The Cheese Board (39 page)

Note: While we believe carefully made raw-milk cheese is a safe food, consumers with special health needs, such as pregnant women, people with compromised immune systems, and the elderly, should consult their doctor in order to make an informed decision about eating it.

With its black wood-ash exterior contrasting with a white interior, this is one of the prettiest of the French goat cheeses. When young, Selles-sur-Cher is firm, sweet, and cakey. As it ages, the surface becomes wrinkled, and it softens and develops even more flavor. The cheese has been made in the Loire River Valley since the nineteenth century.

This cheese is made in the Haute-Savoie on the French side of the Alps, just over the mountains from where Italian Fontina is made. A rich, creamy, soft-ripened cheese, Reblochon has a pleasing delicacy of flavor and is a wonderful contrast or alternative to a Camembert. It is delicious eaten with grapes.

Made in the same region as Reblochon, Tomme de Savoie is firm and more aromatic. It has a gray feltlike exterior, and fine holes dot the smooth, pale gold interior. Not overly assertive, its flavor is pleasantly nutty. Look for raw-milk versions with no cracks or signs of dryness.

This is the holey cheese everyone has in mind when they ask for Swiss cheese. The real thing, however, is a far cry from the bland, Cryovac-wrapped supermarket version. When well aged, it is one of the world’s great cheeses—hard, with a nutty flavor that has winey overtones and a beautiful dark rind. Emmental is also excellent when eaten with a hot mustard on rye.

A most welcome newcomer, Berkswell has the presence of a grande dame. An English farmhouse cheese, its flavor is deep, mellow, and sweet, with a flaky texture. Made from ewe’s milk, the cheese gives off the fragrance of pasture if you sniff the rind. Berkswell has a beautiful shape, a graceful seven-pound dome with the basket-weave imprint of the cheese mold decorating the surface. The amber color of the cheese glows on the plate.

In the last twenty years, something new and delightful has appeared on the cheese plate: American artisanal cheeses. Before the advent of dependable refrigeration and efficient transportation, almost every dairy farm in the country produced cheese as a way to use surplus milk. Many of these cheeses have been lost to modernization and the centralization of cheese production in America, but a reversal of this trend began in the seventies and eighties when a number of dedicated and talented pioneers decided to turn their hand to cheese making. In California, Jennifer Bice of Redwood Hill Farms, Laura Chenel of chèvre fame, Cindy and Liam Callahan of Bellwether Farms, and Mary Keehn of Cypress Grove are just a few of a new wave of cheese makers. Outside our own region, the renaissance has been supported by old stalwarts: Maytag Dairy Farms, Grafton Village Cheese Company, and Cabot Creamery, who have been joined by enthusiastic new cheese makers such as Cynthia and David Major of Major Farms in Vermont, Allison Hooper and Bob Reese of the Vermont Butter and Cheese Company, and Judy Schad of Capriole. We have been happy to watch (and taste!) their cheeses develop into dependably delicious products over the years. It seems as if every week another cheese maker or sales representative visits our store with a new domestic cheese for us to taste. While we are proud of the breadth and quality of the European cheese selection we offer, we are even more excited to be able to sell cheese made by small farmsteads and dairies here in the United States.

Making cheese is time-consuming, hard work, and it requires a significant initial financial outlay. Most important of all, it requires a profound passion for the product. After years of accepting bland, factory-made cheeses, Americans today are interested in eating flavorful, handmade cheeses. There is a lot of excitement surrounding the renaissance of domestic artisanal cheeses. What has caused us to suddenly be so much more interested and educated in our food choices? Perhaps it was the original organic food movement of the sixties that made us examine more closely the authenticity and quality of the foods we consume. Perhaps it is our increased exposure to high-quality artisanal products from abroad, or a combination of both.

Whatever the reasons, the Cheese Board is now faced with the happy problem of
choosing from an increasingly large selection of domestic handmade cheeses. Below you will find three suggested cheese plates, one featuring American cheeses and two others focusing on cheeses made in California.

Made by Old Chatham Sheepherding Company, this cheese—a combination of sheep’s and cow’s milk—is velvety smooth and rich. Almost like a triple cream in its unctuous texture, its flavor is similar to Explorateur in that you are lulled by a creamy richness to be later surprised by the piquancy of the aftertaste. This two-pound cheese is also made in a one-pound size called Tom’s Hudson Valley Camembert.

Meltingly soft, with a rippled, soft rind when fully ripe, Bonne-Bouches are small, ash-covered disks made from goat’s milk by the Vermont Butter and Cheese Company. The fact that the makers include cheese-handling instructions in each box of this cheese for the retailer is indicative of the level of care these tasty morsels are made with. If cut in half when fully ripe, the cheese instantly runs out of the rind. These little goat cheeses are simultaneously sweet and piquant, made to be slathered on a baguette.

