March winds and April showers bring May… goat cheeses?

The rains have dried out (crossing my fingers here) and May is fully in bloom. In the same way I associate winter with Langres and Vacherin Mont d’Or, I associate spring with goat cheese, especially from the Loire Valley.

news flash! Cheese event tomorrow, Thurs. Jan. 26 at the Cheese Board, Berkeley!

Sorry for the late notice, cheese fans of Berkeley. If you’re free Thursday night, I suggest heading over to the Cheese Board for the CheesebAR (I don’t get the weird capitalization,either. Or am I just missing something obvious?)

This is a fun opportunity to taste the featured cheeses. I can vouch for the The Bleu de Basque, Chatelain,and Roncal.

But the best part is sitting in the median on Shattuck Ave, blatantly ignoring the signs warning you of a stiff fine if you get caught. To my knowledge, no one has.*

Anne

*This web site disavows any responsibility and makes no representations on the legality or enforcement of such actions.

The Cheese Board’s email:
Hello Everyone,

Happy New Year’s to all, wishing everyone a prosperous and fulfilling 2006! The CheesebAR is making another appearance this coming Thursday, January 26th from 7:30-9:00 PM, this time we will be holding the event at our Pizzaria location at 1512 Shattuck Avenue. Bring friends and family and help us celebrate the New Year with a little cheese and wine!

New Year’s Delight Cheese Selections:
Ewephoria(Sheep) Netherlands
Bleu de Basque (Sheep, Raw Milk) Pyrenees, France
Bethmale (Goat, Raw Mlik) Bethmale, France
Chatelain (Cow) Nomandie, France
Roncal (Sheep, Raw Milk) Pyrenees, France

New Year’s Delight Featured Wines:
A. Scherer, Gewurztraminer 2003
Domain des Aubuisieres, Curve de Silex Vouvay 2004
Kurt Angerer, “kies” Gruner Veltuner 2004

We hope to see everyone this coming Thursday, January 26th (730-9 PM) @ the CheesebAR 1512 Shattuck Avenue.
Please come join us and…eat cheese…drink wine…enjoy music!

This Burrata is made in Dallas? Get a rope!

I have only the grainiest of cell phone pictures to prove it, but an outfit in Dallas, Texas is making what it claims is Burrata cheese. Burrata is a recently-popular type of mozzarella with a very creamy center. Anne wrote an article on it a while back for No Reservations magazine, but the mag and its website have gone offline.

Burrata has a very short shelf life, so people are happy to find domestic producers like Gioia Cheese in El Monte, California.

Anne spotted this Dallas variant at Central Market in Houston. Central Market is basically what you get when you turn a Costco-sized warehouse into essentially a Whole Foods and take the price and attitude down a notch, but they’re only in Texas at the moment. Anyway she spotted a Buratta, which looks basically like this:

Innocent enough, and at a measly $12 we probably should have bought some and seen how it tasted. But we were scared by an entirely different list of ingredients on the back. You can barely tell because my picture is too blurry, but the second listed ingredient is Marscapone cheese. Anne’s theory is that the company is merely injecting Marscapone into some plain Mozz and calling it Burrata.

Here’s a shot where you can tell the full name of the producer, Mozzarella Cheese Company, which does indeed appear to be a reasonably reputable firm:

Restaurant-made cheese

The Cheese Diaries’ own Anne Pinckard writes in the Santa Cruz Sentinel about a restaurant chef who makes his own cheese, including chevre, blue, brie, feta and “drunken” cheeses. Chef Nicci Tripp of Theo’s Restaurant in Soquel is the only chef in he Santa Cruz area who makes his own cheese, and believes he may be the only one in the greater San Francisco Bay Area.

Tripp is traditional and precise when making cheese, and Anne does a good job explaining the process for those of us who are not experts. But at the same time he seems to have a willingness to experiment that marks him as quintessentially Santa Cruz. It is hard for me to imagine a four-star San Francisco chef making more than half a dozen cheeses in his own restaurant, or inebriating his cheese with hard cider.

“We’re constantly trying new things to find out what we like and don’t like,” Tripp said.

