THOUGHTS: Of cheese and pie

By Kara

A conversation with my grandfather, during round two of my family's Christmas pie extravaganza:

Grandpa, unsolicited, with no prior knowledge of any cheese blog: "You know, Kara, you're not a real pie eater until you have it with a slice of cheese."

Kara, apparently still a pie novice, having recently consumed several cheeseless slices: "Mm, you've mentioned this before..."

Grandpa: "Here, I have an extra piece, just try it."

Grandma: "But she has butterscotch pie! It should be with apple."

Grandpa: "Well, it's good with butterscotch, too. I have it with butterscotch."

Kara, biting into white cheddar after a bite of pie: "Actually, it is pretty good with butterscotch!"

Grandpa, never missing a beat: "A pie without the cheese is like a kiss without the squeeze!"

TASTES: Holiday Edition- The More the Merrier

By Erica

'Tis the season-- sparkly lights, fragrant trees, gift-wrapped presents, and, most importantly, lots of dinner parties. Dinner parties mean appetizers, and appetizers mean cheese. Usually, the spread includes a orange and white striped wedge of cheddar, some kind of blue cheese, and maybe a Brie. Sometimes, though, there's something new. Last night, for instance, my family brought three cheeses to a friend's house. If it were last year, I would have shoveled lots of cheese and bread into my mouth (politely, of course), noted that they all tasted pretty good, and moved on. This year, however, as co-author of this cheese blog, I decided to do some research on the wheels and wedges that we enjoyed.

1) Saint Faron
This cheese, a wheel with a diameter of about five inches and a height of about four, is a cow's milk triple crème from France. Triple crèmes are cheeses to which cream is added to increase the butterfat content of the solid ingredients to 75% (overall, the fat content is about 40%). Other triple crèmes include mascarpone and St. André. As you can imagine, this cheese was very smooth. Like the Camembert we tasted earlier, it essentially melted in my mouth (I didn't lick this cheese as we did the Camembert because I was in public). It is an incredibly lush, full cheese. This lushness seemed to overwhelm any subtle notes that may have existed, which isn't a bad thing. To me, triple crèmes are about richness. In a country that despises and avoids fat like the plague (when, in fact, fat is a crucial ingredient to many of the most tasty foods), it is very pleasing to eat a cheese for which the fattiness is the point of it all.

2) Mousseron Jurassian
A harder, but still sliceable, wedge, this is a Jura Mountain cheese like Gruyère or Comté. The Jura Mountains are a part of the Alps that span Germany, Switzerland, and France. Because of the dense vegetation in this area, many its cheeses have an earthy taste. Mousseron Jurassian is made from raw cow's milk. I liked the cheese's even texture, and it is more mild than many of the cheeses that Kara and I have tasted thus far. M.J. is a very pleasant cheese, but not a stand out. If stronger cheeses are like the flashy, colorful Christmas decorations that wow the neighbors, M.J. is like a string of those white, tasteful lights that make a quiet and comforting holiday statement.

3) Hoch Ybring
Named after the area in Switzerland from where it comes, this is also a raw cow milk cheese. The Hoch Ybrig region famous for its skiing and hiking. The Hoch Ybrig cheese (pictured above) is famous for the white wine brine that it is washed in while it ages. This cheese was a favorite among the dinner guests. It has a strong earthy taste, a rough texture, and the grassy, mushroomy notes linger on one's tongue. This, in my opinion, is a perfect appetizer cheese. It is not overly pungent, but has enough flavor to be interesting.

And so, my first cheeses of the holiday season were delicious. I hope your Christmas season is as cheesy as mine!

LINKS: The Root's 12 Cheeses of Christmas

By Kara

Got a great cheese tip recently (not to be confused with a great cheese dip): The Root recently posted a guide to buying cheese for holiday gatherings, with short descriptions of twelve delicious-sounded varieties of our obsession. Each description includes some background information about the cheese's origin, a tastefully-written (haha) note about its flavor, and suggestions for how to pair the cheese with wine, beer, bread, fruit, etc.

As far as I can tell, it looks like an excellent list. How could someone resist trying "Humboldt Fog," apparently "the most imaginative American-made cheese," which is creamy on the edges, flaky in the middle, and tastes like citrus and thyme?

It should also be noted that Wisconsin makes an appearance at the top of the list, with a Gruyere from Dodgeville, WI. I'm feeling the need to start a cheese wish-list...

