Posts: 16

1. The Real Joy of Cheese Blog

   13.Aug.08, 11:59 EDT
   
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   It's http://thejoyofcheese.blogspot.com/
   
   Somehow elsewhere I got the s and p in blogspot reversed and it takes you to a Bible studies site. 
   I'm a cheeses freak, not a Jesus freak.
   
   
   Though it does make you wonder how that happened!
   
   -MJ
   
   

2. Forgot one

   02.Apr.08, 01:26 EDT
   
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   In the March column, http://www.moli.com/p/moliview/6_200177/article,
   I overlooked one really cool cheddar.  The Blue Mont Dairy Bandaged Cheddar from Wisconsin. 
   It's by Willi Lehner, who is a bit of handful as best I can tell but he makes great cheese.
   
   -MJ
   
   

3. Pasteurized or Not

   19.Feb.08, 21:47 EST
   
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   A cheesy question with a complicated answer

   Pasteurization is one of the most misunderstood issues in American cheesemaking. Just witness the following two recent dialogs that I've had with cheese-savvy people.
   
   I asked an editor, who frequently travels to Europe, where he buys his cheese when he's home in New York City. My hope was to lure him to The Bedford Cheese Shop, so that I could introduce him to great cheese and turn our acquaintance into a friendship.
   
   "Oh I try not to buy cheese in the States," he wrote back. "It's all pasteurized."
   
   A few months later I was finishing hashing out some issues with my literary agent, who lives down the street from Bedford Cheese, when I asked why I never see her in the shop.
   
   "Oh, I'd love to come by more but I'm afraid all the cheese is unpasteurized, and I'm expecting."
   
   The interesting thing about these seemingly contradictory statements is that they are both mostly right.
   
   Pasteurization involves heating milk to temperatures a few degrees short of boiling for a short period of time to diminish the presence of harmful bacteria. Studies have shown that Listeria and E. coli bacteria are found a little bit more (a fraction of one percent) in samples of unpasteurized milk than in pasteurized milk.
   
   You can see why my agent wouldn't want to risk exposing her unborn child to raw milk. She did begin coming to the shop — not for cheese, but for pickles, which are both the new rage and, of course, a classic object of pregnancy craving.
   
   But — as critical readers might note — pasteurization has been around for less than two centuries; cheese has been eaten for more than two millennia. If unpasteurized — or "raw-milk," in cheese-lover parlance — cheeses were truly harmful, then wouldn't Europe have ceased to exist long before the Roman Empire fell?
   
   That's the anecdotal evidence I often cite to folks who have concerns about the safety of raw-milk cheeses. Every creamery, whether here or abroad, has to maintain standards of cleanliness so high that the chance of finding a contaminated piece of cheese at a retailer that specializes in great cheese is less than remote. The cheese will have passed both inspections by health officials and close inspection by knowledgeable cheesemongers.
   
   Nevertheless, the Food and Drug Administration has restrictions on raw-milk cheeses being sold in America. The rule is that raw-milk cheeses must be older than 60 days to be sold in the United States, since harmful bacteria are most likely to occur in the first two months of a cheese's life. That means that when sold in America, Brie and Camembert, two of the best-known cheeses in the world — say nothing of the two best-known cheeses that are younger than 60 days — must be pasteurized.
   
   That situation has led to the stereotype that my editor mentioned. In fact there are hundreds if not thousands of great cheeses made of unpasteurized milk for sale in America, but because of the FDA restrictions, even food lovers are confused.
   
   Purely in terms of flavor, cheese made of raw milk is substantially different. It's fuller and richer than its pasteurized counterpart. Yet cheese flavor is so broad that only the worst cheese snob (or a raw foodist) would refuse to eat pasteurized cheese. Most aged goudas are pasteurized, and they feature a wonderfully complex mix of sweet flavors in their finish. Amid the overtones of toffee, butterscotch, and caramel found in most aged goudas, the differences between raw and pasteurized milk get lost.
   
   In fact, there is a growing number of excellent pasteurized cheeses on the international marketplace. Most British blue cheeses are now pasteurized; several exceptional Irish cheeses like Gubeen, Ardrahan, and Coolea are pasteurized. And a variety of Italian pecorinos are too. What gives?
   
