One of my first jobs in the food world was working for a French pastry chef. I was just the cashier for his bakery, but I hung out in the back a lot. The best lesson I learned from Marcel was not to waste. He would use his thumb to scrape the last drop of egg white out of the egg shell. (“That’s the profit,” he would tell me.) No wonder I never throw away chard stems or Parmigiano-Reggiano rinds. The cheese rinds add body and flavor to bean soup, and I’ve recently learned that they make amazing stock.
Read moreCheese Raises Dollars for Napa Disaster
It has been quite the week here in smoky Napa. The least of my worries was that I had to cancel a cheese class, leaving me with 12 pounds of fabulous cheese in the fridge. Nothing to do but donate it to an evacuation center or to the nearby first-responders’ station.
To my chagrin, neither would take it. “We can’t take perishables,” the evacuation center worker told me. “We have a caterer,” the guard at the first-responders’ camp said. Okay, then. Reject my cheese. I have a better idea.
Read moreSwitching It Up
Fresh mozzarella sales soar in summer, and we all know why. Just look in people’s shopping carts and you can tell what’s on the menu: insalata caprese. Again. At every dinner party, insalata caprese. On every buffet, insalata caprese. I enjoy the dish as much as anyone—especially with homegrown tomatoes—but sometimes I just want to switch it up. With hardly any more effort, you can make some juicy bruschetta for a dinner-party appetizer or quick lunch.
Read moreLife Lessons at a Cheese School
Kiri Fisher’s cheese journey has been a difficult one, to say the least, marked by tragedy, natural disaster and rude awakenings. But Fisher, the spunky proprietor of the Cheese School of San Francisco and the new Fisher’s Cheese & Wine, which opens this week in California’s Marin County, has yet to hit a pothole she couldn’t get past.
Read moreTea Time
If you think chamomile is just for tea, meet Camilla. This raw-milk gem from Northern Italy, with its chamomile cloak, deftly marries innovation with tradition. Friends who tell you they don’t like goat cheese will have to reboot after tasting this one.
Read moreTen Under $20
(l to r): Raschera, Taleggio, St. George, Campo de Montalban, Chevre in Blue
Yikes. Does your credit-card balance look like mine? I know January sends many of us into fits of austerity, but cutting back doesn’t have to mean cutting out. Keep eating cheese! I prowled my local cheese counters for tasty options under $20 a pound and had no trouble assembling a list of worthy contenders. These ten selections deliver amazing value and most of them are in shops year-round.
Read moreThree's No Crowd
Meg Smith Photography
Does the world need another truffled cheese? Probably not, in my estimation. Too often, these cheeses seem gimmicky to me, with a heavy-handed or artificial truffle scent and unremarkable cheese underneath. Oh, but wait. I think I’ve just found the star of your New Year’s Eve cheese tray.
Read moreHome on the Tuscan Range
If mozzarella di bufala has been your only experience of water-buffalo cheese, you have homework to do. Of course that’s where most of us started—swapping out cow’s-milk mozzarella in our tomato salad for the more gamy and exotic bufala. Then came burrata di bufala with that luscious cream filling. Could cheese get any sexier?
Read morePresidential Cheese Plate
“I stole the idea from George Washington,” admits Bill Owens, the Northern California brewer credited with popularizing pumpkin ale. Historians tell us that our first President was a beer enthusiast, and that he brewed ale from gourds. Now, 250 years later, pumpkin beers are an annual American rite and a sudsy segue into autumn. Pair them with a few of the cheeses they like and there’s your debate-night platter.
Read moreWild Kingdom
Meg Smith Photography
Get a hand lens ready. You’re going to want to take a closer look at this astonishing cheese rind. It is quite the wild kingdom, a thick crust of colorful, coexisting microbes. I’m not sure I have ever seen a more riveting surface on a cheese: suede gray, dusty brown, ivory, powdery yellow and rust.
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