9 posts tagged “cheese”

I typically plan my Super Bowl party theme around the location of the big game, or hometown of one of the teams. For example, New Orleans was of course Mardi Gras (hurricanes & beads), Detroit was BYOForty, and Houston was chili. Here are some regional picks for this year's teams and locale:

• New York: Coach Farms aged green peppercorn goat. A fresh, flavorful cheese that will hold its own on your snack buffet. (And yes, it's that Coach.)
  
• New England: Berkshire Blue, of course.
  
• Southwest: It’s not quite Arizona, but Colorado’s Haystack Mountain Queso de Mano is a firm, earthy raw-milk goat cheese.
  

Big-bodied, flavorful cheeses are the best companions to your typical football fare. A garlic gouda, chipotle cheddar or other herbed cheese are good choices. One fun cheese to spice up a deli sandwich board is Leyden – a Dutch cow’s milk cheese studded with caraway seeds and cumin.

And you can never go wrong with a beer cheese. Guinness cheddar is rich and slightly sweet from the healthy dose of stout. Cheers!

Our New Year's Eve Spanish sampler featured Gramona Gran Cuvee Cava (2003), two Spanish cheeses, drunken goat and mahon (cow's milk aged in olive oil and paprika), lomo (cured pork), and roasted almonds. The Gramona is one of the few remaining family-owned estates producing cava in the Penedes region. Gramona cavas are aged significantly longer than most cavas, 30 months for the Gran Cuvee, producing a delightful, flavorful bubbly. The drunken goat is a semi-hard cheese aged in red wine (Doble Pasta) and is creamy and rich - make sure to let it sit at room temperature for at least one hour, preferably two. Mahon is a firmer, chewier cheese with a richness and lovely orange hue from the paprika. Salty lomo and almonds were perfect complements.  

Chocolate and cheese may seem like an unlikely combination, but a good, bittersweet chocolate can be a perfect complement to a rich, creamy cheese. These handmade truffles from Lillie Belle Farms in Oregon contain the Rogue Smokey Blue I wrote about previously, and are rolled in crushed toasted almonds to complement the nutty, smoky flavor of the cheese. Luscious and pungent, these are truly divine. Lille Belle uses only organic and fair trade ingredients, and has quite a few other enticing flavors. 

Tonight's Cheesetique course was on holiday entertaining. The lecture portion focused on tips for creating the perfect party cheese platter. Some useful tips:

• For appetizer or after dinner, serve 3-4 ounces per person; for the main course, 5-6 ounces per person.
• Variety is good, but include one cheese everyone will love and one more adventerous sweet or salty cheese.
• Always let the cheeses sit at room temperature for 1-2 hours before serving, and provide a knife for each cheese to avoid mixing flavors.

We then tasted the ten cheeses pictured, a range of sweet and savory festive cheeses. I tend to like my cheese to taste like cheese, so some of these were trying too hard for my liking. But, the goal was to present crowd-pleasing options, and most of these were inoffensive and would appeal to cheese newbies. My favorites:

• Saint Julien with Walnut (cow, France) - looks like layer cake, luscious and creamy, sweet with a walnut layer. Great for people who aren't into stinky cheese, this is incredibly mild.
• La Leyenda Brandy Cheese (raw sheep, Spain) - A manchego-style aged cheese wrapped in herbs and soaked in Solera Brandy. Grassy and flavorful.
• Boschetto al Tartufo (sheep & cow, Italy) - Flavored with white truffle shavings, this is Incredibly earthy, creamy, delicate and fragrant.

The bottom right cheese was a Royal Windsor from England. The pink layers are the Elderberry Wine Cheese (okay on its own), and the center is a pungent Blue Stilton. An interesting combination, but the stilton really overpowers the elderberry.

I am a long-time fan of Rogue Creamery of Oregon - makers of Oregonzola - but I hadn't tried their Smokey Blue until a recent "Best Blues" class at Cheesetique. Rogue Creamery has an interesting history, started in southern Oregon by an Italian immigrant in 1935 with the backing of J.L. Kraft. Yes, that Kraft. Rogue produced the first American blue cheese to win the London Best Cheese Award for blue cheese, with its Rogue River Blue in 2003. The Rogue River is made only during the autumnal equinox and winter solstice each year, and wrapped in grape leaves macerated in pear brandy to give it a sharp, fruity flavor.