   Part of it is that there is fear that the EU will mandate pasteurization guidelines, and part of it is that these cheeses come from small creameries and that, as these dairy farms grow and increase the scale of their production, it's simpler for them to use pasteurized milk to insure meeting safety standards. These cheeses are all full of depth, flavor, and nuance. Not even my globetrotting editor would resist them.
   
   Martin Johnson's "The Joy of Cheese" column runs the second Tuesday of every month in the MOLI View.
   

4. Counter Intelligence During the Fall of the Velveeta Empire #3 The Authority

   28.Dec.07, 12:22 EST
   
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   How did I get into cheese?  The short answer is earlier in this blog.  This part three of the longer answer, and takes place in 1984 at Bloomingdales.
   
   
   
   My colleagues and I were keenly aware that change was afoot in American cheesemaking but it was too early to understand the totality of what was happening. The few knowledgeable veterans at the counter could readily mock the concept that great American cheese was news. Cabot, Crowley, and Shelburne Farms in Vermont had been making cheddar that was our gold standard for decades. The Maytag people, yes relations to the home appliance folks, had been making an excellent blue for nearly a century. These newcomers like the Goat Folks and Coach Farms (we had yet to learn of the bustling cheesemaking scene on the west coast), were interesting but hardly a movement.
   
   Although I enjoyed working with the cured meats and prepared foods, cheese always took the majority of my attention. For one, its share was usually about half the overall display, and for another it was where your authority mattered. Then as now, people’s enthusiasm for cheese nearly tripled their actual knowledge of it. This gave me my chance to be Tony or Marc, that Café La Semeuse guyfrom part two of this serial.
   
    Authority, a command of a subject and an ability to communicate that knowledge with grace was always something that had eluded me to that point in my life. Hard as I tried, I couldn’t match my siblings as they were a decade older; by choice I ran with a very fast crowd academically and at my first post-collegiate job I quickly got in over my head, which led to excruciatingly long workweeks. Holding forth at a cheese counter allowing people to discover which fresh chevre or washed rind cheese they liked best while being able to discuss the difference between say Chaumes or Beaumont, gave me a cherished sense of authority.
   
   This was a big improvement over that first post-collegiate gig at a market research firm, but retail had several other inherent advantages over working in an office. At the office, implementing any decision meant coalition building, getting two or three fellow supervisors on board selling it to a principal to sell it to the client. The daily staff meetings went on forever as my colleagues and I tried to show off how knowledgeable we were about pesticides in North Carolina, computerized banking or something else similarly irrelevant to our lives then. And lastly there were status turf wars everywhere to be the lead African-American (which is phrasing it far too gracefully) or some parallel battle.
   
   Alliances, crucial for office survival didn’t come easily for me. I was always a good fit on some points but not on others. Coming from Chicago’s South Side, I had street cred, but I also had this Ivy League degree (Columbia Class of '82) which made me seem very middle class. I loved music, but instead of pop or house music, my affection was for jazz which was pretty far off most cultural maps. For every possible African American sub group, I was a lego lock on some points and a complete misfit on others and when you're in your early 20s the misfitting matters a lot.
   
   By contrast, retail didn’t require much finesse; if you needed to do something, for instance pull a product of dubious freshness off of the sales floor, you just did it then you told whoever was responsible what you had done. Meetings were very few and very far between. There were of course turf battles since retail staffs consist of human beings, but the pace of the job mitigated them quickly.
   
   In every workplace there are all hands on deck moments where all personal friction is put aside and everyone jumps in to get the job done. In some offices that happens a few times a month, others once a week. In retail specialty food, it happens two or three times a day, and all day Saturday and Sunday. It’s hard for too much friction to build up in that environment, and alliances are pretty fluid. There was one other aspect that attracted me to retail, the hours. I knew from my stint in Texas that retail managers hated overtime. I took a 25 hour a week schedule secure with the knowledge that while I might occasionally work 40 hours, the 100 hour workweeks, a staple of my time in market research, were gone for good.
   

5. Counterintelligence During the Fall of the Fall of the Velveeta Empire #2 Navigating Bloomingdales

   21.Dec.07, 16:00 EST
   
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   I'm often asked how I got into cheese. The short answer is that I needed a job and NY Times wasn't hiring. The long winded answer is what the Counterintelligence series is all about. The second installment follows.