I wonder how many other restaurant chefs out there are doing this.

Yay Anne!

Read the whole story

C’est Bob!

Greetings from Paris!

After arriving at my host’s flat in the Marais (4th arrondissement), and settling in, the first establishment I stepped into into was of course, a cheese shop.

Before I knew it, I had a petite Epoisses wrapped up and ready to go, language barrier notwithstanding.

Most food purveryors really try to display their foods as attractively as possible in their storefront windows. Some even have them out in the open on the street.

Right now, I’m going to pick up a pain au chocolate and some coffee before going grocery shopping. Au revoir!

Cheese Shop Blogs

Everyone is blogging…we’re blogging, that big corporate behemouth down the street is blogging, and, of course, our favorite cheese shops are blogging. Some are updated more than others. Here are a few links to blogs run by cheesemongers:

Artisanal Cheese

Murray’s Cheese

Formaggio Kitchen

Fairway’s Steve Jenkins

Thanks Elijah for the scoop on Fairway.

Got more links? Send them to me and I’ll post them here.

Je vais à Paris!

In less than one month, I will board a plane at SFO and arrive 15 hours later in CDG. Paris, here I come! My coworkers (and even my husband) seem to think I will spend most of my waking hours at the Place Vendôme or the Galeries Lafayette, contributing to Bernard Arnault’s empire. They are wrong, I say! Besides the museums, it’s Marie-Anne Cantin, Alléosse, Pierre Hermé and Poilane – the fromageries and bakeries that I’m looking forward to. Okay, that and maybe Colette.

In the meantime, I will attempt to brush up on my rudimentery French, figure out places I will visit and where to eat, and finally, study the customs loopholes. Any suggestions will be welcomed.

So how exactly do you lose 2,000 pounds of cheddar?

A Canadian cheesemaker dropped the cheese into a fjord in a ripening experiment. And then, well, some $50,000 later, they still couldn’t find it. Hmmmm….

From the Globe and Mail: Sunken Cheddar Defeats Divers by Ingrid Peritz.

CheeseBar at the Cheeseboard, Sept. 2005

My friend James and I dropped in on the Cheese Board’s second-ever CheeseBar event, an irregularly scheduled cheese and wine gathering that feels more like a little party than a bar. It is sort of a Berkeley hippie’s version of the Flash Mob — the Cheese Board collective sends an email message out to its mailing list a few days in advance, and sometimes posts a notice in the store. Then they stay open after hours and offer flights of wines and tastings of cheeses. By the end the staff is a little tipsy and giddy, and the patrons are practicing civil disobedience by wining and dining out on the street median.

In other words, it’s great fun, both because of the amateur feel and in spite of it. James had never been before, but I was at the first CheeseBar with Anne and Connie. There was more seating this time, both indoors, where seats had been added near the scone baskets, and outside, where two long tables replaced some of the individual cafe tabletops. It was also darker — the prior cheesebar was this past June or thereabouts, so the sun was still out.

We ordered the full five-cheese sampler to share. I added a glass of pinot noir rose, James had three wine tastes (the rose, a Sangiovese and Pinot Grigio). Of course, being two strapping lads in our latetwentiesearlythirties, and both finished with a hard day’s work writing newspaper articles (cough), we had to add half a pizza from Cheese Board Pizza one door down the block.

The standout revelation for me was the Fleur Verte, a very nimble and fluffy goat’s milk cheese covered with fresh herbs. In the accompanying photo it is the white cheese closest to the fork. There’s a larger picture (not mine) here. It was just very light and pleasant, went very well with the fruit, and broke my preconception that goat cheese can’t be very subtle.

I wish the Cheese Board would put together some written information about wine-cheese pairings for these events. I had no idea that the Fleur Verte goes well with rose and at least one type of Pinot Grigio (the distinctive variety from Alsace — I do not recall if this is what was on hand). Boucheron, meanwhile, apparently goes quite well with deep rich tannic reds like the Chateau Mourges du Gres (Nimes, France) Galets Rouge 2003 I tried in the wake of the fruity rose.

