Category: 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.

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.

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.

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.''