The Smokey Blue is the first cold-smoked blue cheese, smoked for 16 hours over crushed Oregon hazelnut shells. Domestic hazelnuts are entirely grown in the Pacific Northwest, virtually all in Oregon's Willamette Valley, so it's a natural fit. [Did you know hazelnuts have the highest folate level of any tree nut?] The hazelnuts give the cheese a hint of sweetness, balancing out the smoky and sharp blue cheese tang.

I had fantasized about pairing this with Nutella, but alas, I was out and couldn't wait for a grocery trip. Instead I used an Oregon blackberry jam on sourdough toast, which was a great sweet-sharp, creamy-crunchy contrast. Next time around, I plan to pair it with a Rogue HazelNut Brown Nectar Ale, to harmonize with the hazelnut flavor.

We had three options for today's outing:
A. Arts on Foot in the district
B. Starbucks Coffee Festival in the 'burbs
C. Bluemont Country Fair in the country

Which did we chose? B, of course! A, Arts on Foot is my favoritest local festival and was the Monkey's very first festival/outing into the city last year. But this year, the pros (tons of cheap samples from DC's best chefs!) were outweighed by the cons: difficulty parking, too crowded to let the Monkey out of his stroller, unlikelihood of the Monkey sitting contentedly in his stroller while we ate, and the smell and hassle of the anti-war protesters. (Sorry, but protesting on the weekends, i.e. when your members of Congress are NOT in town, is just dumb and annoying.) We were too lazy (the husband and I have been sick all week) to go all the way out to Bluemont, although it was the first crisp, cool day of fall and would have been lovely out there, so the ease and comfort of the suburbs won out. Plus, it was all free! And there was good music! And room for the Monkey to run and dance. We had a blast.

Speaking of fall, we saw the first pumpkins of the season at market this morning. It was chilly this morning so I bought a butternut squash and sweet potatoes to make some soup tomorrow, and a ton of cheese (our usual Amish smoked gouda and Grafton 2-year cheddar) for mac 'n cheese. Yum.

On our way back from the Oregon coast, we visited Rivers Edge Chevre, a tiny goat dairy that was having their second anniversary wine & cheese festival. The farm was in a beautiful valley in the coast range.  They recently won several awards at this year's American Cheese Society Competition.  The cheese was phenomenal - the winery (Madrone Mountain) had port-style wines that were a little sweet for my taste. But the cheeses... yum.  They had goat cheese tortes with flavors like olive tapenade, sun-dried tomato pesto, basil pesto, and roasted hazelnut & frangelico which was the kid's favorite. (I had to cut him off for fear of him getting drunk off cheese ;-).) I really enjoyed the Sunset Bay, "an ash-coated wheel with a deep vein of paprika."

And the little herd of friendly goats kept the kid and his cousin well entertained.

I was drooling all day in anticipation of this post. As I mentioned previously, cheese is one of the four Italian food groups, and definitely my favorite. One of the best things about the neighborhood where I live is that we have our very own cheese shop. I don't make it there as often as I did before my cheese-addict friend moved away, but they have just started biweekly wine & cheese happy hours (free samples!) so I think the kid and I will be stopping by tomorrow night.

Cheese is a necessary component of any party I host, although the hubby is picky so I always have to have a "safe" cheese (cows milk, not stinky) for him. A cheese plate was the feature attraction at my baby shower (thanks J!), and for our Italian-themed baptism party I ordered the Italian sampler (pictured): Crucolo (cow), Pecorino Toscano  (sheep), Armentizia Caprini (goat), and Castelbelbo (cow/sheep/goat) .

One of my very favorite cheeses is Humboldt Fog, by Cypress Grove Chèvre (CA). It's a mild, melt-in-your-mouth creamy goat cheese that's slightly sweet with a layer of ash that gives it a slight bite.

For mass-produced cheese, we stock up on Tillamook Reserve Extra Sharp and Smoked Cheddars when in Oregon. Grocery stores here only carry their plain and kosher cheddars. A great thing about Tillamook is that even though they've gotten huge and no longer get all their milk from their own cows there in Tillamook, all their cheeses are growth hormone free.  And if you visit the plant, you get free samples and cheese curds. (And a CMC alum is an executive there.)

There is a man at our farmers' market who makes amazing goat cheeses and mozzarella. Unfortunately his goat cheeses are made with raw milk, so I can't share them with the kid yet. I have been gradually introducing him to good cheeses though. He gets mozzarella fairly often, occasionally bufala, and most recently we tried a Cypress Grove goat milk cheddar - excellent for grilled cheese.

I was shocked and dismayed to see that there are no Vox groups dedicated to cheese, so I started one myself. If you enjoy a fine cheese - stinky or not - please visit the group and share!