People like stealing fontina fortunes worth of cheese because it’s easy to sell on the black market and is hard to track. The mascarpone market probably doesn’t even have to be super dark for creamy criminals to launder their pinched cheese through conventional cheddar channels thus allowing the roquefort rapscallions to bathe forever in ill-gotten ricotta riches. Cheese is the most stolen food in the world, so let’s read about some cheese crime, shall we? (Unrelated, cheese fire.)
This could go on and on. By the way, did you know cheese.com has a whole list with nothin’ on it but different cheeses? You could just look at different cheeses ALL DAY!
Join cheesemonger Anne Saxelby as she shows us how to cut, serve, store, and accompany more than two dozen cheeses that cover the entire spectrum of cheese-dom, from Parmigiano-Reggiano to Cheddar to Roquefort to Burrata. This video is like a private cooking class with a very thoughtful & knowledgable host — and it made me incredibly hungry. A good pairing might be Saxelby’s recent book, The New Rules of Cheese.
But….. at the first mention of the word “fridge”, I could not help but think of this classic interview with French marketing consultant Clotaire Rapaille: In America, the Cheese Is Dead.
For example, if I know that in America the cheese is dead, which means is pasteurized, which means legally dead and scientifically dead, and we don’t want any cheese that is alive, then I have to put that up front. I have to say this cheese is safe, is pasteurized, is wrapped up in plastic. I know that plastic is a body bag. You can put it in the fridge. I know the fridge is the morgue; that’s where you put the dead bodies. And so once you know that, this is the way you market cheese in America.
Featuring the ideas of cheese expert Paul Kindstedt, this TED-Ed video is a quick animated look at the history of cheese and cheesemaking over the last 10000 years.
The best indication of ancient cheese-making lies in pottery fragments that migrating peoples left behind as they moved to new locations. Neolithic peoples sometimes stored cheese and butter in pottery vessels, which left embedded residues of milkfat in the pottery. Even after thousands of years, these ancient milkfat residues can be identified by sophisticated archaeochemical techniques. By following the pottery trail, it is possible to reconstruct the movement of Neolithic cheesemakers out of the Fertile Crescent into northwest Turkey, and then westwards to Europe, where cheese-making evolved into countless new varieties, and eastwards to the Eurasian steppes. With respect to Africa, it is still unclear whether cheese-making arrived from the Fertile Crescent or developed independently there.
Kindstedt is the author of Cheese and Culture: A History of Cheese and its Place in Western Civilization and is based at the University of Vermont, not too far from where I live in VT, land of plentiful hyper-local cheeses…the nearest cheese-making dairy is 1/4 mile from my house. Some of Kindstedt’s recent research uses techniques like x-ray diffractometry to study stuff like crystal formation and packing density in cheeses, which takes me back to my research days in college studying the structure of glass. What a fun thing, to discover a whole new vector into cheese appreciation! (via open culture)
Officially, according to the Italian government and the EU, parmesan cheese (or more formally, Parmigiano-Reggiano) can only be made in a small region in northern Italy. Wheels of Parmigiano-Reggiano weigh about 85 pounds, can be aged for three years or more, and can cost upwards of $1000. With all the fakes out there (see also olive oil and canned tomatoes), it can be tough to find the real stuff, but when you do, it tastes amazing.
Thinly spread one side of each bread slice with butter. Spread the other side of each slice with mayonnaise and place the bread, mayonnaise-side-down, in the pan. Divide the cheese evenly on top of the buttered slices. Adjust the heat so the bread sizzles gently.
When the cheese is about halfway melted, use a spatula to flip one slice over on top of the other, and press lightly to melt. Keep turning the sandwich, pressing gently, until the sandwich is compact, both sides are crusty, and the cheese is melted.
Personally, I would omit the mayonnaise and brush the down sides of the bread with olive oil instead: it gives the bread a nice cripsyness and none of that mayonnaise flavor. (I’m cool with mayo most of the time, but not on my grilled cheese.)
In early August, these cheeses and many more landed on an FDA Import Alert because the agency found bacterial counts that exceeded its tolerance level. Cheeses on Import Alert can’t be sold in the U.S. until the producer documents corrective action and five samples test clean, a process that can take months.
Of course, French creameries haven’t changed their recipes for any of these classic cheeses. But their wheels are flunking now because the FDA has drastically cut allowances for a typically harmless bacterium by a factor of 10.
Even Parmigiano-Reggiano might be threatened by the new restrictions. Ridiculous.
A short film about how Neal’s Yard Dairy, a top seller of cheese in London, works with producers to make cheese.
I had a tour of the caves below Murray’s in the West Village where they do the same sort of thing as at Neal’s Yard. Pretty cool to see the process in action and to taste the same cheeses at different ages.