LINKS: The Wisconsin State.... Microbe???

By Erica

A few days ago, the microbe Lactococcus lactis was nominated by the state Assembly (Assembly Bill 556) to become Wisconsin's State Microbe . Lactococcus latis, which has its own hilarious home page is used in the cheese making process to ferment milk sugar into lactic acid.

Apparently, Wisconsin lawmakers believe that adding L. latis as the state microbe would raise awareness about Wisconsin's cheese making industry. Demoncrat Representative Gary Hebl, who is one of the primary authors of Assembly Bill 556, said, "My first reaction was, 'Uh . . . why would we do that?'But then we started talking about it, and it made sense."

Don't believe me? Here's the article.

TASTES: Camembert

By Erica and Kara

Background
This week, we tasted a Camembert cheese from Butler Farms (Whitehall, WI). We sampled this cheese at the farmer's market a couple weeks ago and decided that we needed to buy a wheel at some point. Camembert wheels are by definition very small--only about 4.5 inches in diameter. In fact, this small size is the only factor that distinguishes Camembert from Brie, whose wheel can range from 9 to 15 inches in diameter. When it comes to cheese, size matters--the smaller wheel size means that Camembert takes a shorter time to ripen (about 3 weeks as opposed to 4 or 5) and has a higher concentration of flavor.

Besides the different sizes, Camembert and Brie are made by the same process. After the rennet is added and the milk curdles, the curds are ladled into their molds and allowed to drain. Then, after about a day, the cheeses are put in a "salting room" where they are, as the name suggests, salted. Additionally, they are coated with a particular strain of mold, Penicillium candidum, and allowed to age for a few weeks. The creamy texture is thought to be a product of the ladling technique, and bitter notes are a result of the amino acids ornithine, cadaverine, and citrulline. Nowadays, the rind is always white, but before we had the technology to tightly control the molds used in cheeses, the rinds were often spotted, grey, or blue. One legend is that Camembert was originally a blue cheese whose recipe changed over time into what it is today.

There are many other myths surrounding this beloved (especially to the French) cheese. One myth is that the cheese was invented in 1791 by Marie Harel, a farmer, and a priest from Brie whom she saved from the guillotine. Regardless of who first produced the cheese, it wasn't transported around Europe until the 1800s with the invention of the wooden box by Ridel, a french engineer (who knew that an engineer was needed to come up with the idea of a circular wooden box?). Camembert became the darling of France, and it was doled out to French soldiers during World War II.

The French have a particular snootiness when it comes to Camembert because it was not granted AOP protection until 1983. The AOP (Appellation d'Origine Protégée, or The Nomenclature of Protected Origin) decides if a product is copyrighted to a particular geographically location. Thus, today, Camembert made in certain areas in Normandy is called Camembert de Normandie, and many Frenchmen contend that regular old Camembert is not the real deal. In fact, if you buy Camembert in the U.S., as we did, you are not tasting "real" Camembert by any measure. Camembert requires raw milk, but in the U.S., if raw (unpasteurized*) milk is used in cheese, the cheese must be aged for at least 60 days. As noted above, Camembert is only aged for about 20 days. Thus, most creameries in the U.S. use pasteurized milk in their Camembert production.

It follows that, alas, the Camembert from Butler Farms that we tasted did not use raw milk. And, unlike to the traditional Camembert, it was made with a combination of cow milk, cow cream, and sheep milk. In the future, we hope to find a Camembert made solely with raw cow milk. PeRhaps then we will gain the respect of the French.

Sources:
www.thenibble.com
www.cookthink.com

*Pasteurization is a heating process that slows down the development of certain strains of bacteria to prevent disease.

Camembert Ingredients:
- sheep milk
- cow milk
- cow cream
- p. candidum
- rennet
- salt

The Taste:
Smoooooth is the operative word here. Unbelievably, perfectly, tremendously smooth. Creamy velvet. The cheese also tastes and feels luxuriously fatty, in the best sense of the word. Licking it (which we did, unfortunately not until after we turned off the camera) feels like liking a stick of butter or a hunk of lard. It's the sort of sensation that confounds the gustatory and the tactile... "Mouthfilling" might be the word.