    

    

   Proud to the point of arrogance, and opulent to the point of pretension, Bloomingdale’s and the ‘80s were made for one another. When I arrived in 1984, people at the store were still beaming with pride from the Queen’s visit in the late ‘70s when traffic on Lexington Avenue was reversed so that her highness could exit her limousine from the right side and walk directly into the store.The store’s garish theatricality in merchandising felt unique and enjoyably over the top.It was the perfect setting for my introduction to the food world.

    

    

   Blooomingdale’s Fresh Food section was begun in the early ‘80s after Macy’s food segment, The Cellar, became a big hit, and after Joel Dean and Giorgio DeLuca attracted shoppers in droves to the <place>Soho</place> boutique that bore their name. For their executive staff, Bloomies raided Balducci’s (“they may as well have stood on the corner of Ninth Street and Sixth Avenue with a bullhorn telling every middle manager not named Balducci or Doria to come with them,” said a friend of mine who worked at the renowned <place>Greenwich Village</place> retailer in the late ‘70s).But Bloomingdales wasn’t out to copy what other great specialty food markets were doing; they were going to do it the B way.
   

    

   Everywhere you turned there was someone handing out samples of great food.And in contrast to the model wannabes who try to spritz you with perfume or cologne as you walk through the store, many of the barkers in the food area were experts in their field.
   

    

   One afternoon, there was a guy hawking a coffee roasted in <country-region><place>Switzerland</place></country-region>.I told him with some pride that I’d just bought some Irish Cream coffee beans from Porto Rico, a respected coffee roaster in <place>Greenwich Village</place>.

    

   “That’s not coffee” he scoffed.“Try this!” he said handing me a sample cup of his brew, Café La Semeuse.
   

    

   He was right; I’d never tasted such deep rich java.He went on to explain the roasting method, the style of bean used, and the difference borne of roasting coffee beans at high altitudes.His method—don’t hesitate to be a contrarian then provide proof to back up your claims--became my style.
   

    

   My coworkers and I weren’t especially interested in becoming cheese experts out of a love of cheese but we needed to know enough to fend off the sense of privilege and presumption of knowledge felt by many of our clientele.We knew enough to sound authoritative even if there was much that we didn’t know.

   In the world according to the Bloomingdale’s counterpeople, cheeses were classified by strength, strong, mild or medium, not by region, animal of origin or by method of production. We knew that chevre went with white wine, cheddar and hard Italian cheeses went with red.Oh yeah, that’s how we knew wines, color code.If someone asked about matching a particular type, oh say, Riesling, (which would have been an excellent match for the some of the soft aromatic cheeses in stock which back then meant things like Tavallion Savoyard or Saint Albray), we would bandy the name amongst ourselves until someone would feign knowledge and made a recommendation.

   “The city” was a lot smaller then and New Yorkers feared one another a lot more.A cab ride above 96th Street<street /> usually required a negotiation.Directions usually involved what blocks to walk on and which to avoid.The outer boroughs were a place only for urban adventurers and natives of those far away lands.But the concentration of urban sophistication only enhanced the sense of entitlement amongst our clientele and our very own sense of authority as salespeople.
   

    

   Late summer 1984 was also a strange time in <state><place>New York</place></state> as many reasonable thought that Walter Mondale would be the next president of the <country-region><place>United States</place></country-region>.While the nation’s political capital had shifted elsewhere, <city><place>Manhattan</place></city> was still very much the cultural capital of the world and that plus the B way gave our customers a solid notion that they knew more about our cheeses and charcuterie than we did.And any dispute would be settled by our District Supervisors who spent far too much time arguing over whether Madonna was a flash in the pan.

   My new coworkers were mostly ambitious twentysomethings including some from far flung places like <state><place>Oregon</place></state>, <state><place>Arizona</place></state>, and <city><place>Houston</place></city>.We might have been put out as sacrificial lambs for our clientele but we had no intention of staying that way, marching meekly to verbal slaughter; and we weren’t going home with our tail between our legs.One of these new colleagues found the Simon and Schuster Pocket Guide to Cheese and within days everyone on the crew had a copy and we were enthusiastically citing chapter and verse.Blue cheeses were injected with penicillin and they go with white wine, we’d proudly tell our customers by means of reminding them that we knew things they didn’t.

