A Cheesemonger's Guide to Holiday Shopping: Part I

Our cheese counter never sees more action than in the days approaching Thanksgiving and Christmas. There's always something invigorating about being in the cozy, bustling shop on those days—you might find a new favorite cheese, you might run into a neighborhood friend—you’ll definitely get elbowed by someone on their way to snatch the last Rush Creek Reserve. Ahh, the holidays. It’s a magical time.

We’ve put together a few simple tips and tricks to help you achieve the best possible shopping experience. The stakes always feel high this time of year, and we’re here to help.

Shop Early

Unless you're a truly chaotic spirit and just love last-minute shopping (and really, more power to you), we advise doing your holiday cheese shopping prior to the week of Christmas. We're already fully stocked with all the exciting holiday offerings--the options only stand to dwindle. Most soft cheeses have a shelf life of several weeks, if not months. A slice of hard cheese, stored properly, can last at least a couple weeks in the fridge. The pro move? Stop in on a weekday afternoon before the 17th for short wait times, optimum selection, and minimally-frazzled mongers.

Have a Game Plan

While we love to initiate new cheese devotees into the cult of dairy, it's always helpful when a customer comes in with a direction, especially during these busy periods. You don't have to know a ton about cheese to buy cheese like a pro. Some examples of great customer prompts:

• "I love that cheese Midnight Moon—do you have anything like that?" YES.

• "I'm allergic to cow's milk—can you help me find something firm and crunchy?" Sure can.

• "I'm entertaining twelve on Saturday—adventurous crowd. Pick three cheeses for me." Love it.

• "I like that cheese that you squeeze out of a can, do you have that?" Erm, maybe not this one.

The point is, as long as you know what you like, you don't need to know a lot else. That's why we mongers have jobs, after all.

Know your Options

If you're not the DIY type but still love entertaining, boy, do we have some options for you. We offer beautiful cheese and charcuterie trays on our catering menu, including the "Impromptu" board which serves just 4-6 and can be prepared with just a few hours' notice. We also have a fantastic holiday menu this year, featuring house-made delights like Foie Gras Torchon, Egg Nog Cake, and Sous Vide Prime Rib. If you'd prefer not to throw elbows in the shop, we have a host of products available for sale online. Don't see what you want? Email us, and I'm positive we can help you out. We offer curbside pickup, shipping, and local delivery for catering and gifts. We've got you!

Check back next week for a holiday gift guide (oooh, ahhh) featuring some of our favorite products!

Ask A Cheesemonger: How Do I Eat My Rush Creek?

Rush Creek Reserve for the Holidays

by Austin Coe Butler

For many during the holiday season, cheese comes before or after a meal as its own distinct course. If cheese makes its way onto the dining room table or into the kitchen it is often grated over or whisked into a dish to be subsumed in a supporting role or as a garnish. But this Thanksgiving I’d like to invite you to bring one cheese to the table to take its rightful place as the centerpiece, Rush Creek Reserve.

Rush Creek Reserve is the perfect cheese for large gatherings because of its size and ceremony. Girdled in spruce bark and mottled with glaucous mold, it has an arresting aesthetic like a well composed holiday wreath. Many of you have likely had this cheese before, and what I’m going to tell you may sound perverse, but this year you should bake it and serve it alongside your Thanksgiving spread.

Heated, Rush Creek Reserve takes on an unctuous, velvety texture that reminds me of gravy, demi, or even more decadent jus gras with a syrupy, tacky mouthfeel that is lip-smacking. The “woodsiness” imparted to the cheese by its spruce cambium girdle is perfectly at home alongside traditional Thanksgiving herbs and seasonings like parsley, sage, rosemary, thyme, or poultry spice. Served alongside or on lean white meat like turkey, Rush Creek brings needed richness. A tart cranberry sauce with citrus zest pairs perfectly with the savory, meaty flavors of the cheese, too. Gravy on your mashed potatoes? Why not Rush Creek for instant aligot? Fresh bread or crackers with this cheese? Use stuffing as your delivery vehicle of choice. A warm Rush Creek Reserve deserves your gravy boat’s spot on the Thanksgiving table.