Although it's hard to move beyond that initial impression of silkiness, there are other aspects of the Camembert experience: a subtle cow-y aroma, a buttery flavor, and a certain sourness and bitterness that rise up gradually at the back of the tongue. The sour and bitter tastes come mostly from the rind (and the amino acids, apparently - see above). We thought it tasted a lot like Brie - which was spot-on, according to our research! Kara thought it would go well with something sweet... maybe some honey. We ate it with water crackers, which allowed us to appreciate the slow and subtle unfolding of this cheese's flavors.

Our big downfall was to cut and eat the cheese too soon after taking it out of the refrigerator, which took away from both the texture (it was even much more cloud-like at the Farmer's Market) and the taste (which got stronger as the cheese started to warm up). Amateurs we remain!

FACTS: A Cheesy Vocabulary

By Kara

This week I want to be better prepared to speak about cheese. I say this with some hesitation: I'm skeptical of the lingo of expertise in most avocational domains, because I think it serves as much of a social purpose as it does a descriptive one (e.g., "Mm-herm, don't you think this is quite a nervy Sauvignon Blanc?"). My goal here isn't really to immerse myself in some sort of culture d'affinage... But I do want to be able to think about what I'm tasting, and remember different cheeses for their distinctive characteristics. If I can hang my sensory experience on some reliable words, maybe the taste will be preserved a little more vividly in my mind. Also, maybe Erica and I will be able to sum our our thoughts in under 5 minutes of babble.

So I've been poking around websites and leafing through books, and I've assembled a few lists to get us started.

To describe the texture of cheese, people use words that are for the most part pretty straightforward: airy , bold, buttery, chalky, creamy, crumbly, curdy, custardy, delicate, dense, firm, flaky, fluffy, fudgy, gooey, grainy, hard, luscious, melting, moist, mouthfilling, oily, pasty, pillowy, pliable, rubbery, runny, sandy, smooth, soft , spreadable, striated, sturdy, supple, thick, veined, velvety, voluptuous, waxy, yielding. Most of these words seem like they correspond well to descriptions of other textures. "Curdy" is a little special, but I'm pretty sure that it's a literal term, referring to the concept of cheese curds (i.e., not dense, rubbery, solid but pliable). I'm thinking a luscious cheese would be super creamy and velvety... as would a voluptuous variety, though this might be a little thicker and gooier. I love the concept of "mouthfilling" - I've looked around online a bit, and it seems like this describes the experience of a complex combination of flavors that feels like it requires the whole tongue, oral cavity, nasal passages, etc., to fully experience. Yum.

To describe the aroma and flavor of cheese, people use slightly quirkier words: acidic, biting, bright, burned, buttery, chemical, creamy, delicate, dry, electric, goaty, lactic, lingering, mean, mild, milky, moldy, popping, pungent, rich, roasted, salty, sharp, smokey, sour milk, stinky, stringent, strong, sweet, tangy, tart, vibrant. "Bright" and "electric" seem to be used most frequently to talk about blue/eu cheeses - maybe this corresponds to something sort of sour and tangy, somehow "shocking." "Stringent" seems to be a similar sort of flavor, kind of acidic and often used to describe moldy cheese. I gather that a vibrant cheese has a strong but fairly simple flavor... but for the life of me I can't figure out what would make someone call a cheese "mean."

Often adjectives just don't suffice. (Some speculate that this because taste and smell are processed largely in the "deep," subcortical areas of the brain, meaning there's a long neural road to travel between those types of sensory experiences and the formulation of sentences to describe them.) In these cases, cheese-lovers turn to analogies to describe the flavors they detect: almond, ammonia, apple, apricot, artichoke, barnyard, berry, brothy, butterscotchy, candied, caramel, catbox, chocolate, cinnamon, citrus, earthy, fermented, floral, fruity, grassy, hay, hazelnut, herbaceous, herbal, humus, lemony, mushroomy, nutmeg, nutty, onion, peanut, pear, pepper, plum, spicy, straw, toasty, toffee, vanilla, vegetable, walnut, wet grass, wet wool, wheat, yeasty. I'm having a little bit of a hard time imagining a cheese that tastes brothy or mushroomy, but these words show up all the time, so I guess I'll get a taste of it soon enough. I sort of hope to avoid anything with notes of barnyard, catbox, or wet wool... but I certainly wouldn't mind overtones of caramel or pear!