   Thanks to S&S we now not only knew the backstories of all of our cheeses but we could tell anyone who had the time that cheese was made from farm fresh milk, which is something far different than what you buy from a supermarket.The milk is heated slightly and rennet is added to separate the milk into curds, the soft pudding like nuggets and whey, the liquid-ey remainder.Then the curds are salted, culture is added and from there a myriad of cheeses are made.Most customers didn’t have time for that explanation; they wanted their goodies and fast.

   Our counter, a rectangle of display cases, was divided into three sections, cured meats, prepared foods, and mostly, cheese.The Bloomingdales cheese case circa 1984 would look quaintly middlebrow by today’s standards.Our top cheddar was Canadian Black Diamond, which had lean flavor and a piercing sharpness; our best washed rind was <city><place>Beaumont</place></city>, which wasn’t that stinky but had an earthy finish, and in our little world, all goat cheese was soft and spreadable.These weren’t the greatest cheeses on the planet, but it didn’t matter. We were doing the grunt work of the culinary revolution.

   The struggle then wasn’t to introduce—if not addict—Americans to the finest cheese in the world, but rather to liberate them from supermarket habits.We wanted to illustrate that Vermont Cheddar didn’t mean just one thing, that fresh made mozzarella was miles beyond the Polly-O stuff in supermarket dairy cases, and that a world of creaminess beyond brie awaited those interested in tasting St. Andre, L’Explorateur or Gratte Paille.

   Yet Simon and Schuster notwithstanding, if a customer asked any of us for <state><place>Munster</place></state>, we would have happily reached for a brick of American slicing sandwich cheese rather than a wheel of the classic, deeply aromatic washed rind cheese from <state><place>Alsace</place></state>. If someone did that to me today when I’m a customer at a cheese counter, I might channel a certain Trinidadian from years ago.

    

    

    

    

6. Why Stuff Matters

   21.Dec.07, 15:43 EST
   
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   Last week, I was at Dean and DeLuca buying some cheese when one of the new counterpeople enthusiastically offered to show me one of his new favorite cheeses.  The folks on the counter at the shop know I'm a veteran of many cheese wars and respect my knowledge and appreciate my enthusiasm, so I was all too happy to see this newbie showing some pride and joy in the very good selection offered at D&D.
   He brought me a taste of a Wensleydale with Porter; he beamed while my face fell.
   
   I regrouped quickly and took him aside to tell him that for the most part, cheese with something in it is to be mistrusted  (Monterrey Jack with peppers and fresh chevre with garlic and herbs are notable exceptions to this rule as they are made for cooking).  Most cheesemakers want their cheeses to stand on their own and offer a nice complexity of flavors that adeptly reflect the environment that they are from.  It's the failed, or subpar batches that are "rescued with seasonings. 
   
   The newbie looked a bit sad, but understood that it was part of the learning process;  he's still new to cheese.  Most of us are.  But it's a simple rule, when you eat cheese, you want to taste cheese, not some extrinsic element.  It's parallel to beer.  The weaker batches get seasoned with some fruit to hide their inferiorities. 
   
   -MJ
   
   

7. The Cheese Chronicles vol. 1: Counterintelligence during the Fall of the Velveeta Empire

   13.Dec.07, 13:23 EST
   
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   I've worked in and around cheese for more than 23 years.  The short answer of how is here, but the long answer is much more entertaining.  We start at Bloomingdales in 1984.
   
   Counterintelligence During the Fall of the Velveeta Empire vol. 1
   

   The woman asked for New York State Cheddar.<p></p>

   Immediately, I was thrilled; in fact, I could barely contain my glee.  This was the first moment of the first day on a new job.  And it wasn’t just any new job.  It was the summer of 1984, two years after I’d graduated college, intent on becoming a writer.  My first post-collegiate job turned into a marathon nightmare of 100 hour workweeks that left no time whatsoever for writing (and little for sleeping or leisure).  This was my first day on the sales floor at Bloomingdale’s fresh food area, a part time job that I figured would pay my share of the rent (which was barely $350 in a Nolita duplex; doesn’t 1984 seem like a long time ago?) and enable me to develop a journalism career.<p></p>

   I had done this kind of food service work in Texas when I was in high school and loved it; in fact, I loved being around food either for work or pleasure.  But I was keenly aware that <street><address>59^th Street</address></street> and <street><address>Lexington Avenue</address></street> was pretty far away both geographically and culturally from <place>North Dallas</place>.  The selection of cheese looked mostly unfamiliar, and I expected exotic requests.  But when my very first customer, a tall, stout Trinidadian woman, responded to my carefully honed greeting of “welcome to Bloomingdales, how may I help you” with a request for New York State cheddar, I immediately felt as if everything in my life was now going to work out just fine.  I might have been new to the job and its environs, but I felt completely at home.<p></p>