In France, pie charts are called “le camembert” after the cheese. Or sometimes “un diagramme en fromage” (cheese diagram). In Brazil, they are pizza charts. (via numberphile & reddit)
In Gruyeres, western Switzerland, from mid-May to mid-October, the fifth generation of the Murith family produces its distinctive mountain pasture Gruyere cheese. Each wheel of cheese weighs between 25 and 40 kilograms, and takes a minimum of six months to mature. The family produces 200 wheels each year to sell locally, using unpasteurized milk from their own herd of cows. Reuters photographer Denis Balibouse spent time with the Murith family over this past grazing season, capturing days and nights in the alpine pastures of Switzerland.
For example, if I know that in America the cheese is dead, which means is pasteurized, which means legally dead and scientifically dead, and we don’t want any cheese that is alive, then I have to put that up front. I have to say this cheese is safe, is pasteurized, is wrapped up in plastic. I know that plastic is a body bag. You can put it in the fridge. I know the fridge is the morgue; that’s where you put the dead bodies. And so once you know that, this is the way you market cheese in America.
I started working with a French company in America, and they were trying to sell French cheese to the Americans. And they didn’t understand, because in France the cheese is alive, which means that you can buy it young, mature or old, and that’s why you have to read the age of the cheese when you go to buy the cheese. So you smell, you touch, you poke. If you need cheese for today, you want to buy a mature cheese. If you want cheese for next week, you buy a young cheese. And when you buy young cheese for next week, you go home, [but] you never put the cheese in the refrigerator, because you don’t put your cat in the refrigerator. It’s the same; it’s alive. We are very afraid of getting sick with cheese. By the way, more French people die eating cheese than Americans die. But the priority is different; the logic of emotion is different. The French like the taste before safety. Americans want safety before the taste.
Veniamin Konstantinovich Balika recently used false paperwork to load his 18 wheeler with 42,000 pounds of Muenster cheese worth about $200K. Balika’s plan was to sell the cheese to retailers on the east coast.
“There’s a black market for everything,” said Sissman. “We’ve seen everything stolen. We’ve found stolen beer, stolen food, stolen machine parts, but this is the first time, we’ve found stolen cheese.
I wanted the opinion of an industry professional so I reached out to Aaron Foster, Head Buyer at Murray’s Cheese Shop.
I’ve seen a lot of people wondering how the culprit was planning to unload 40,000 lbs of cheese without raising suspicion. Is there such a thing as a cheddar fence? In my opinion, it really wouldn’t be that hard. While the larger retailers and chains — and, of course, Murray’s — have all become much more conscious of food safety and food security, there remains plenty of retailers who would jump at the chance to buy their product for pennies on the dollar, no questions asked. Literally as I wrote this, I received a vague email with the subject “RE: Special sale - Mega aged WI Cheddar”. I’ll pass, thanks. Groceries, specialty shops, and bodegas that work with perishables need every edge they can get to scrape by. Think about that next time you order your egg and cheese from the corner store.
A truck carrying 27 tons of brunost, a Norwegian brown cheese, caught fire in a tunnel in Narvik on Thursday and burned with gooey rage until Monday. Closed during the fire, because who likes driving through tunnels of flame, the tunnel will take about a week to repair.
“This high concentration of fat and sugar is almost like petrol if it gets hot enough,” said Viggo Berg, a policeman.
Brown cheese is made from whey, contains up to 30 percent fat and has a caramel taste.
“I didn’t know that brown cheese burns so well,” said Kjell Bjoern Vinje at the Norwegian Public Roads Administration.
He added that in his 15 years in the administration, this was the first time cheese had caught fire on Norwegian roads.
Wimbledon winner and world No 1 Novak, 25, wants the donkey’s milk cheese to supply a new chain of restaurants in his Serbian homeland. The delicacy, known as pule, is made in Zasavica, Serbia, and is described as similar to Spanish manchego. Donkey milk is said to be very healthy for humans as it has anti-allergen properties and is low fat.
If I hadn’t seen it on the official Emmentaler web site, I would have thought this video about cheese producers using geckos to produce better cheese was fake.
Pesky flies buzzing around our cows cause them stress. And this affects the quality of the milk. Which is why we quite simply put a gecko on our cows which gets rid of all these pesky flies — by eating them. The result is milk that is smoother, and cheese that is smoother too.
(thx, urs)
Update:sigh This is likely an early April Fools joke or whatever. INTERNET, I THOUGHT WE HAD AGREED THAT APRIL FOOLS IS STUPID AND FOR STUPID PEOPLE AND EVEN IF THAT IS NOT THE CASE TO CONFINE THE STUPIDITY TO ONE DAY, APRIL FIRST, AND NOT DO ANYTHING BEFOREHAND. God, I hate April Fools Day. Fuck you.
But it’s not what you think. At Le Bernardin, one of the highest calibre restaurants in NYC, Eric Ripert and his chefs use “cheap, fake Swiss cheese full of artificial flavors” as a baseline to normalize everyone’s palates so that sauces can be judged fairly in the kitchen.
In terms of flavor, that cheese tastes identical all year long…so it give us a reference, and we can judge fairly.
This recipe for a basic hard cheese works for any kind of milk. I primarily use my own fresh goats’ milk, but have made it quite successfully with cow’s milk purchased from the grocery as well as raw cow’s milk from a local farmer.
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