On the other hand, maybe I needed to just slow down and try the various wines with the various cheeses. The cheesebar is, after all, a superb environment for such experimentation. With a friend, you can enjoy a flight of three wines and plenty nibbles of five different cheeses for $13, with accordian music thrown in for free (note to self: next time, find the accordinaist’s tip jar).

Of course, it can be a bit rattling to search for seating while carrying three glasses of wine and a cheese plate, all the while navigating a busy store, sidewalk and even two lanes of auto traffic! We lucked out and found a table next to the pizza collective. But last time, seating was totally full and we risked all sorts of citations by sitting on the median (no no) and drinking our wine (no no).

Quick notes on the other cheeses:

Pont L’Eveque – (Cow) Nomandie, France – I found this much like a Camembert, and nice and gloopy because the Cheese Board knows how to store its cheese. Apparently is the fourth most popular cheese in France. Steven Jenkins seems to agree, writing, “Pont-l’Eveque has the texture and all the nuances of Camembert but with a much more pronounced beefiness of flavor and an intensity of level somewhere between Camembert and Livarot.

Tomme du Levezou – (Sheep, Raw Milk) Levezou, France – This one is the hard traingular wedge in the picture. Reminds me of an aged Comte or an Ossau Iraty, which it resembles. (More)

Bleu d’Auvergne – (Cow, Raw Milk) Auvergne, France – A salty and assertive bleu. No particularly complex (and pasteurized to boot), but very nice to nibble with the deep reds.

I have to say, the cheesebar things are fun and memorable. Where else can you sit between mellowed Marxists and slumming students, sipping wine and tasting cheese on the sidewalk, listening to the accordian play, and watching the bartenders giggle? In France, actually. Probably. But if you have to work the next day, or your friends don’t want to spends hundreds of dollars just to come taste cheese with you, get yourself on the collective’s emai list, comrade.

Wine and Cheese Bar event in Berkeley, California, Sept 29

The Cheese Board Collective here in Berkeley is having their second Wine and Cheese Bar on Thursday September 29 between 7 pm and 9 pm.

Here’s the text from the email:

Hello Everyone,
The CheesebAR is back! Thank you to everyone who joined us for our first event in August, it was great to see such a warm response. We will be offering an enchanting selection of French cheeses along with an even more alluring selection of wine. Accompanying us for the night will also be Odile Levault, French chanteuse-accordionist and head mistress of the Parisian music band the Baguette Quartette. Our menu offering is posted on our website at www.cheeseboardcollective.com under CheeseBar.

We hope to see everyone this coming Thursday, Sept. 29th (7-9 PM) @ the CheesebAR.
Proceeds from wine sales will be donated to Katrina Hurricane Relief Efforts, so please come join us and…eat cheese…drink wine…enjoy music!

French Persuasion Cheese Selections:
Tomme du Levezou (Sheep, Raw Milk) Levezou, France
Fleur Verte (Goat) Loire Valley, France
Bucheron (Goat) Loire Valley, France
Pont L’eveque (Cow) Nomandie, France
Bleu d’Auvergne (Cow, Raw Milk) Auvergne, France

Cheese Selection:
Individually [$5.00 ea], Selection of 3 [$9.00], Selection of 5 [$12.00]

French Persuasion Featured Wines:
Chateau Mourges du Gres (Nimes, France) Galets Rouge 2003
Vino Noceto (Amador County, CA) Noceto Sangiovese 2002
Zeta (Navarra, Spain) Ganarcha 2004

Wine Selection:
Individually [$2.50], Sample of 3 [$7.00], Glass [5.00]

Sweet Offering:
Candied Almond Vanilla Fig Tart

Connie, Ryan and I attended the event in August. We got our little bits of cheese, baguette, and olives. Seating was limited, as always, so we headed out to sit on the street divider, blithely ignoring the signs saying such an action was illegal. It’s a true Berkeley experience.

At any rate, those of you who are local, I strongly suggest you attend this. I do confess, however, the cheese was not quite enough to make a meal, so we headed down to Popeye’s later. Ahem.