   I reached into the case found a big brick of New York cheddar, pulled back the plastic wrap on the cheese and confidently placed my knife on the orange rectangle looked her in the eye, smiled, and said, “right about there?” <p></p>

   My request was met with stony silence; after a few seconds I began to think something was terribly wrong.  <p></p>

   I don’t recall exactly what she said as it quickly mutated into one long warbly mush, kind of like the adults in Peanuts, but in a Trinidadian patois.<p></p>

   I stood there confused and frozen.  My tidy plans for the rest of my life and all my confidence in handling this brand new job were dissolving at an alarming speed.  I felt I was on an island and not a <place>Caribbean</place> vacation destination but a deserted one where everything—even the sand--was on fire.  Out of nowhere, one of my coworkers, Tony, whom I’d met the day before during a brief introduction to my sales area, stepped in.  He smiled at the woman, an announced “New York State SHEV?”<p></p>

   Her rant stopped on a dime. She looked a bit piqued at being corrected on her pronunciation but meekly nodded. Tony then reached into small refrigerator behind the display case and pulled out a tray of small cylinders of fresh white cheeses.  He plopped one into a small plastic cup, secured the lid, went to the register, rang her up and sent her silently on her way.   <p></p>

               I was impressed.<p></p>

               “It sucks that they don’t give you new guys any training” he sighed.  <p></p>

               This was true. I spent three days of “training” in an upstairs classroom listening to some woman explain how to say “welcome to Bloomingdales, how may I help you,” and which in house restaurant to go to if one our superiors asked us to lunch or dinner (she was young and attractive by almost any standard, so it wasn’t hard to imagine that this dilemma was a daily quandary for her; for geeky, gawky me, I was somewhat annoyed by the irrelevant counsel).<p></p>

   For the last hour of the third day, we were sent down to the sales floor to get our sea legs.  My other new foodies were shown how to operate the electric slicing machine for charcuterie meats and other skills I already possessed thanks to my two years in the deli in <state><place>Texas</place></state>. I was sent to the adjacent Michel Gerrard boutique where Tony, a medium built guy with thick Mediterranean facial features, worked.  He was initially annoyed at having a new kid to assist him in closing his sales area, but he quickly warmed to my ability to quickly seal dishes in plastic wrap and put them away in a knee high refrigerated case.  To show his gratitude, he introduced me to foie gras, which I took to hungrily only to spend the evening at home in bathroom atoning for my gluttony. <p></p>

               Tony was putting away the tray that had the little forms of chevre, when he stopped and said “hey <state><place>Tex</place></state> (a nickname I quickly put a stop to), you probably haven’t ever had goat cheese before.”<p></p>

               I shrugged; I hadn’t.  <p></p>

               He reached into the knife rack and pulled out a small spade like instrument that I would later learn was a cheese plane, reopened the tray of small white cheeses, and ran the side of the plane over the surface of one form.  He offered it to me with the instruction to drag my finger across the edge.  I did, taking half the cheese offered figuring that we were splitting the sample.  Then with my mind flashing back to the previous night and quickly seeing my hero with horns, I hesitated.  He let out a loud guffaw, “oh it won’t hurt you like the foie gras.”  <p></p>

               And it didn’t.  Instead it reminded me of another dazzling culinary experience, my first encounter with Haagen Dazs ice cream some six years earlier.  The Johnsons were a food conscious family, but in the ‘70s, we pretty much only got as high as Bryer’s when it came to at home ice cream food chain.  When my high school pal Steve introduced me to Haagen Dazs, I was almost overwhelmed with the richness and distinction of the flavors.  I thought the same thing here.  <p></p>

               “What do you think?” asked Tony somewhat eagerly.  <p></p>

               “It’s really good,” I responded, “but [not thinking that Haagen Dazs was an apropos comparison] I really have nothing to compare it to.”<p></p>

               “That’s okay we have lots of stuff that will.  This is so much better than the stuff from Coach Farm,” he said.  I gave him a blank stare that he must have found annoying. <p></p>

