Categories
cheese cheese lifestyle

Mac 'n cheese

I think mac­a­roni and cheese is the dish that first intro­duces you to how good cheese can be, and how much bet­ter good cheese can make some­thing taste. Call it what you will — shells and cheese, mac 'n cheese, quat­tro for­mag­gi, — the com­bi­na­tion of bak­ing pas­ta and cheese togeth­er is one of the best uses of cheese in the world. It's also a good way to use up any cheese you might have sit­ting around in the cheese draw­er. I made it this week­end using fis­cali­ni aged ched­dar reserve, mixed in with a lit­tle cave-aged gruyere and some reg­gie. MMMMMMMMMMMMM.

Categories
cheese

Vento d'Estate

I've been intrigued by this cheese for a while now. It's a bar­rel-aged cow's milk cheese from Italy that has hay pressed into the rind. At the store, where the pre-cut pieces sit on top of the giant wheel, you can see the long strands of hay in the rind. Need­less to say, ven­to d'estate has more than a whiff of the barn­yard. It's tasty, with a lit­tle tang and a lit­tle sweet sum­mery good­ness. It makes you feel like you are some pam­pered Ital­ian cow, graz­ing in some mag­nif­i­cent field right below a cathedral.

Categories
cheese cheese lifestyle

Humbird

I'll be vis­it­ing here in a few hours: Humbird Cheese Mart. I'll let you know. I'm not sure I did this link right.

Categories
cheese

Caciotta dei Boschi

Ital­ian for "truf­f­li­cious" (Venet­ian dialect) or "mag­i­cal­ly deli­cious" (Tus­can dialect) or "as good as crack" (Cor­si­can), caciot­ta dei boschi is a home­ly look­ing cheese. Its yel­low-beige flesh is spreck­led with brown truf­fle bits, giv­ing it the appear­ance of say, a quail egg. Imag­ine, for a moment, the misty for­est, and the trees that grow there in the black earth, and the roots beneath the trees, crum­bling and damp, mak­ing a home for the hunt­ed Truf­fles, brown fun­gal babies of the per­pet­u­al night. Any­way. Caciot­ta dei boschi has a dank, briney bite that lingers. The sheep's milk base com­bines with the mag­ic truf­fle bits to co-host an earthy, smoky, yum­my par­ty in your mouth. One can almost feel the warm moist pig snout paus­ing to caress its truf­fle quar­ry before roust­ing it from its sub-arbo­r­i­al cub­by. C. d. B. can be eat­en for din­ner, fol­lowed by Girl Scout cook­ies, while watch­ing Rounders star­ring Matt Damon and Edward Nor­ton on cable. No crack­ers necessary.

Categories
cheese non-cheese

Espadrilles and guns

I'm assum­ing we will inter­rupt our reg­u­lar­ly sched­uled pro­gram­ming for round-the-clock cov­er­age of the sit­u­a­tion in Zurich, name­ly, that tal­ent­ed actor Don John­son has been detained at the Swiss-Ger­man bor­der with a car full of $8 BILLION "in bonds, stocks and cred­it notes in his pos­ses­sion, stuffed in a suit­case". I'm both shocked and sad­dened by these events. One might say that Johnson's sto­ry has more holes than Swiss cheese. And yes, that's BILLION, with a B.

Categories
cheese cheese lifestyle

Civilized Living

I've always been a pro­po­nent of civ­i­lized liv­ing (and I think we are all agreed that cheese is the bedrock upon which civ­i­liza­tion is con­struct­ed) and today, after an unex­treme­ly unciv­i­lized wait at the post office to turn over things that already had postage on them but weighed more than a pound and were only going to two sep­a­rate address­es but were in six sep­a­rate pack­ages (why can't the intern ever grasp the dif­fer­ence between inter­na­tion­al and domes­tic mail? why?), I real­ized I need­ed a good dose of civ­i­lized liv­ing. So I went to lunch at Metro­pole and had a nice sand­wich. More impor­tant­ly, I had a glass of wine with my lunch. Why are we not drink­ing wine or beer or cock­tails at lunch? Because Specialty's doesn't serve them? What has hap­pened to the hey­day of the three-mar­ti­ni lunch? Here's the thing—it real­ly took the edge off, that glass of wine. Civ­i­liza­tion is end­ing (it feels like the entire known world is hurtling towards apoc­a­lypse) and so maybe we ought to be tak­ing advan­tage of as much as the civ­i­lized world can offer us—drinks with lunch, an entire cake of Hum­boldt Fog to our­selves, the con­so­la­tions of High Life.