To prepare your Rush Creek, set your oven to 150º or its lowest setting. Remove it from its paper wrapper, and place it on a small sheet tray lined with parchment. Bake it for just 5 to 10 minutes. There should be some resistance when you press the top with your finger, but it shouldn’t be bubbling or leaking. Score the perimeter right above the bark and peel back the top rind. Once you remove the top your can serve your Rush Creek as is or place it under the broiler or a hand torch to get some color on it. Take generous spoonfuls of the Rush Creek and drizzle it like honey over whatever you choose. For the uninitiated or unconvinced, try a warm Rush Creek over a sheet tray of roasted vegetables for a hearty, vegetarian meal that many of our mongers cook during this special time when Rush Creek is available.

When you’re in the shop to pick up your Rush Creek, be sure to buy an extra. You’ll want one for your leftovers, trust me.

What's the best way to store cheese at home? Part II

Last week, we set up a casual experiment to test four of the most recommended cheese storage methods: cheese paper, foil, saran wrap, and Tupperware. We allowed four small pieces of Chebris to age for seven days in the less-than-sterile environment of the F44 Wine & Spirits staff refrigerator. No fancy humidifiers or wooden shelving here, only the harsh fluorescent bulb and stale air of your typical home fridge. After a week, we opened up the four test subjects with great anticipation. The results…

The good news is: all of the cheeses still looked and tasted pretty decent. There were no visible mold growths or spots of serious oxidation, which are typically the first harbingers of cheese death. A couple of the samples were looking a little crisp around the edges (pictured), but nothing that concerned us.

The paper-aged sample shows signs of drying around the edges.

1. The Winner: Foil

   Surprisingly, foil proved to be our favorite storage method. Tasters agreed that the foil-wrapped cheese remained the most creamy and still tasted fresh cut from the wheel. The foil wrap kept out fridge odor completely, while keeping moisture in.

2. Cheese Paper

   It’s no surprise that cheese paper stores cheese well. The paper is designed to do this with a paper exterior and breathable poly-lining. Our only gripe with this method was that the cheese did show signs of dryness encroaching around the edges.

3. Tupperware

   Similarly, the Tupperware-encased piece of Chebris showed signs of drying out, but not as much as we expected. This proved to be an effective way of keeping fridge odors out, and would probably be a great way to store larger pieces of cheese in the fridge.

4. Saran wrap

As we hypothesized, the saran-wrapped piece of cheese tasted by far the worst, with notes of plastic and stale-fridge odor apparent. This cheese also appeared the most oily and sweaty, having not been allowed to properly breath within the cling film. (Granted, we’re nitpicking here! These cheese was still mostly tasty and far from inedible, but all things considered, it was our least favorite method.)

While we learned a lot from this brief experiment, our consensus was that a longer aging might be necessary to truly test wrap methods’ durability. Trial two begins today, and this one will run for four whole weeks. The potential for gnarly cheese pics is high, folks. Fellow cheese obsessives, stay tuned.

What's the best way to store cheese at home? Part One!

Ask ten different cheesemongers this question and you’re likely to get at least six different answers. Parchment paper. Foil. Tupperware. Saran wrap. Beeswax wrap! There’s a monger out there who swears by each of these methods, we guarantee it. At France 44, we typically recommend that our customers keep their cheese wrapped in the custom cheese paper we provide, but we like to back our advice up with more than just inherited practices. So this week we decided to put our lab coats on and conduct a good, old-fashioned cheese study.

The first matter at hand was choosing an appropriate test subject. Cheeses at either end of the texture spectrum tend to do best in the fridge, somewhat counterintuitively. As such, we chose Chebris, a lovely semi-firm sheep & goat’s milk tomme with just enough moisture and pliability to really show maltreatment from the harsh environment of the fridge.

1. Control: Cheese Paper

   We already know that cheese paper keeps cheese reasonably fresh in the fridge. Worst case, every other sample tastes terrible and we learn that our tried and true method is the classic for a reason.

2. Foil

   This is a tip we learned from the late, great Anne Saxelby. Foil is flavorless, air-tight, and has the added benefit of blocking out light. Wrap as you would with cheese paper.

3. Tupperware

   Sealing your cheese in a small Tupperware container allows the cheese to breath, while blocking out the drying, cool air of your refrigerator.