               “Oh they’re the guys who sold their famous handbag company to move upstate and make goat cheese.  The Goat Folks,” he said pointing to the tray, “are way hipper.  Anyway, we have lots of good cheese here.”<p></p>

               I nodded, my mind racing furiously to catch up and process all this information.  For one, they made cheese from goat’s milk and it’s called chevre though some people pronounced it like it was cheddar.  Two, a company run by folks who escaped corporate life to run a farm wasn’t the epitome of hip; there were other higher levels.  And three, this stuff was delicious, and we had lots more varieties of it.  <p></p>

               I smiled as Tony excused himself to go back to the Gerrard boutique.  I had thought that this was going to be an interesting new experience and possibly a turning point in my life and fifteen minutes in, as best I could tell, I was right.  <p></p>

               I looked out to the counter to see if there were any customers waiting and I hoped they wanted something simple like Brie or Jarlsberg. I was going to need some time to come up to speed on all this new stuff.   <p></p>

   
   

8. The Joys of Cheese: Gifty Cheese

   11.Dec.07, 11:40 EST
   
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   Martin Johnson/December Cheese Column<p></p>

    

   </p>

               Like a lot of cheese lovers I brought some cheese to Thanksgiving dinner.  When my mother saw the two packages neatly wrapped in white butcher paper, she began to rush them into the refrigerator.  <p></p>

               I stopped her, reminding her that they were snacks for while the bird roasted and best consumed at room temperature.  She gave me one of those skeptical mother looks. I started to remind her that the cheeses (oh, by the way, they were Pleasant Ridge Reserve and Lincolnshire Poacher, two choices I recommend for any holiday gathering as they pair well with a wide variety of beverages, foods, and eccentric relatives) had happily endured close to eight hours out of refrigeration since I left my New York apartment to fly to Chicago, but I chose a more succinct approach.  <p></p>

               “They’ll be fine,” I said with my best, you’ll-just-have-trust-me-for-once tone.  And they were fine.  Within 10 minutes of being opened, they were gone.  I thought about breaking into my lecture about cheese and refrigeration, but the bird was nearly ready; it was time to set the table.<p></p>

               Many of my mother’s fears are well founded, but ones about cheese and refrigeration are not, though they are widespread.  Here’s the simplest way to look at it:  Cheese has been a delicacy since Zeus, Athena, and other Greek deities were the reigning religion.  Commercial refrigeration’s invention roughly coincides with reform-minded ministers taking up the cause of abolitionism in the 19^th century.  Putting a finer point on it, hard cheeses were developed as a means of storing the nutrients in milk during the colder months, when cows yielded less of it.  <p></p>

               So there should be little doubt that a few firm cheeses, and even some soft ones, can withstand overnight transit as part of a gift package.  Hand-crafted cheese makes the ideal gift for the foodie on your list.  It’s exotic, complex in flavor, and may open whole new vistas.  <p></p>

   There are four great types of cheese gifts: baskets, subscriptions, accoutrements, and reading material.  Each of the top retailers for hand-crafted cheese in America -- Zingerman’s Artisanal Cheese Center, Murray’s, the Bedford Cheese Shop, Cowgirl Creamery, the Cheese Store of Silver Lake, and the Beverly Hills Cheese Shop -- have excellent selections of gift baskets that can be shipped within 24 business hours of order.  Due to the holiday crush, most shops require that all gift-basket orders be placed by December 18.<p></p>

   The cold weather months are prime time for firm cheeses like cheddars, aged <city><place>goudas</place></city>, and aged pecorinos.  These cheeses have very little moisture in their composition (it evaporates during the ageing process) and thus are less volatile.  I work weekends at the Bedford Cheese Shop, and we don’t keep those cheeses in our refrigerated cases; instead they sit on a bookshelf behind the counter.  When we ship them this time of year, they are often sent via the less expensive second day delivery options.  <p></p>

   Ssofter cheeses are best in the warmer months as they require richer milk, which is typically taken from animals eating springtime growth.  So if you want your gift to be inclusive of all types of cheese, then you may want to give a subscription.  Most of the retailers listed above have a Cheese of the Month club, wherein they send boxes typically with three of the top cheeses that month.  That way your recipient can receive top-notch cheese on a regular basis for periods of three months, six months, or if you’re particularly generous, even a year.  <p></p>