Some of these words have some physical/chemical basis (fat content, level of moisture, diet of mammal, etc.) - others originate in the associative mind of the taster (at least, I hope they do). I think the take-home lesson here is that when it comes to describing and remembering cheese, free association is strongly encouraged. The descriptions I read ranged from poetic ("delicately floral") to disturbing (I still can't get over "catbox"), but none lacked creative flair. The task for our next tasting is to breathe in, let go, and let the tasting mind wander.

FACTS: A Cow's Milk + Its Fourth Stomach = Cheese

By Erica

Both Kara and I (and probably the majority of you out there), thought that all you needed to make cheese was milk. There is, however, a second ingredient that is necessary: rennet. Rennet is collection of enzymes that mammals (that means you!) have in their stomachs to digest milk. In the cheese making process, it is what causes milk to split into curds and whey (Little Miss Muffet, &c &c). Today, about 60% of cheese produced in the US is made with genetically engineered rennet, but this was not always the case. Cheese, The Making of Wisconsin Tradition by Jerry Apps (a lovely little piece of propaganda "Courtesy of the Wisconsin Milk Marketing Board," and my reading material on the bus to work), tells me that in the 1800s, when cheese making was still a domestic chore, rennet was made by combining six gallons of water, loads of salt, 12 calf's stomachs "half emptied, rinsed, and salted", six lemons, and an ounce of cinnamon cloves. It was stored for around a year before it was used.

Most people would probably prefer that their cow stomach's were not involved in the making of their cheese, or at least that they didn't know about it. The Vegetarian Society writes that "The usual source of rennet is the stomach of slaughtered newly-born calves," and advocates for the use of other sources of rennet, like fungus, bacteria, or a petri dish. But there's something intriguing to me about getting the milk and rennet from the same source. It seems more natural. When you eat cheese made with cow rennet, it's like you're eating something that, more or less, exists already in a cow's fourth stomach somewhere.
























Moo.

TASTES: Aroma Bear

By Kara and Erica

For our first tasting session we tried a piece of Aroma Bear cheese from Capri Cheesery in Blue River, WI. This fall, the Capri stand at the Dane County Farmers' Market has been Kara's favorite - an opinion she exclaimed more loudly than necessary in front of the vendor (who cheerfully agreed).

Some Background:
Capri Cheesery is a small operation, spear-headed by an ambitious Swiss-American named Felix. Capri specializes in cheese made from raw (unpasteurized) goatsmilk, which purportedly allows for the full taste of the goats' "terroir" to infuse every bite. To quote the Capri website, "The cheese that results is the intersection of special goats and a special place."

We selected a "bear cheese," which is made with traditional Mu(e)nster techniques. A little context: Muenster cheeses were first made by monks in Alsace, France (hence, "munster," like monastery - no joke!); according to some (the French), Muensters are still made nowhere else. The cheese is traditionally made with cow's milk, although Felix has obviously deviated from this norm with Aroma Bear. Muenster is a "washed cheese," which means that the rind is rubbed periodically with a salt brine solution while the cheese ages, a process that simultaneously inhibits the growth of mold and nourishes the bacteria that produce the cheese's strong taste and smell. The cheese is aged for a week outside, and then for a minimum of 2 months next to other Muensters, in order to develop the unique, tangy "rind flora" that distinguishes Muenster from other cheeses. This communal aging traditionally occurs in a cave, and there does indeed appear to be a cave on the Capri Cheesery premises! In Steven Jenkins' Cheese Primer (Workman Publishing, 1996), French Munster is described as "at once piercingly sharp, beefy, and nutty." (Jenkins adds, "Odd as it may sound, I always think of fried eggs when I eat Munster.") Munster is commonly eaten plain, in quiche, with bread, on dessert plates, and with potatoes.

It should be noted that it's very easy to find disparaging remarks about American Muenster cheese, which apparently is a terrible imitation of German and Danish Münsters, themselves but bland knock-offs of the French original. We'll give Felix the benefit of the doubt and assume he's following the French technique. The descriptions of the French original definitely seem to conform to our impressions of this cheese, which was anything but "bland." Bear (haha) in mind that the cheese contains the word "aroma" in its name.

