My dad couldn’t cook but he could at least follow the recipe on the Bisquick box. So Bisquick pancakes are the pancakes of my childhood. These aren’t those. My made-from-scratch hotcakes are likely the fluffiest you’ll ever have. Fresh ricotta keeps them moist and beaten egg whites make them airy. It’s blueberry season so I sprinkled a few plump berries into the batter on the griddle and made a blueberry-maple sauce to serve on the side.
Read moreTop-Value Cheeses for Tight Times
Left to right: Piave Vecchio, Taleggio, La Dama Sagrada, Point Reyes Toma, Bleu d’Auvergne
Seems like everything’s going up but the stock market. My neighborhood bakery just hiked the price of my favorite loaf by 33 percent. Ouch. That’s serious inflation. Cheese is hardly immune, and the stresses in the grain market guarantee more sticker shock to come. We cheese lovers just have to shop smarter. The values are out there. I’ve rounded up a few well-priced favorites for these inflationary times. There aren’t many cheeses that make me think “Is that all?” when I see what I’ve spent, but these dozen do.
Read moreFresh Sheep Cheese is Rye Bread Ready
With May on the horizon, it’s prime time for fresh sheep cheese. The ewes are back on the job after some winter R&R and they are giving their all right now. To manage the surge of spring milk, a few creameries produce a soft, rindless, spreadable sheep cheese that I vastly prefer to fresh chèvre. This category hardly existed a decade ago. Now your favorite cheese counter should have (or can get) at least one of these lovelies. Slathered on whole-grain toast, stuffed in pasta, dolloped on pizza…what an endlessly useful cheese.
Read moreShave This Cheese in Spring Salads
Topping my list of cheeses that deserve more love than they typically get: ricotta salata. With spring imminent and asparagus beckoning, this savory sheep cheese should be in your fridge. It’s so useful! I don’t snack on it—it’s not meant for that—but I do shave it in salads and grate it on pasta with spring vegetables or lamb. It loves asparagus, fava beans, peas, fennel, zucchini, beets. Basically, it’s ricotta with moisture removed so it will last longer.
Read moreNext-Gen Gouda
A Dutch gentleman in the cheese business once told me that the reason his country’s cheesemakers put so many different spices in Gouda—cumin, caraway, fenugreek, mustard seed—was because the Dutch eat Gouda every day. You have to change it up or lunch gets boring. Goat Gouda, which didn’t gain traction in the Netherlands until the 1980s, provides some variety in the modern Dutch diet. But sheep Gouda? “I am aware of no exported cheeses from the Netherlands made of sheep’s milk, nor, to my knowledge, is there any dairying of sheep there at all,” wrote Steve Jenkins in his authoritative Cheese Primer twenty-five years ago. Time to strike that, Steve. A new Dutch sheep Gouda has landed and it’s on the march.
Read moreWinter’s Greek Salad
We are approaching the one-year anniversary of the TikTok baked feta and tomato pasta, the recipe that caused an international feta stampede. Google Trends, which tracks search volume, shows a near-vertical spike twelve months ago in the number of searches for “feta pasta.” As a feta fanatic, I’m a little saddened to see that the line crashed as quickly as it rose. But maybe the craze introduced a lot more people to this endlessly useful cheese.
Read moreCrackers by You!
You may recall that I went crazy for these crackers last year. They’re from Top Seedz, a small company in Buffalo, New York. Many of you told me you bought some and found them as irresistible as I did. Now you can make them. At home. So they’re as fresh as can be. Top Seedz has developed a packaged mix for home bakers, and it really works. I made the crispy shards pictured above.
Read moreWhat Cream Cheese Emergency?
So New York delis have a cream cheese shortage. What more trauma does this pandemic have in store for us? The good news is, we have alternatives. Several other fresh cheeses can fill in for the schmear on your bagel. In fact, they’re tastier than Philly cream cheese. A lot tastier. They don’t have the gums that make Philadelphia cream cheese so…gummy. So go ahead and buy your bagels. Here are five great choices to go under the smoked salmon until we get this cream cheese situation resolved.
Read moreValue Proposition
We’ve all read about the soaring cost of shipping, both by sea and by air. Brace yourself for the inevitable price hikes on imported cheese. One retailer complained to me that he can barely keep up with the constant alterations he needs to make to his signage. Given these times, I was jubilant to find a favorite Spanish cheese recently at just over $20 a pound. Ironically, a few days later, I received a sample of a new American cheese retailing for $70 a pound. What can possibly explain such a price spread?
Read moreLet’s Do Lunch
Thank goodness my garden is churning out tomatoes because all I want for lunch these days is dakos. That’s the Cretan rendition of what Italians call bruschetta. In Crete they use rock-hard rusks, first softening them in water, then drenching them in olive oil and heaping them with grated tomato and feta. No wonder the Cretans live forever. In my view, this is just about the tastiest and most wholesome quick lunch you can make.
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