               One aspect of any great cheese plate is presentation.  Many of the above retailers have a nice selection of beautiful boards in several different varieties of wood, and in many shapes and sizes.  The Vermont Butcher Block Company makes a stellar selection of boards that will elevate any cheese serving.  <p></p>

               The other key accoutrements are knives.  Cheese knives are so distinctive that you might mistake them for some sort of avant garde design contest winner.  Knives for cutting hard cheeses often look more like spades or scrapers, while knives for softer cheeses have fluted blades.  There’s good reason for this variation beyond visual splendor: Hard cheeses are often best served in small, chipped-off segments, so an instrument that you can maximize the downward force on is preferable to a conventional knife, which would require two hands to generate comparable momentum.  Softer cheeses tend to stick to the blade of the knife, so one with fluting enables you to cut beautiful, thin slices of softer cheeses.  Vermont Butcher Block and Artisanal have excellent selections of cheese knives.<p></p>

               Lastly, books on cheese make a nice addition to a gift containing cheese or a cheese board.  The Cheese Primer by Steve Jenkins is the best book “101” book of its type. The next best thing is Cheese: A Connoisseur’s Guide to the World’s Best by Max McCalman, which is an excellent shopping advisor to the amazing variety of great cheeses available to Americans today <p></p>

               So when do those cheeses need to find their way into the refrigerator? Firm cheeses don’t as long as you have a secure, somewhat cool part of your home for them.  If not, keep all cheeses wrapped in paper either in a Tupperware container or a Ziploc bag in the vegetable-crisper portion of your refrigerator.  The greatest danger for cheese is that the cold swirl of air in a typical refrigerator will dry it out.  Very few cheeses will actually go bad; rather they’ll dry out.  Some will mold, but you just scrape the blue mold off and keep eating the cheese.  <p></p>

               If anyone doubts the utility of this, you could explain that most cheese is months-old milk and bacteria. Or just give them your most reassuring look and tell them it’s fine.  <p></p>

    

   </p>

    

   </p>

9. The Joys of Cheese: The Pairing Strategist

   11.Dec.07, 11:26 EST
   
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   Martin Johnson/The Joys of Cheese November: The Pairing Strategist

    

   </p>

               A few Sundays ago, I was at working at The Bedford Cheese Shop, when a telling encounter occurred.  A woman came in and asked what cheeses we had from <state><place>Provence</place></state>.  Now, the shop carries cheeses from all over <country-region><place>France</place></country-region>, but <state><place>Provence</place></state>, that stumped us.

               We asked why, and she reached into a bag pulled out a bottle of a big red wine made in <state><place>Provence</place></state>.  Immediately my coworkers and I began suggesting an array of cheeses—mostly from <country-region><place>Switzerland</place></country-region> and <country-region><place>Italy</place></country-region>--that would complement her wine but she cut us off and at a volume that made us all wonder if she’d consumed one too many Bloody Marys over brunch, she announced “No, I want to taste the land!”

               One of my coworkers with a wry sense of humor offered her a taste of Persille Des Tignes, a firm, earthy (hey, she wanted to taste the land) goat’s milk cheese from the <place><placename>Rhone</placename><placetype>Valley</placetype></place>. 

               The woman adored the cheese.  It was perfect for her wine.  We assured her that Tignes was close to <state><place>Provence</place></state> (which it is in the very general way that <state><place>Virginia</place></state> can be said to be close to <state><place>Florida</place></state>), and she went away happy.

               The real punch line was that she was following a flawed strategy in pairing her wine and cheese.  While they undoubtedly make some great cheese in Provence, what’s mostly available for export are soft goat cheeses that are—big surprise here—rubbed in the fresh herbs that are Provence’s culinary calling card.  These cheeses would wilt under the force of a full bodied red wine.  Rather than a blend of flavors that highlight the strong points of each, you would only taste the wine and a clump of some foodstuff.

               Pairing wine and cheese has long vexed even the most astute enthusiasts of each.  In fact, last October, Financial Times wine columnist Jancis Robinson grew so frustrated with trying to match cheeses with red wines that she suggested people give up the quest and only pair cheese with whites. 

               For years, there were two dominant philosophies about pairing wines and cheese and both have been discredited lately.  The first philosophy held that you needed to pair cheeses and wine from the same region.  There’s no guarantee that cheeses and wines from the same region will work (for instance, Marsolino and Chianti come from the same part of Tuscany but their qualities are more overlapping than complementary) and there are plenty of cheeses and wines from disparate regions, Oregonian Pinot Noir and Piedmont Tomas that tend to work very well together.