Made in central Oregon, this is a raw-milk farmhouse goat cheese made in four-pound wheels. Although a firm cheese, it is silky in texture, with a pleasing tartness of flavor. Hand washing the cheeses with a brine solution produces a rust-colored exterior that provides a nice contrast with the off-white pâte. Unique.

This is an extraordinarily good American Gruyère, with a deep flavor and a luscious, densely smooth texture. Grand Cru is produced in eighteen-pound wheels in Wisconsin dairy country. Although a factory cheese, Grand Cru is carefully made with lots of hands-on time during making and aging. The Roth Käse factory has ties to Switzerland, and their knowledge of what a good Gruyère should taste like is apparent. Unlike the Swiss original, Grand Cru is made with vegetarian rennet.

This well-established American blue is made in Newton, Iowa. A rich, crumbly blue, it is handmade and aged for six months. Its pronounced flavor, characterized by an initial sharp bite followed by a sour-cream flavor, is due to the fact that it is a raw-milk cheese. This cheese has a fanatical following, which is probably why the dairy sells over 800,000 pounds of it yearly.

With its fresh, earthy flavor, this is the star of domestic goat cheeses. A tall five-pound round, it is a dramatically beautiful cheese resembling a cheesecake. The fluffy white interior, transected by a decorative band of vegetable ash, varies from slightly crumbly to melting around the edges, depending on the stage of ripeness. Its flavor stays on the tongue for a long, satisfying period of time, during which different flavors emerge. It is tart and sweet and never overwhelmimgly goaty.

Triple cream, vegetarian (curdled with vegetable rennet), and organic—how California can you get? This cheese is the New World answer to
Epoisses
. Made in Marin County by Cowgirl Creamery, it breaks the flavor barrier for organic cheese and is delightfully pungent when allowed to ripen until soft and tender. Buy it when the surface yields under a gentle squeeze.

Authoritative and sharp when aged, with a distinctive edgy tang, this raw-cow’s-milk cheese is similar to a medium-strength Cheddar when young. The Matos family in Santa Rosa makes it on a small scale, modeled on the Portuguese São Jorge. The age of the wheels varies a lot, as does its flavor. When well aged, this is one of the greats.

This newcomer has an ancient look: wrapped in cloth, the sixty-pound wheels are covered in a bluish mold that assists in the aging process. It is made from raw cow’s milk and aged for at least eighteen months. (We have held a wheel for an additional six months in our
cave
to allow it to develop even more character.) The flavor is sharp and complex, reminiscent of the English Farmhouse Cheddars it is modeled on. Produced by the Fiscalini family farm in Modesto, this cheese is lovingly handmade.

Another local hero, from a family venture that produces this raw-milk blue from a Holstein herd in Marin County. It is a rich blue with a pronounced flavor of buttermilk. The wheels come into the Cheese Board sharper and more aged than they were in the first year of production. The Giacomini family claims that the proximity of their farm to the salty coast fog contributes to the flavor of the cheese.

There are just too many lovely and unique goat cheeses made here in California for them all to fit on a California cheese plate, so here is a plate devoted exclusively to California goat cheeses.

Redwood Hill Farms in Sebastopol makes this creamy goat Camembert. The company crafts its cheese from its own fresh goat’s milk, which gives the products a particularly sweet taste, as the milk is used almost straight from the animal, leaving it no time to develop the unpleasantly strong flavors and odors so often associated with goat cheese. The pretty, white Camellia is a mold-ripened cheese that softens as it matures. The edible crust is supple and thin, and the interior is meltingly mild, with flowery overtones. On a warm day, it oozes out of the shell of its rind when cut, as if seeking a fresh, warm baguette.

This sweet tasting Crottin, also made by Redwood Hill Farms, has the classic wrinkled exterior, but it is usually sold at an earlier point in its development than the French original. At the Cheese Board, we order this cheese without the wrapper so that we can continue the aging process at the store. We usually age these Crottins for two weeks to allow a lovely, flaky consistency and a complex caramel-like flavor to develop (see
instructions on home aging
). Young or aged, this Crottin has the unique flavor of northern California grassland.

This cheese is made from pasteurized milk, but until recently we were under the impression that it was a raw-milk cheese, as its flavor is so deep and earthy. We sell it as a very aged (over ten months) hard goat cheese, so firm that it needs to be shaved in paper-thin slices. Made by My Time Dairy near Eureka, in coastal northern California, Capricious is sold in roughly shaped seven-pound disks. Its handmade appearance adds to its presentation; every fold of the cheesecloth used to make it is imprinted on its surface.