Spoonworthy, The February Cheese Explorer
This month we turn to savory, spoonworthy delights from Spain and Vermont, as well as a brand new snackable melting cheese from Britain by way of Germany.
My most indelible cheese memory involves a wheel of cheese bound in bark. It was a Thanksgiving years ago when gatherings of people seemed like nothing worth commenting about - in other words - worlds away from our current situation. The cheese was Harbison, at the time a relatively new entrant into a relatively new concept, American made artisanal cheese.
Harbison is a riff on French and Swiss traditions of binding cheese in wood bark. It’s a tradition that, like many, evolved from adapting to the land around them. The Jura, the hilly region alongside the French Swiss border, is filled with forests of spruce, and the wood here was perfect for making planks to age the large wheels of Comte and Gruyere.
However, those classic massive alpine cheeses take a lot of time to mature, and require the majority of the summer season just to provide enough milk. Not ones to sit idly by in the winter months while their larger wheels mature, cheesemakers would utilize the more limited quantities of winter milk to make softer cheeses, and would use the inner bark of the spruce, harvested by sangliers to hold the cheese together.
Just as various bacteria cultures and washes transform the flavor of cheese over time, so does wood. When young, these spruce bound cheeses taste quite, well, woodsy, before developing more savory, mustardy, meatier flavors as they age.
While Harbison is a treat I get to enjoy all the time these days, Winnimere is a rare treat, made only in the darkest wintertime months, and unlike Harbison, it’s made with raw cow’s milk and washed with a cultured salt brine, like an alpine cheese.
I recommend keeping this cheese whole, letting it sit out for a good 45 minutes and dipping into it with a spoon. You can cult away the rind if you’d like for easier access, or you can warm it up at a low temperature in the oven for a couple minutes to encourage the cheese to reach peak levels of gooey delight.
The other spoonable delight in this month’s selection is the result of entirely different traditions and cultures (in both senses of the term).
Iberian cheesemaking traditions, some of the oldest in all of Europe, came from a time when nomadic shepherds tended to their flocks and goat herds amongst the hills, and there just wasn’t enough land or vegetation to justify cows. Being largely dependent on sheep and goats meant that milk production was much lower, and that one of the most traditional ways of coagulating milk, using animal rennet harvested from cows, was not an option.
Necessity is a breeding ground for ingenuity, and while history doesn’t remember the individual who discovered it, these early cheesemakers discovered that the thistle, a member of the cardoon family, provided a similar effect to animal rennet, coagulating the milk and also imparting a delicate vegetal flavor on the cheese. Thistles, as you might imagine, proved to be much more practical than cows, and they were everywhere.
It’s also warmer here, especially during the summer months, and cheesemakers had to find a method of creating a soft cheese that could withstand warmer temperatures.
Enter the torta.
It’s the Spanish term for a small cake, and this style of cheese was originally aged to be a firm cheese that was often used as payment in lieu of taxes, but the story goes that some of these early cheesemakers noticed the cheese wouldn’t completely solidify, but instead collapse into this atortado.
The torta in this month’s explorer comes to us in a peculiar fashion. Finca Pascualete has held this land since the beginning of the 13th century, but it only began making its artisanal farmstead cheeses in the 20th century.
In the late 1940s, Luis Figueroa y Pérez de Guzmán el Bueno, Count of Quintanilla, met a young American woman, Aline Griffith, who turned out to be a CIA agent. Aline fell in love with the Count, but also with the rich history and incredible beauty of the Finca estate. After their marriage, Aline dedicated her life to preserving the culture and tradition by producing premium artisanal farmstead cheeses, including this spin on Spanish tradition.
Like Winnimere, this cheese is best served at slightly warmer than room temperature, and best served with the top rind cut off, using the rind of the cheese to hold the gooey paste together for dipping. Made with only the raw milk from Pascualete’s herd of Merino sheep, you’ll notice flavors of cultured butter, roasted artichokes, and briny green olives. While the rind itself is edible, we don’t recommend eating it.
Our third cheese is the result of years of experimentation from two fantastic cheesemakers, Quicke’s Family Cheeses out of Devon, England, and Hofkäserei Kraus in Ebersbach, Germany. The Quicke family has been a fixture in cheesemaking for over 500 years, making classic clothbound cheddar from their herds of goats and cows, while Albert Kraus began his dairy in 2008. Albert is perhaps best known for Alp Blossom, a flower studded alpine cheese that is released in the spring that is almost too pretty to eat, while Quicke’s is best known for their Mature Cheddar.
The building blocks of this cheese started in 2018, when Tom Chatfield, Head of Sales and Marketing at Quicke’s, visited Albert’s dairy and saw some of Albert’s experimentation with cheeses. Reminiscing on the visit a year later with Norbert Sieghart of Kaeskuche whilst at a wedding in California, Tom enquired as to whether aged cheddar could be added to the curd of Albert’s cheese to create a sort of hybrid. Norbert messaged Albert straight away and the path was set!
Curds from Quicke’s Mature Cheddar are added to Albert’s traditional Alp Blossom recipe, and then the cheese is matured for 3 months. The result is a not quite hard, but not quite soft cheese that is slightly hazelnutty to start, sweet with acidity from the cheddar coming through and a delicious apricot finish.
I recommend melting this cheese to get the best experience, not only because the days are colder in the dead of winter, but because the flavors of cheddar and alpine cheeses marry together so well.
Alongside these cheeses, you’ll find the delectable French Onion spread from Blake Hill Preserves out of Grafton Vermont, that plays to all three of these cheeses savory strengths, and Brewer’s Crackers Sea Salt Flatbreads as the perfect vehicle for dipping, made locally by our friend Kyle Fiasconaro.
Further Reading:
Woodland Wonders: Bark-Wrapped Cheeses from Culture Cheese Magazine