4. Saran wrap

   Most mongers agree that saran wrap is the worst way to store cheese. You may point out: but you guys store your cheese in saran wrap at the shop?! It’s true, most cheese shops use cling wrap to display cheese, but it requires constant upkeep to prevent off flavors from taking hold. Saran wrap does not allow cheese to breath, trapping moisture near the surface which can lead to mold. It may look nice at first, but we don’t recommend this method for storage.

We popped our four test subjects into the chaotic France 44 Wine & Spirits employee refrigerator for a true replication of the home environment. Taco Bell leftovers? Present. Fish curry? Oh, yeah. We’ll come back in a week to see which storage methods sealed out these nefarious odors, and which, tragically, did not.

Ask a Cheesemonger: Does cheese go bad?

The answer, of course, is yes… and no. And probably not in the way that you think. Let us explain.

First, a bit of friendly mongerly advice. The best way to enjoy delicious cheese is to buy only as much cheese as you can consume in a week, no longer. Cheese will never taste better than when it’s freshly cut off the wheel. If you’re reading this, hopefully you patronize one of our cut-to-order cheese shops; our mongers would be delighted to cut you an appropriate amount of cheese, no matter how big or small. That said, we know life happens and sometimes things kick around in the fridge longer than we’d like. Let us help you triage some hypothetical cheese-mergencies.  

We’re going to talk about the ‘m’ word. We’re talking, naturally, about mold. If you’ve ever found a long-forgotten piece of cheddar in the back of your crisper, only to unwrap it and discover a thick pashmina of blue growth, this one’s for you.

We’re guessing that you quickly jettisoned that piece of cheese straight into the bin. We’ve all done it. But that little piece of cheese might not be beyond saving. Surface mold like the kind that grows on cheese or bread is unpalatable, but not harmful. Take a knife and cut a few millimeters off of each moldy surface. Now give the cheese a taste. You may be surprised by what you find. If that didn’t do the trick, the problem probably lies deeper, literally.

Firm cheese (think cheddar, Alpines, goudas) absorbs off-flavors in the fridge (which, incidentally, represents a far greater threat to cheese health than mold), flavors that work their way in from the surface down. At any decent cheese shop, mongers practice regular maintenance by scraping away the aged surface of open wedges. Sometimes this includes mold, which grows naturally from ambient spores and truly can’t be prevented. Your cheese represents a plush king size bed to those spores, which will happily make their home there given time. It’s unsightly, but it doesn’t have to be scary because—and allow us to let you in on a little secret—cheese is mold. That rind on your brie? Mold. The flavor in your favorite blue? Mold. The white patina on the rind of an aged Alpine? Ok, that one’s a yeast but you get the point! Mold: it’s what’s for dinner.

A wedge of any firm cheese you may purchase will never go bad, but it will lose its flavor with time, or worse, end up tasting like the smoked salmon you have next to it in the fridge. Our softer cheese friends, however, have the potential to get a little funkier. Soft cheeses ripen from the outside in; you may notice that their center remains firm and fudgy while the outer layer becomes gooey. This creates some wonderful textures, but it also means that the rind of such cheeses is the first part to age.

As the proteins in cheese break down, the nitrogen within is released in the form of ammonia. (Walking through a cheese-aging facility is an eye-watering experience.) You may unwrap a Camembert to be hit with a wave of chemical aroma—this is likely an indiction that your cheese is past prime. Again, it won’t be harmful to you, but eating it would be a supremely unpleasant experience with a bitter aftertaste. In milder cases, you may choose to cut off the top rind and eat the paste within, which tends to retain flavor better. Orange spotting, fluffy growths, or blue spots on these cheese rinds are strains of mold or yeast and can be consumed, or scraped away with the tip of a knife. Funkier barnyard aromas tend to be desirable in washed rind cheeses (Epoisses, Langres, Oma) and aren’t of concern.

Hopefully you’ll walk away from this post feeling a little more comfortable eating and caring for cheese. Wedges of firm cheese will last quite a while well-cared for in your fridge, but their flavor will naturally degrade with time. Softer cheeses, especially those in breathable packaging, are designed to age over a matter of weeks; depending on when in the cheeses’s life-cycle you pick it up, you may be able to keep it for up to a month. In either case, checking in on your cheese periodically is a good idea. Your nose is your best friend when it comes to cheese. If your nose tells you “nuh uh, no,” trust it!

