CurdNerds

Check out my latest post on Serious Eats regarding raw-milk cheese. It's a debate that doesn't seem to die, so I thought it would be good to lay out the basic issues.

Check out my latest post over at Serious Eats, about George W. Bush's latest (and last?) F.U. to the world: increasing tariffs on Roquefort cheese by 300 percent. Get it while you can, the tariff goes into effect on March 23--unless Obama repeals it before then.

Check out my "red, white and blue" suggestions for an Inaugural Cheese Plate, which appear today on the new Cheese and Champagne blog.

There's a new cheese publication in town, and it's definitely worth checking out. Cheese Enthusiast is a reincarnation of the old newsletter "Home Dairy News," and as such its focus is on hobbyist cheesemaking at home. Nevertheless the paper takes a very in-depth approach to the topics it explores, so even if you don't make cheese at home the articles are very informative. And, hey, guess what--the inaugural edition features an interview with yours truly!

Annual subscriptions are a bit steep at $30/year, but so far the product is promising. I would love to see some full color photography to go along with the well-written articles, and hopefully they will head in that direction in the future.

The kind folks at Murray’s Cheese are inviting the first 30 of you who R.S.V.P. to the phone number below to an exclusive Irish farmhouse cheese tasting at Ireland House in NYC this Thursday, October 30th, from 6-8 PM. The tasting will be led by Breda Maher from Cooleeney Cheese in the heart of Tipperary. Below are the details.

This will be the kick-off event for a month-long Irish cheese promotion that Murray’s is conducting. As part of the festivities, Murray’s will be featuring Irish cheeses throughout November and hosting tastings with cheesemakers from the country.

What: A free guided tasting of Irish farmhouse cheeses
When: Thursday, October 30th, 6-8 PM
Where: Ireland House, Consulate of Ireland, 345 Park Avenue (bet. 51st and 52nd)
R.S.V.P: Please call Jasmin Mirsal at 212-243-3289, ext. 38

Photograph courtesy of Cooleeney Cheese

Some of the greatest cheeses in the world are made only in the summertime in the gorgeous high elevations of the French and Swiss Alps. Gruyère, Beaufort, Appenzeller, Comté all come to mind. In a process known as transhumance, cows are allowed to graze on mountainous pasture at higher and higher elevations as the snows melt in the warm weather. The cheese itself is made right there on the slopes in little stone huts. The lush array of herbs, grasses and wildflowers in the alpine meadows make for some of the greatest tasting cheeses in the world. This process has been beautifully chronicled on FXCuisine.com, with a stunning high-resolution photo essay of the wonder that is alpine cheesemaking.

Attention cheese-loving New Yorkers: this Tuesday (7/29), Supermac is teaming up with 8Coupons.com to offer 8-cent mac and cheeses, available all day. Supermac is a mac and cheese mecca here in New York City, offering no fewer than 13 different varieties of the dish.

I've never been to Supermac (and I call myself a Curd Nerd?), though I have been a few times to their very similar downtown competitor S'Mac, which is a great restaurant itself. But it's pretty tough to resist 8-cent mac and cheese, so I'm definitely going to go try it. The website that's co-sponsoring the event seems interesting too; the premise is that you can text-message coupons to your cell phone, and redeem them at stores simply by showing the cashier the text on your phone. Pretty cool idea, and I downloaded a bunch of other coupons for a kosher deli near my office.

I'll be sure to give a full review of Supermac's offerings in the comments below. Check back on Wednesday!

Supermac
348 7th avenue (btw. 29th - 30th Street)
212-760-1900

What respectable curd nerd has not, for even a moment, contemplated leaving the rat race, moving to a farm, and making their own cheese? Well, lest there be any doubt that being a cheesemaker is easy business, check out this recent post that Kris Noiseux of Meadowstone Farm published to a cheesemaking listserv:

We have a grade A goat dairy in CT, milking 20 with 4 dry and 6 replacement kids. I work full-time and have the help of my retired father. My significant other works weekends and does morning milkings during the week plus animal care, soap, order tracking and supply stocking. We make soap, lotion, have a farm shop, and sell raw milk as well as cheese. We also keep bees, broilers and layers. We service commercial accounts and do two farmers markets.

I work 100-120 hour weeks, every week. I normally work to extreme exhaustion and, during high season like now, will find myself passing out in odd places and and generally incoherent. I regularly work 48 hours at a stretch, especially on the weekends. I have no idea how other farms do it, I would guess each season probably takes a few years off my life span. We couldn't afford to hire an employee.

Thanks to all the hard-working cheesemakers out there! We appreciate you!

It's a question I am asked frequently, and my answer is always the same, "Yes, but you'll know it if it's so spoiled that you can't eat it." That's kind of a loaded answer though, because many people think that cheeses that are perfectly fine have spoiled. For instance, Époisses is so stinky that it smells spoiled even when it's perfectly ripe! That said, if a cheese is so smelly you can't bear to eat, don't. (But make sure you find the nearest curd nerd and ask them if they would want it!)

In fact, cheese is just milk that has spoiled in a controlled way, so asking whether spoiled milk can spoil is kind of a non-question. But maybe you want some more details. The folks over at Philadelphia's DiBruno Bros. have published an extensive blog entry on cheese spoilage. Definitely worth a read!

Apologies for the noticeable dearth of posts lately. Things in my life have been busy and I haven't been able to give this blog proper attention. However, I continue to post a weekly cheese column called Serious Cheese over at SeriousEats.com. Be sure to check there every Tuesday if you're jonesing for cheese-related blog posts (this week my cheese post is hitting today). Thanks, and I look forward to getting back on track here soon!

In the meantime, take a look at this interesting history of cheese someone posted in the forums. (No sources are given, but anyway it makes for entertaining reading and is a somewhat plausible theory. They also link to an interesting-looking site that has videos of cheese-making and other wine & food related things.)

-Jamie

UPDATE: Just installed a widget at the right that lists my most recent posts over at Serious Eats. Check them out!