Categories
running

Palo Alto / Cruiser

At around 4pm, the Stan­ford cam­pus is always filled with run­ners, cyclists, and ath­letes in car­di­nal red. I appre­ci­ate this, and yet, at the same time, I feel like I'm run­ning among high­ly-intel­li­gent pod-peo­ple who have sin­is­ter inten­tions beneath benign good looks and have assumed the forms of innocu­ous, white-bread ath­let­ic types in order to Blend In. I imag­ine that they detach their low­er jaws and con­sume god knows what when my back is turned, and per­haps some­day I will stum­ble upon a fly­ing saucer deliv­er­ing giant eggs. As always, this run was sus­pi­cious­ly uneventful.

Categories
cheese cheese lifestyle

Wisconsin

Wis­con­sin researcher makes a bet­ter ched­dar — Asso­ci­at­ed Press — Pub­lished March 12, 2003 — MADISON, Wis. — A Uni­ver­si­ty of Wis­con­sin-Madi­son pro­fes­sor says he's found a way to take the bit­ter­ness out of ched­dar — a dis­cov­ery that could save cheese­mak­ers some seri­ous bread. Food sci­ence pro­fes­sor Jim Steele said an enzyme reduces the bit­ter taste that afflicts low-grade ched­dar cheese. "It has the poten­tial to give con­sis­ten­cy to the qual­i­ty of cheese that we pro­duce, and save us a whole lot of mon­ey,'' said John Umhoe­fer, exec­u­tive direc­tor of the Wis­con­sin Cheese Mak­ers Asso­ci­a­tion. Cheese­mak­ers start by mix­ing a med­ley of bac­te­ria called a starter cul­ture with warm milk. They some­times add a sec­ond batch of bac­te­ria, called an adjunct cul­ture. To make ched­dar, they mix in an organ­ism called Lac­to­bacil­lus hel­veti­cus, which smooths out the cheese's taste and reduces bit­ter­ness. Steele and his team have worked to iden­ti­fy what in the organ­ism pro­duces this desir­able effect. They hoped they could then find a way to pro­duce the effect in the starter cul­ture, which would drop the cost and improve the cheese. The researchers sequenced the 2,400 genes in Lac­to­bacil­lus in 2001, and Steele's team iden­ti­fied the desired gene with­in six months. Cheese­mak­ers can now add that gene to starter cul­tures. Paul McShane, sales man­ag­er for the small Brook­field cheese com­pa­ny Roth Kase, thinks Steele's enzyme would take the mys­tique out of cheese pro­duc­tion. "Cheese­mak­ing is an art, and you lose some­thing — a qual­i­ty — when you try to take short­cuts,'' he said. But Bill Schlin­sog, chief judge at this week's 2003 U.S. Cham­pi­onship Cheese Con­test in Mil­wau­kee, hailed the dis­cov­ery as a weapon against bit­ter cheese. "It's unde­sir­able,'' he said. "And if it can be avoid­ed, then that's great.''

Categories
cheese

Cave-Aged Gruyere

This cheese is like that boy your moth­er wants you to marry—safe, reli­able, a lit­tle bit pre­dictable. you know it's always going to treat you right. you hold the idea of it in reserve like an extra ace tucked away. when you've been burned by flashier, sex­i­er, more excit­ing cheeses—what a good idea bres­cianel­la seemed like at the time!—cave-aged gruyere is there to pick you up the morn­ing after. it doesn't ask ques­tions, doesn't press its agen­da, it's just there, sol­id and depend­able. it knows the tor­toise always wins the race in the end.

Categories
cheese

Capricious

An apt­ly-named aged-goat cheese so play­ful and salty that it brings to mind the Great God Pan cavort­ing around a field with his pipes, sur­round­ed by half-naked nymphs. I've only seen this once at the Rain­bow (the cheese, not Pan—I doubt Pan would grace the veg­e­tar­i­an aisles of the Rain­bow, unless it were to wreak some mer­ry mis­chief with his pipes) and more often at the Fer­ry Plaza Farm­ers Mar­ket. Like Pan, capri­cious can go either way—it can be full of whim­sy and charm, or it can cross the line from mis­chief to mal­ice with­out warning.