               The other approach held that cheeses and wines of comparable intensity should be paired.  The appeal of this is obvious in the case of say a rose and say, a medium bodied Spanish goat’s milk cheese like <city><place>Pau</place></city>, it works beautifully.  However, it’s as likely to not work as it is to work.  For instance, consider the match of a big intense Barbera and an aggressive spiky Roquefort.  Instead of a sweet blend, your palette will more likely feel like a war of the worlds is going inside your mouth. 

               There is a new approach called balance.  It was introduced by Max McCalman in his fine book, Cheese: A Connoisseur’s Guide to the World’s Best balance. In other words a strong cheese should be balanced by a sweet wine.  A big tannic red should be balanced by something creamy or earthy (hence the Persille Des Tignes and that woman’s robust Provencal red). 

               Autumn is a time of sweeter whites like Chenin Blancs and fruitier reds, most notably <place>Beaujolais</place> but many others.  How do you find the right cheeses to pair with them?

               This is a great time of year for blue cheeses, especially classic ones like Stilton, which goes great with Port and other sweet wines and lately some amazing makes of the classic French blue, Roquefort, have been trickling onto the market.  If you are lucky, your local cheese merchant will carry one of the following brands, Papillon, Vieux Berger, or Herve Mons.  These are roqueforts so good that you could just slather them onto a baguette, open a bottle of Chenin Blanc or Riesling and forget all your troubles. 

               Drier wines benefit from complex cheeses.  While you probably think of Parmesan as a topping for pasta, it’s much more than that.  There are many varieties of “Parmesan” but the best is Parmigiano Reggiano, which is made by a select handful of families in <city><place>Parma</place></city>.  There’s absolutely nothing wrong with putting it on pasta (I do it all the time, in fact, some flavored fettuccine, sautéed portabello mushrooms, and grated Reggiano is one of my go-to quick and easy dishes), but Parmigiano Reggiano is a great table cheese and it’s a fine complement for drier wines.  Reggiano has a nice pineapple-like sweetness in the middle of its flavor (yes great cheeses are like great stories, they have beginnings, middles, and ends). 

   If you have the opportunity to see the wheel of Parmigianno that you’re buying look for the date.  In <country-region><place>America</place></country-region>, we tend to eat older more abrupt Reggiano, with vintages reaching five years old.  In <country-region><place>Italy</place></country-region> they favor younger Reggianos, sometimes a mere eighteen months old.  These younger varieties are more buttery and multifaceted in their flavor.

               My top choices for flamboyant red wine like Pinot Noirs or Amarones are alpine cheeses like Comte and Gruyere These are classics made in the same region, the Jura Mountains in Eastern France and Western Switzerland respectively and both are renown for their dense, nutty flavor.  The very best Comte comes from an affineur (a master at ageing cheeses) named Marcel Petit and the very best Gruyere comes from a brilliant man named Rolf Beeler.  Beeler is so well regarded in the cheese world that he has groupies.  His Gruyere is so dense; it’s almost chocolate-y.  

   Another excellent wine pairing with big red wines this time of year is Vacherin Mont D’Or, which is also made on both sides of the border. It’s a classic, rich, decadent cheese full of fungal goodness.  Vacherin is only available from mid November until mid February, and I get the idea that’s for our own good.  

10. Cheese that's rocking my world these days

    21.Oct.07, 01:24 EDT
    
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    Tarentaise: a wonderful Vermont interpretation of the French classic Tomme D'Abondance. Whereas its inspiration offers a gentle balance of nuttiness and earthiness, Tarentaise, especially when aged nine months or longer, is a big burst of roasted macadamia nuts. I love it melted.
    
    Persielle Des Tignes. Speaking of mouthfuls, this cylinder of firm goat's milk cheese hails from the Rhone Valley and it's a big mouthful of dirt. In a good way. Show this to the next person who says you can't pair goat's milk cheeses with red wine. This baby screams for a Chateauneuf du Pape.
    
    Bleu D'Auvergne Mons: Not just any ol' Bleu D'Auvergne, but the one from Herve Mons! Harvey's spin on the basic French blue is a sweet creamy and biting. You'd almost think it was a Roquefort.