Rush Creek Reserve Season

     When you stop by the store during the Holiday season you’ll most likely encounter a cheesemonger jazzed to tell you about the amazing seasonal cheeses we have in stock. In fact, when someone asks me “what tastes good?” I have a hard time deciding what cheese deserves that accolade. We don’t just bring out the ‘good stuff’ because it’s the end of the year, many of these cheeses are seasonal. And right now it’s RUSH CREEK RESERVE SEASON!

     Before I can even get to the Rush Creek Reserve story, we have to travel to Europe. Vacherin Mont d’Or (or Vacherin du Haut-Doubs depending on what side of the border between France and Switzerland you buy the cheese) is Rush Creek Reserve’s inspiration. If you’ve ever seen the full 90 lbs wheels of Comte and Gruyere that come through our door, it would stand to reason that the milk that goes into making these cheeses doesn’t just come from one farm but many farms. These farmers are called fruitieres. The fruitieres send their very young wheels of Comte to affineurs (cheese agers) to be ripened. Two Hundred years ago when winter rolled around sending young cheese and milk across distances was not so desirable. Enter Mont D’Or. When the cows came in from pasture and the temperature dropped, farmers would make Mont D’Or, a raw milk oozy wash-rind cheese wrapped in spruce bark for themselves. Unfortunately, Mont D’Or cannot be found in the U.S.A. FDA regulation only allows for raw milk cheeses aged for over 60 days to be imported and sold here. Luckily, Andy Hatch’s cheese can fill the void.

Andy Hatch with the herd at Uplands Dairy

     Andy Hatch operates Uplands Dairy in a similar fashion to alpine cheesemakers from Europe. During the summer months, his cows graze on fresh pasture in the Driftless Region of Wisconsin and with their milk he makes the alpine inspired cheese Pleasant Ridge Reserve. Just like the big alpine cheeses of Europe (ex. Comte, Gruyere, Beaufort) Pleasant Ridge Reserve is a raw milk cheese that has wonderful nutty, fresh floral grassy flavors, with a dense creamery texture and slight crunch. And just as the alpine cheesemakers use winter milk for Mont D’Or, Andy makes Rush Creek Reserve with the milk from the hay-fed cows who come in from pasture. Rush Creek Reserve is a raw milk cheese that just squeaks passed the FDA’s 60-days-aged benchmark. Because of this regulation, we receive few soft raw milk cheeses in case.

     This weekend Andy will roll up to our shop in his pick-up truck and drop off his final delivery of Rush Creek Reserve for the season. This cheese won’t last long in our case but has the staying power to last in your refrigerator until Christmas.  Pick one up and pair it with something bubbly: a saison, cider, or champagne. The bubbles will cut through the dense custardy texture of the cheese but still allow the cheese’s meaty barnyard funk to stand out. As you enjoy this cheese around a roaring fire on a dark December day you can picture the cows snug in their barn as well, waiting for that spring day they get to step out on their fresh pasture and start the whole cycle over again.

Comte: The most special cheese

Six years ago I was invited to travel to Europe on a cheese discovery trip. I had absolutely no clue just how lucky I was. Our first stop was the Jura, a majestic region of verdant mountains right along the Swiss border. We were there to visit a dairy making wheels of Comte and to tour the Fort St. Antoine where wheels of Comte are aged.

The cheesemaker inspecting the vat

Comte is perhaps the most magical of cheeses. There's no point in spending time describing the flavors and deliciousness of this cheese when you can come on down to the shop and try some. So we'll leave it at magical and then you'll just have to see for yourself.

What is incredible about our Comte is that our wheels are chosen out of tens of thousands of wheels as the best of the best. We work with the fantastic folks at Essex St Cheese to supply you with some of the best Comte available in the world. 

My cheese adventure was also a selection trip for the folks at Essex. We were walking through the Fort so that we could try batches of cheese to see which ones were the best.

Benjamin's cheese mentor Daphne Zepos amongst thousands of wheels of Comte

It's hard not to spew hyperbole when talking about cheese or food in general but Comte truly is a food worthy of all the fuss. It's the star of a cheese plate, the necessary ingredient in a life changing grilled cheese, or your go-to for kickass fondue.

We're thrilled to offer three age profiles to you at our cheese counter this holiday season. 8- month, our signature 15-month selection, and the holiday-season-only 24-month selection. 

Oh, and did we mention that one of our employees is a Frenchman who used to work at the Fort? Yeah, there's that.

Sheep's Milk Stars For Autumn

Halfway across the world, in the Western Pyrenees, the brothers of Notre Dame de Belloc are preparing their sheep for the end of milking season and the beginning of breeding season. During the majority of the colder months, the herd will ruminate on winter grass, hay, and life. In the following spring, after the new lambs have been ushered into the world, milking and cheese making will resume.

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The monks will transform the milk into a small tomme called Abbaye de Belloc. In the region, the style is referred to as 'ardi-gasna' (our/local cheese). Like other ‘fromage de brebis’ cheeses, Abbaye de Belloc exhibits a fresh, rich feel on your tongue and a subtle finish of straw and pasture.