"Aroma Bear" ingredients:
- Goatmilk from Amish grass-fed goats (Amish goats!)
- Salt
- Rennet
- Cheese Culture

The Taste:
To our untrained palates, Aroma Bear is a delightful cheese. How does one expand on this statement? Indeed, it took some effort (see video) for us to get beyond general descriptors. After the first taste, we exclaimed that we liked it, then exchanged blank looks. As novice cheese tasters, we didn't quite know how to proceed. Under the "learn by doing" philosophy, though, our inexperience did not hold us back. Kara noted the sour notes. Erica noted the grassy flavor. It is a timidly pungent cheese, by which we mean it doesn't have a strong smell (where's the "aroma" in the bear? I ask), yet the strong flavor hits your tongue immediately and stays there (in the cheese world, I think they call this "lingering"). It is not a sweet cheese, and Kara suggested eating it with some jalapeno jelly, which we did. It was a nice complement.

As for the texture, Aroma Bear is not as crumbly as most goat milk cheese, although pieces broke off in crystalline bits. In fact, the cheese looks like some sort of mineral. The brown rind is like dried lava, and at some places folds into the cheese like the sulci of a brain or, more aptly, the mineral rind of a unpolished piece of quartz. Perhaps the natural appearance of Aroma Bear adds to its earthiness. I would recommend Aroma Bear to those who enjoy a stronger cheese-- this isn't your typical Muenster!

Erica had the foresight to capture our first tasting on video:

THOUGHTS: My current cheese-knowledge

By Kara

Cheese is made from milk, and perhaps some other things. It's somehow related to mold, maybe, and can be "aged" to different degrees of desirability. It goes well with fruit, wine, nuts, crackers, bread, and, according to my grandfather, apple pie.

Adjectives that can be used to describe cheese include, but must certainly not be limited to, the following: sharp, mild, soft, hard, stinky, salty, and nutty. These qualities most likely arise from some part of the process that occurs between "made from milk" and "aged to different degrees."

I love cheese, I really do. I ate grated parmesan by the spoonful as a kid, and before writing this post I polished off the first of two huge hunks of cheddar (Wisconsin-made!) I bought at the grocery store last week. My love of cheeses, however, far eclipses my actual understanding. I guess I used to have some latent theory that various kinds of cheese got their distinctive tastes from the types of milk that were used in their production. Upon recent reflection, I've come to realize that there aren't possibly enough milkable mammals to produce all the varieties of cheese out there in the world... or, at least, it seems very unlikely that the difference between swiss and gouda and taleggio is that one of them is made from cow's milk, while the others originated in the teats of lions or alpacas.

So what goes on between your Bovine Bessie, Shirley Sheep, Goatrude, or whomever, and that cheddar I just ate? I can't explain, or even accurately describe, the distinctive brie flavor I've grown to love so much, or what it is about string cheese that makes it stringy. Of course, let's not forget the ultimate Wisconsin mystery: why do cheese curds squeak? (And what exactly are "curds," anyway?)

It should be fairly obvious that at this point my cheese-knowledge is really just cheese-appreciation. With any luck, we'll soon observe it developing into a true cheese-passion.

THOUGHTS: How little I know about cheese

By Erica

When I was a 15, my sister told me I should be a cheese connoisseur. I don’t think she meant it seriously. I think we were sitting in the kitchen and, as usual, I was in the middle of eating an entire wedge of whatever cheese was in the refrigerator. It was probably her way of saying, “Erica, you eat too much cheese.”

In fact, I do eat a lot of cheese. Now that I have my own apartment, I make sure to always have cheese and crackers handy. My unofficial cheese mantra is “the stinkier, the better.” Consequently, my favorite kind of cheese is Époisses, a French cows milk cheese that comes in a circular wooden box. Its stench can clear a room. My mother used to buy this cheese for me whenever I visited home.

Despite my extreme love of eating cheese, I have very little knowledge about cheese. In fact, I had no idea that Époisses was called Époisses until last year. And I didn’t know it was a French cows milk cheese until I looked it up on Wikipedia a minute ago. It is high time that I learn about the food that I love so much. Perhaps I will even become a (amateur) cheese connoisseur after all.

Before Kara and I embark on our cheese journey, I will document the current state of my knowledge for posterity:

These are the names of cheese that I know*:
Cheddar
Goat Cheese
Gruyere
Monterey Jack
Gouda
Époisses (of course)
Mozzarella
Brie
Roquefort
Asiago
Parmesan
Feta

*A pathetic list.

How cheese is made according to Erica**:
1) Take the milk of some animal: cow, sheep, or goat
2) Do something to it (remove the fat? Pasteurize it? What does Pasteurize mean?)
3) Use a cheese cloth to squeeze the liquid out and create a solid
4) Let it sit for some about of time
5) Eat it

**Laughable.