to the top and the whole thing rubbed in ash again, thus the black vein.

Third, we had some Oma, a washed-rind cow's milk cheese from the Vermont certified organic farm of the von Trapp Brothers — or, as we occasionally like to say in my household, in a terse voice belying the stressful climax of the film: "The von Trapp family singers. ... The singers, von Trapp!" This entirely melted into our paper plates, on that 90-degree evening, but when scraped up had a slight stink and a pleasant creaminess. (Lightly orange rind; mild flavor.)

And finally, there was Landoff, a raw cow's milk cheese from the very logical Landoff Creamy in Landoff, New Hampshire. Because, and here's the thing with the American cheese makers, unlike those in Europe, the Americans call their cheese whatever the heck they want to, instead of loosely sticking to a basic category — provolone, taleggio, brie, etc. — which makes classification a little difficult. Err, impossible.

The Landoff (the yellow bite on the plate pictured above) was a more solid cheese than the others, a Ploughman's Lunch sort of cheese. (Buttery, grassy, salty, I wrote in my notes.) It was a cheese I wanted to buy and eat in big hunks, and in this way it reminded me of Cato Corner Farm's Vivace, which I buy at the Grand Army Plaza's greenmarket on Saturdays. It has become a test of self-restraint in our house to try and make the Vivace last until Tuesday. So far, we've managed once.

This Saturday, wanting another bite of that dense, salty flavor, with its little protein crystals, I closed in on the Cato Corner stand, though in the end left with something far stinkier. I believe it was the Hooligan. In "The Cheese Chronicles," Liz describes its ilk this way:

The only nonbloomy triple creme I know of is the California stinker Cowgirl Creamery Red Hawk. I also reserve particular affinity for Cato Corner Hooligan, Meadow Creek Grayson, and Twig Farm Soft Wheel.

APPEARANCE: (Edible) pink to orange rink, shiny, sticky, tacky, Vaseline-y
AROMA: Stinky! Barnyardy, pungent, fermented fruit
FLAVOR: Bacony, fruity, meaty, peat mossy, salty
TEXTURE: From runny to pliable, bulging, buttery