“I don’t know if we’ve ever introduced a new cheese that has had this much instant acclaim,” said Vermont Creamery owner Allison Hooper about the recent debut of St. Albans. “We didn’t anticipate it.”
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 moreNew Beauty from Basque Country
Innovation isn’t a word I associate with Basque cheesemakers, but the sublime sheep’s-milk Arpea is reason to rethink that. Created about three years ago by the Fromagerie Agour, Arpea resembles no other Basque cheese I know. A small, semisoft disk from an area known almost exclusively for hard aged wheels, it represents new thinking in this tradition-bound region.
Read moreLast Call
Made from sheep’s milk and wrapped in grape leaves, Ledyard is one of America’s most impressive new cheeses. And if you want to taste it before the year’s supply dries up, hop to it. The sheep are about to go on sabbatical.
Read moreWhat Does Cheese Need?
Roasted Concord Grapes with St. Agur/adapted from The Art of the Cheese Plate
Sixteen years ago, I wrote a cookbook inspired by some of the enticing cheese plates I was seeing in restaurants. That little book, The Cheese Course, is still in print, but restaurant cheese plates have since evolved into a platform for competitive creativity that I could never have imagined. Two new books—both from New York City cheese authorities—demonstrate the state of the art.
Read moreSummer’s Celebrity
Move over, mozzarella. Burrata—a cheese that most Americans had never heard of a decade ago—is summer’s breakout star. I know that from restaurant menus, from observing grocery carts and from these stats from Di Stefano Cheese, the Southern California burrata producer whose product I adore:
Read moreCheese Epiphany
When Daphne Zepos died, too young, in 2012, she left behind a cheese-import company and a business partner dedicated to perpetuating what they had started. Essex Street Cheese Company introduced many Americans to fine Comté and aged Gouda hand-selected from the best French and Dutch cellars.
A year after her death from cancer, Zepos’s business partner Jason Hinds traveled to the Greek island of Sifnos to assist friends and family in spreading her ashes. While there, he had an epiphany.
Read moreFresh As It Gets
Rebecca King makes some excellent aged cheeses in California’s Monterey County with milk from her 100 ewes. But if you want to taste her fresh cheese, Sweet Alyssum, now’s the moment. In early October, her flock will start a two-month sabbatical, resting up for the lambing season that begins in December.
Read moreCollaboration Nation
Many cheesemakers and brewers know that their products are better together. But lately some American artisan cheesemakers are taking the relationship further. By washing their cheese with local brews, they’re producing some unique one-off wheels that deserve a permanent place in the firmament. Jasper Hill’s Gose-Washed Willoughby, part of a new beer-themed series from this Vermont creamery, proves how rewarding the collaboration can be.
Read moreSayonara to the Raw-Milk Rule?
Raw-milk beauties: Scharfe Maxx and Bleating Heart Fat Bottom Girl/Meg Smith Photography
It’s looking like the days are numbered for the FDA’s 60-day rule. Introduced in 1949 to protect public health, the regulation requires all cheeses—domestic or imported—made with unpasteurized milk to be matured for at least 60 days. Conventional wisdom held that cheeses aged that long would be too dry, acidic or salty to harbor deadly bacteria like Listeria and Salmonella.
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