Next week we’ll be covering the best ways to store cheese in your fridge at home because ultimately, happy cheese is the best cheese.

Ask a Cheesemonger: What's the difference between mozzarella and burrata?

by Maura Rice

If you read our newsletters religiously (and truly, bless you), you may be tired of hearing us harp on about our fresh mozzarella. We get it—we really do. We just can’t help ourselves when it comes to mozzarella season because the stuff is so dang special. And this summer, Austin (our resident pasta filata specialist—more on this term later), has expanded his repertoire to include fresh burrata too. You may even have accidentally picked up a ball of the delicate cheese by mistake, only to be surprised (and delighted, hopefully?) by the creamy filling. This brings me to our central question this week: just what is the difference between mozzarella and burrata?

We’re guessing you’re probably familiar with mozzarella at this point in your cheese-consuming career—it is, after all, the most popular cheese in America. And you’re willingly reading a cheese blog, so odds are you’ve probably encountered burrata in the wild too. Still, the nuances of these Italian softies can be tough to distinguish when you’re elbow deep in salad or pizza. Burrata? Fior di latte? Stracciatella? The Italians notoriously have a complicated term for every aspect of cheesemaking, not to mention the hundreds of formaggi in their bullpen. Case and point…

Pasta filata refers to a class of cheese encompassing mozzarella and burrata. It translates approximately to “spun thread” or “stretched curd” which is an apt description of the unique cheesemaking process used to create both. While most cheese is made by aging curd pressed into forms, pasta filata cheeses are formed by softening curd in near-boiling salty water until it becomes smooth and luscious. Our mozz-maker, Austin, does this by using a large wooden paddle to gently stretch the curd in the air until it reaches the proper temperature and texture. The process is exceedingly delicate (not to mention painful), which is why fresh-pulled mozzarella is such a rarified treat. Overwork the curd for just a few seconds and you may end up with a tough, toothsome product. Other cheeses made in this popular style include provolone, caciocavallo, and scamorza, which all share the stretchy, pull-apart structure created by the pasta filata process.

Mozzarella in true Italian tradition is made with water buffalo milk, which, being richer in fat than cow’s milk, makes for an exceptionally luxurious cheese. Sadly, water buffalo farming is quite rare in the States, so most mozzarella found here is made with cow’s milk, and is technically what the Italians call fior di latte. We use lovely cow’s milk curd from our friends at Liuzzi Angeloni in Connecticut. The curd itself is remarkably flavorless and bland, not at all like the cheese curds we Midwesterners know and love. It tastes purely of fresh, whole milk, which, of course, it is. Mozzarella is the most basic pasta filata cheese being formed by simply pinching off spheres of the stretched cheese. These alabaster globes are either wrapped immediately to preserve their shape or stored in brine for extended life. In any case, to witness the transformation of rubbery curds into rich, silken mozzarella in a matter of moments is to understand the true magic of cheesemaking.

On the surface, burrata appears identical to mozzarella (hence, the confusion). But the amount of work that goes into a ball of burrata is tenfold that of mozzarella. In the most basic sense, burrata is a thin layer of mozzarella housing a stracciatella filling. Stracciatella, in turn, is a combination of fresh cream and mozzarella shreds, likely a way for cheesemakers to utilize the scraps of the mozzarella-making process. Austin has adopted the Italian tradition of adding fresh seasonal fruit to the cream. As you might imagine, crafting these delicate spheres is incredibly challenging. First, the cheesemaker must form the hot curd into a flat sheet—the ‘skin’ of the burrata. With one hand, he must form a pouch from this sheet while using the other to pour in his stracciatella mixture. Finally, he must painstakingly seal the ball without spilling the liquid contents or puncturing the skin. The final product is much like a delicate water balloon or an extremely overripe tomato­, and, as in either case, it’s best to just embrace the mess.

You may wonder, how could this laborious process possibly be worth it?! It does seem likely that the creator of pasta filata cheeses was probably a masochist. But to enjoy freshly-made mozzarella and burrata is to understand the mania. Stop in some weekend to pick up a still-warm ball of lactic magic, and see for yourself.