Expeditions: The February 2022 Cheese Explorer

Something Sheepish This Way Comes

It may seem strange to realize that cheese is a seasonal product, but it certainly rings true in the winter time, when a lot of producers start to see their product dry up. This is certainly true of any farmstead goat cheese producer, as this is the time where goats are in peak kidding season, and that means that any milk they have goes primarily to their offspring, and goats are almost trained to always have their kidding season in the late winter. All of this to say that fresh sheep milk cheeses are upon us, and we’re super excited that the one animal with an even shorter milking season than goats has its time in the sun. This month is in part a celebration of that, and the majority of the cheeses here have a coating of some kind or another. First though, it’s time to talk sheep milk bloomy rinds.

Summer Snow - Woodcock Farm, Weston, Vermont.

Summer Snow from Woodcock Farm in its full splendor.

If you had to make me pick a favorite milk for cheese, it’s sheep milk. The higher butterfat content is what gives sheep milk that satisfying nutty like quality that makes Manchego one of the most popular cheeses in the world. While you can usually get Manchego year round — though a shortage may be on the horizon — one cheese that I can never seem to get enough of is Summer Snow from Woodcock Farm.

Woodcock Farm is run by Mark and Gari Fischer in Weston, Vermont, where' they’ve had a particular focus on farmstead sheep’s milk cheeses for the last 15 years. Summer Snow is what’s considered a bloomy rind, or “brie style” cheese, with hints of mushroomy characteristics but a whole heck of a lot of sweet cream and tangy buttermilk notes. It has a beautiful creamline, what folks in the cheese industry call the more liquid like edge on the interior rind of the cheese to separate it from the paste.

These pudgy little wheels are roughly 12 ounces and are aged for 4 to 6 weeks before being considered fully mature, and the Fischers took their naming inspiration from the fluffy snow like rind, reminiscent of the snow capped mountains that adorn the town in the wintertime.

Romero - Queso Manchego Pasamontes, Ciudad Real, Spain.

Romero from Queso Manchego Pasamontes.

The production of sheep cheese in Spain goes back centuries, and has been ensconced in the cheesemaking traditions thanks to Spain’s shepherding history. You make do with what you have, and Spain didn’t have a lot of wide open valleys that made cows worthwhile. In fact, Spain’s most famous cow’s milk cheese, Mahon, is largely thanks to the British takeover of the Baleric Islands where they brought their beloved ruminants with them.

Pasamonthes has been a family owned and operated producer since the late 19th century, and the current cheesemaker María Dolores Pérez-Guzmán Palomares has been keeping the traditional copper kettle recipes alive that her great grandmother showed her when she was growing up. We keep their traditional 3 month in stock all the time, but we’ve been lucky to gain access to Romero, their Manchego recipe that is coated and aged in rosemary leaves for 6 months, leaving an unmistakable herbal flavor that really makes this cheese sing and helps cut through the classic sheepy flavors.

It should be noted that Spain isn’t afraid to season their cheeses, and Romero is a riff on Romeral, a classic Spanish cheese that always sees that classic rosemary coating. They’re equally ardent with using pimenton, olive oil, and wine, because they have all those in abundance, and you make do with what you have.

This is the perfect cheese for the end of winter and the beginning of spring, and it’s fast becoming a favorite in our shop.

Calderwood - Saxelby Cheesemongers, Greensboro, Vermont.

Calderwood from Saxelby Cheesemongers

There are few cheeses I love more than Calderwood, a fascinating collaboration between the likes of Anne Saxelby and the Cellars at Jasper Hill in Greensboro, Vermont.

It was initially conceived as a response to a conversation Anne Saxelby had with Chef Dan Barber of Blue Hill at Stone Barn fame, and the impact that grass had on the flavor of food. The impact of grass-fed diets on milk was already evident, and written into a lot of the classic rules for European cheeses like Comte and Gruyere, but they wondered, what if they could use that same grass for the cheese itself?

The query was brought to Mateo Kehler at Jasper Hill, a cheesemaker and affineur dedicated to the nature of taste of place. Kehler had another piece of the puzzle — when he had gone abroad to Italy to learn the ropes of cheesemaking early on in his career, he noticed some cheesemakers would coat the rinds of their pecorinos with hay - a process that helped keep out unhealthy bacteria and keep the moisture content at an acceptable level without drying it out. Furthermore, Kehler had just brought a brand new hay drying machine from Germany that was poised to turn fresh hay into usable toasted feed within hours instead of days, and thus the pieces fell into place.

Calderwood takes its name from the Robert Aldi Calderwood Facility, where they keep that fancy hay dryer, and it is based on their make of Alpha Tolman, the original alpine style cheese from the Cellars at Jasper Hill, but after its initial make, the wheel is coated in the toasted hay and sealed for 6 months to lock in the flavors of the hay. After this, the wheels are allowed to breathe in Jasper Hill’s cave aging facilities for an additional 5 months, letting the natural flora and fauna of the environment make an impact on the flavor.

The result is a wheel with a lot of complex flavors that make this a standout American make.

Unfortunately, Anne Saxelby passed away unexpectedly last October and she will be missed tremendously, but we continue to support her mission of bringing American farmstead cheeses to a wider audience.

Westcombe Clothbound Cheddar - Westcombe Dairy, Evercreech, UK

Westcombe Clothbound Cheddar from Westcombe Dairy. Image Courtesy of Neal’s Yard Dairy

Cheddar may as well be one of America’s most famous exports, especially when you consider how many dairies make the classic cheese, but Cheddar is actually a British creation named for the hamlet where it was first created, and being British and great fans of redundancy, they doubled down and not only named the cheese after the town but named the process of making that kind of cheese after the town as well. So, yes, it’s possible to cheddar a cheddar in Cheddar.

One thing the British didn’t do was put a protected designation of origin on it, which is what you find on everything from Comte to Parmigiano to Roquefort. Cultural rules recognized by the countries of origin and their trading partners that protect the quality of the cheese by limiting imitators pretending to make the same thing.

Instead, the British allowed cheddar to proliferate. It can be made anywhere with anything (almost), which is why you’ll find goat milk cheddar, sheep milk cheddar, mixed milk cheddars, in almost all parts of the world, especially across the pond.

The traditional cheddar, however, is found in the Somerset region, and often in vast quantities. Made in giant cylindrical truckles, a full wheel often weighs between 40 and 50 pounds and is typically coated in lard and bound by cloth. This practice not only helped keep the cheese from spoiling in the times before refrigeration, but also, like the Romero and Calderwood above, allowed specific flavors to permeate the cheese itself.

Westcombe has been in operation since 1890, and they still make their cheddar by hand. Each wheel of Westcombe we receive has been hand-selected by the knowledgeable cheese mongers at Neal’s Yard Dairy, who are the premier distributors for all UK cheeses that come into the American market, and we’re thrilled with this wheel here that features robust vegetal top notes and a sweet , almost caramel like finish.

Wine Addendum: Gavi DOCG - Molinetto, Francavilla Bisio, Piemonte, Italy.

Molinetti Gavi DOCG features notes of peach blossom and citrus zest, and we love the herbaceous finish on this wine, making it a great compliment to the herb and grass rubbed cheeses in this month's expedition.