Traveling back to the northeast corner of the U.S., cheese maker, David Major, is following similar practices on his own farm, Vermont Shepherd. He and his family are the first sheep dairy farmers to establish themselves in the United States. They use the unpasteurized milk of the Dorset, Tunis, and Friesian breeds to make Verano. The wheels showcase the symbiotic lifestyle of shepherd and flock along with traditional cheese making in a modern era. Using wooden boards to age the natural rinded tommes causes warm almond notes to harmonize with a luscious vegetal finish.

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In our shop, we carry Abbaye de Belloc year round and Vermont Shepherd from Fall to late Winter. Early Fall is one of my favorite cheese eating seasons because I can settle in with a juicy apple, malty beer, and a hunk of good cheese. It’s the perfect preamble to Winter.

Alpine Summer

Summer in the Alps

During midsummer, while you’re headed up north to the cabin or enjoying a cold one at your favorite patio, the folks at Uplands Farm are hard at work. Pleasant Ridge Reserve is in its height of production due to the high yield of milk from the herd at this time of year. The cattle are enjoying a lush diet of pasture grasses and wild flowers whose flavor profiles are reflected in the milk, and in turn, the cheese itself. Cheesemaker, Andy Hatch, maintains a closed herd. This means that they breed using their own bulls and calves rather than sourcing outside cattle. This allows the herd to evolve with the land. Uplands is in the Driftless region of Wisconsin. Our cheese monger, Mallory, wrote a great post on the area that you can check out here.

L'Etivaz production

I can’t write about summer alpines without mentioning L’Etivaz. Henri Gutknecht makes cheese in his 266 year old chalet. The small scale producer creates, on average, two wheels of cheese a day. Gutknecht, along with other cheese makers, respect centuries of tradition by heating the raw Montbeliard and Red Holstein milk in large copper vats over open fires. The wheels we receive each year have the classic bass notes that resonate warm and nutty. Initial floral grassy notes make way for a clean finish.  

Feta Lesbos and Why Origin Matters

    What does it mean for something to be inherently tied to the land where it is produced? As globalization plays an increasingly dominant role in our world, distinctions regarding origin become blurrier: we can eat strawberries in Minnesota in February. It’s possible to walk through the aisles of a grocery store without noticing once where our food comes from. But it does matter where our food comes from and this applies to cheese as much as anything.

    In the early 1990s, the European Union (as well as individual countries) began to fight back against what they saw as a tarnishing of reputations of foods historically made in Europe. Sparkling wine, they argued, should not be called Champagne unless it is made in Champagne. They viewed these imitation products as unfair competition and believed them to be misleading customers into buying inferior (or at least different) products. The EU established a set of classifications meant to tackle this issue, including “protected designation of origin” (PDO). PDO marks foods and beverages produced entirely within a certain region that have some unique characteristic because of where they are made.

    As you can imagine, PDO designations were not awarded evenly across Europe or without dispute. While English cheddar and Italian taleggio received PDO status as early as 1996, others weren’t as lucky. As feta had grown in popularity, it’s production spread from Greece across the rest of Europe and eventually elsewhere in the world, causing many (especially non-Greek feta producers) to argue that its name had become “generic.” The feta cheese that much of the United States is familiar with is often produced outside of Greece, without following traditional practices. As a result, a lot of it doesn’t taste all that good. We know feta as a crumble for salads, salty but otherwise fairly bland and uninteresting. That feta has been ruining Greek salads for decades. Finally, in 2002, feta was given PDO status and must be made in Greece with traditional methods, including the use of 70% sheep’s milk.

    The feta that we recently started selling is from a small village on the Greek island of Lesbos. Our primary importer of European cheeses, Essex Street, sent a chef named Danae Tsekoura to the far reaches of Greece looking for a feta worthy of introducing to the US as the “real deal.” This is what feta is meant to taste like: bright, briny, floral. It’s salty without being overbearing and the flavor of the sheep’s milk shines through.

    Essex Feta Lesbos is a great example of why we can’t ignore where cheese comes from. It’s glaringly obvious, from Essex’s search for perfect feta to its PDO status, that origin matters. By acknowledging origin, we are able to support independent cheesemakers and farmers in a country that is undergoing economic crisis. It also makes faraway problems seem closer and more personal. Or maybe it just means that we get to eat really delicious feta.

The Driftless Region and Its Cheeses

The Driftless Area in Wisconsin

The Driftless Area of the Midwest, containing the southeastern corner of Minnesota, a large chunk of Wisconsin and a little bit of Iowa, gets its name from a glacial event that took place over 12,000 years ago. Glaciers surrounded this area of the land, but never passed over it. This meant that no glacial “drift” was collected in the region: deposits of rock and other earthly masses that glaciers tend to leave in their tracks. This allowed for rivers to cut deep, flora to grow lush and thus, shaped a truly special region of the Midwest.

