Calderwood: A Taste of Place
What makes a good cheese? This is a question that we try to answer in the same way that we pursue defining what makes a great wine. It’s easy, especially in this day and age, to be convinced by a narrative, to fall into the trap of good marketing. We’re constantly seeking something new, and you don’t have to take our word for it, just dive into your latest Netflix queue or Spotify recommendation. At the same time, many of us end up wanting something that’s also recognizable and comforting.
This plays no small part in the continued popularity of cheeses like Cheddar, Manchego, Gruyere and Gouda. These cheeses give us a sense of familiar but they can also challenge us.
Wine lovers may be familiar with the idea of terroir, that French sensibility of tasting a place. It’s an idea that has long been entrenched in the presumption of quality in the wine world. The same idea can be translated to cheese. What makes the special cheeses featured below unique is a tightly intermingled relationship between chemistry, geography, and tradition. They offer up flavors that we know and love but also notes that slip our tongues. They are carefully crafted with locally sourced ingredients to reflect a sense of place, to give us the satisfaction of a familiar favorite while pushing them (and us) to a new understanding of what they can be.
But I digress. Enter Calderwood, our latest cheese fascination.
Anne Saxelby and Chef Dan Barber have collaborated before. Saxelby, the woman in charge of New York City’s Saxelby Cheesemongers, frequently runs cheese courses at Barber’s Blue Hills Farm critically lauded restaurant, which is dedicated to using locally sourced ingredients. Their first experiment was a bit of an oddball, tweaking the age old technique of vegetable ash-ripened cheeses and substituting bone ash in its place. The result,‘Bone Char’, is a fine cheese that’s only found in Saxelby’s store and at Barber’s restaurant, but they wanted to think bigger.
There is perhaps no dairy better recognized on the East Coast than Jasper Hill Farm. This cheesemaker and affineur (those that age cheese) create some of our favorite cheeses: Harbison, the supple washed rind Willoughby, and the fudge and sweet cream reminiscent Bayley Hazen Blue.
Jasper Hill Farm is a true believer in taste of place, going as far as to reflect their ethos in the choice of name. Bayley Hazen, our favorite blue, is named for the road that George Washington led the colonial forces through in Vermont.
Saxelby knew that Barber was obsessed with grass-fed everything, and she also knew that Jasper Hill had just built the country’s first solar-powered hay drying facility. Familiar with the traditional Swiss and Italian practices of aging cheeses in dried hay, Saxelby and Barber decided to reach out to Andy and Mateo Kehler in hopes of creating a cheese that would both celebrate this new facility and follow the ethos of terroir.
The cheese starts as specially selected wheels of Jasper Hill Farm’s Alpha Tolman, a toothsome cheese that follows its alpine style forebears like Gruyere and Comte with savory and oniony notes. Toasted and sterilized hay is added, coating the entire rind of the cheese before it is sealed and aged for four months. The final step is removing the cheese from its protective seal, and letting it age in Jasper Hill Farm’s cheese caves for another month before release.
The result brings all of the toothsome flavors that we love from alpine style cheeses, but the toasted hay brings a lightly sweetened note, with hints of the sweetness of summer grass and tropical citrus marrying the crystalline concentrated beef broth and onion-like base flavors.
The goal of great cheese is to taste like the place where it was made from, to be unique. Calderwood fills that promise with a twist; the hay that coats the cheese is the very hay that the cows graze on, what helps produce the milk in the first place.
We’re thrilled to have this singular cheese in our case, and we hope that this will become as much of a part of your cheese board dreams as it is in ours.
Further Reading:
Rind By Design -- Janet Fletcher
Calderwood - Culture: The Word on Cheese
Jasper Hill Farm - A Taste of Place
