cheesenotes:

Steve Jenkins, author of the The Cheese Primer (for a long time the gold standard of cheese books in the US), comes out in defense of Cracker Barrel cheese. Yes, you read that right, Cracker Barrel cheese.

Steven Jenkins, author of “Cheese Primer,” was visiting his mother on the coast of…

Color me skeptical. I’m sure the cheese tastes good, for what it is, but there’s more than just flavor and aroma that goes into why it’s important to support artisanal, farmstead and small-scale cheese makers. Cracker Barrel can charge $4/Lb because it’s buying milk in astronomical quantities from CAFO dairy farms and producing it in massive factory production settings. Make no mistake, this isn’t like Cabot working with Jasper Hill to produce the Cabot Clothbound. Cabot has a long track record of supporting Vermont dairy farmers and doing good by the local community and has proven itself genuinely interested in working with master affineurs to produce a quality cheese. Whether the same holds true of Cracker Barrel remains to be seen.

Read the full piece here.

(photo ©2012 NYT and Cracker Barrel)

well said, as always!

texts from my cows dot tumblr dot com

When Christian Oesch was a boy on his family’s hog farm, cellphones were a thing of the future. Now, Mr. Oesch tends a herd of dairy cattle and carries a smartphone wherever he goes. Occasionally he gets an SMS from one of his cows.

cheesenotes:

In the New York Times, a piece about the stretchy, delicious cheese known as Straciatella, made by Caputo’s Brothers in Pennsylvania:

The Caputos, who are in their 30s, spent years perfecting their pasta filata, or stretched-curd cheeses, before opening Caputo Brothers Creamery in Spring…

Great piece on the lovely Rynn and her amazing cheese. When she stops by the shop she brings us these crazy maple donuts from Pennsylvania and it is awesome. Love this woman (with or without the donuts)!

Salt + Fat = flavor, people. How many times do we have to say it?! EAT REAL CHEESE.

cheesenotes:

Now that’s a protest! 

BRUSSELS — After months of complaints by European dairy farmers angry over low prices, protesters in Brussels on Monday poured milk onto the streets, hurled eggs and other missiles, and started fires that filled the air with black smoke.

Police helicopters hovered overhead as hundreds of tractors — and some cattle — blockaded the area outside the European Union’s headquarters while agriculture ministers met in an emergency meeting.

The gathering of ministers, convened after pressure from France, failed to produce any breakthroughs apart from a decision to set up a committee to report on the dairy industry in June.

Monday’s protest was the latest by farmers who dumped around three million liters of milk on fields in Belgium last month.

“There’s a very serious crisis in the milk sector,” said the Swedish agriculture minister, Eskil Erlandsson, who headed Monday’s discussion. “We didn’t take any decisions today, but we identified areas where the future policy needs to concentrate on.”

The protest organizers, the European Milk Board, said that more than 1,000 tractors and 5,000 people took part on behalf of “more than 80,000 dairy farmers”.

The group said milk prices are below 75 percent of production costs. Another European farm union organization, Copa-Cogeca, says that milk prices have plummeted 30 percent in a year and that dairy producers will lose up to 14 billion euros before the end of the year if nothing is done.

Full Story here. 

no cheap milk for EU!

At the Table, Nora Ephron Knew Best - NYTimes.com (via rebeccalando)

AMEN.

(via rebeccalando)

Eric Asimov wrote a great piece for The New York Times on red wine and cheese, featuring some advice from the pairing pros at Murray’s. Boils down to: RELAX, it’s just cheese and wine.

“I tell people not to be afraid,” said Tia Keenan, who recently became the first director of food services for Murray’s Cheese, and whose first job is to develop a cheese and wine bar for Murray’s near the flagship store on Bleecker Street. “The worst-case scenario is that you have a wine with a cheese that doesn’t really go so well together, nothing more tragic.”

Recently, with a 2010 Côtes du Rhône Brézème from Eric Texier, the sort of excellent but modest red wine that I’m happy to drink on any given night, I sampled a few different sorts of cheeses and found many of them to be enjoyable, even unexpected matches. Up in Smoke, a smoked, fresh, creamy goat cheese from Oregon, was delicious with the savory Brézème. So was Jasper Hill’s Harbison, an oozy, soft, bloomy rind cheese from Vermont with a pronounced fruitiness.

Best of all was one of my favorites, Ossau Iraty Vieille, a hard raw sheep’s milk cheese from the French Pyrenees. This pairing was brilliant, the earthy qualities of both wine and cheese enhancing and amplifying each other.

The point is not to obsess over the specifics of food and wine pairings, but to feel free to explore different matches. Seeking perfection is daunting and more often than not will disappoint. Looking for the good rather than the perfect allows more flexibility and fewer inhibitions, and opens one up to the quality of versatility.

“Pairing is about process as much as about results, and that’s scary,” Ms. Keenan said. “The important thing is the journey, not the destination.”

We are in love with Mike Geno’s cheese portraits, featured in today’s NYT.

This painting of Bayley Hazen Blue is particularly stunning.

Mmm…. art…..

ladleandknead:

Great piece on cheese and affinage in the heart of New York City in an article for New York Times late last year.

Hey, that’s our cheese!

This story was awesome. Murray’s Cheese won the blind taste test on EVERY CHEESE. No big deal. (JK it was totally a big deal!)