Here at the shop, we have three delicious cheeses that come specifically from this area, all of which are produced in Wisconsin. Pleasant Ridge Reserve, for one, is a wonderful gruyere style cheese made by Andy Hatch and his team. Their farm sits upon Pleasant Ridge in the Driftless Area where the cows have a vast and beautiful landscape to traverse and feed on the different grasses and wildflowers that abound. This lends a complex and unique flavor to the cheese that customers, and mongers alike, fully enjoy.

Andy Hatch of Uplands Cheese with his cows

Secondly, we have Bleu Mont Cheddar from Willi Lehner over at Bleu Mont Dairy. Like tradition goes, these awesome wheels of cheddar are cave-aged and clothbound. You can imagine that the Driftless Area fosters a great space for one to carve their own cave, which is exactly what Lehner did. This allows his wheels to age and bring out the earthy nuances that are ever so important in a cheddar.

Lastly, there is Dunbarton Blue from the Roelli Cheese Haus, a truly special cheese, handcrafted by Chris Roelli, that combines a cheddar and blue style all into one. These wheels are cellar-aged and contain a perfect balance of subtle blue veins and dense cheddar paste. It goes without saying that there is something exceptionally alluring about the Driftless Area for a man from Switzerland to choose it as the beginnings of a generational cheese production that hails back to the 1920s.

Sing a Song for English Cheddar

English Cheddar and Joe Strummer

Haven’t visited the British Isles? Neither have I, but a bite of Montgomery’s Cheddar offers a glimpse. This English cheddar is dry, structured and possesses an old-world earthiness. Nothing like the bright, fresh, and nutty earthy notes found in alpage cheeses. It’s that barnyard, cave-y, damp, gamey, hobbit hole kind of earthy. A quality that evokes images of the British countryside, giving me a sehnsucht to travel to that soggy field full of cows with the farmer in muddy Wellies and tweed jacket.

I get excited every time a new wheel of English Cheddar arrives at our store. Batches can vary widely, more than most cheese that we see. The earthiness is the backbone of this British Cheddar. But a range of tannic, cave-y funk, pineapple-y sweet and grassy notes will bring you a different adventure in flavors every time. If English Cheddar were an album it would be The Clash’s “London Calling”. It proclaims its English heritage from the start with London Calling, gets dank and grungy with Guns of Brixton, becomes a little tropic and fruity like the reggae in Revolution Rock, and surprises you with a long finish as if it were the bonus track Train in Vain.

Stop in this weekend and at our counter you’ll find Montgomery’s and Keen’s Cheddar, and Lincolnshire Poacher (somewhat of a divergence from true cheddar). Not only do these cheeses have distinct flavor profiles, if you stop in our store 6 months from now and try another Montgomery’s Cheddar, that batch could be singing a different tune. This weekend cheddar might be all Rudie Can’t Fail, but don’t be surprised when the cheddar you pick up in a few months is more Lost in the Supermarket. Whatever the flavor or tune it’s bound to be a good experience! 

Cravero Parm: Not Just For Your Pasta

Katie Renner, Cheese Buyer

When I create cheese boards I usually stick to the classic line up: clothbound cheddar, something soft, and something sheep or goat. Having grown tired of this classic (and still tasty) plating affair, I decided to reach out to a cheese that is often overlooked. A good Parmesan, more specifically Cravero Parmigiano Reggiano, has become one of my favorite things to nibble on. The Cravero family has been selecting wheels and aging them in Bra, Italy for five generations.  The local forage and pasture that the herds of Fresian cows eat create a flavor profile which is rich with fruity and savory notes. The texture is succulent with that good bite of tyrosine delight.

As of late, my favorite way to devour this baby is to let my piece come up to room temperature and just dive in. This first part is key to any good cheese eating. By letting the cheese warm up, the texture becomes more supple and flavors that would otherwise be masked by the chill of the fridge, will open up. After an hour or so, depending on the size of my hunk, I go for it. The bread, oils, and fruit are all left behind in my frenzy, but if you aren’t ready to make the plunge quite yet, I highly recommend you drizzle some of the 2015 press of the Laudemio olive oil or the Saporoso balsamic from the Malphigi family over the top.

So please, the next time you go to make a cheese plate or a snack, go beyond your usual choices and dive deep into the pool of Parmigiano Reggiano.

A Love Letter to Cheese

Dear cheese,

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways:

1. You're always there for me yet always changing. No two wheels of Comte or Cheshire ever taste the same. We taste each new wheel with a completely open mind, forgetting what we tasted the time before.

2. You fill me up both literally and spiritually. Cheese is a complete protein which fills you up and keeps you feeling full. And really do we need to talk about all the ways that cheese is the most delicious and versatile food on the planet?

3. It's possible that you might be an aphrodisiac but at the very least you're made to be sandwiched between two pieces of bread and melted.

So this Valentine's Day clearly wouldn't be the same without you. I'm so lucky to have you in my life.

xoxo

Benjamin