Another Great Bread Bowl ... & Cheese

You'll know from past posts how bread bowls hold a special place for Gail and me. Tonight, Gail made homemade wheat bread bowls, and we filled them with soup made with garden potatoes and leeks. Yum.

We also like a little goat cheese in our soup. Since we still have some cheese left from our cheese share, we did a taste test of how various cheeses compared. We typically use grocery store chèvre logs, so this was the cheese to compare against. The other two were the boucheron-like Ada's Pride from Ruggles Hill Creamery and the brie-like Kunik from Nettle Meadow Farm.

Eaten plain, both the Ada's Pride and the Kunik far outshine the chèvre log. I really expected the Ada's Pride to be my favorite in the soup. Surprisingly, the chèvre worked best in this soup. Well, that's why we do these taste tests.

Gail's bread bowls worked particularly well with the soup. She made a half recipe of this whole wheat sourdough bread from about.com. It had a particularly good mouth feel as I scraped the gooey inner walls of the bowl. Gail wishes she had made four loaves with this half recipe, and I agree. Each loaf was too big for one person, but also too big to hold their bowl shapes.

Formaggio Kitchen Local Cheese Share

On Saturday, Gail and I picked up our first local cheese share from Formaggio Kitchen. We signed up for three months, and it looks like something we might keep doing for a while.

Formaggio hires passionate people. By coincidence, the first person we asked about picking up our cheese was Erin Carlman Weber, the person who picks what is in the package. She was excited to tell us about the heirloom apple she included to go with the Cabot Clothbound Cheddar. Her enthusiasm made getting our package feel like getting a Christmas present.





The package included:

Ada's Honor, Ruggles Hilll Creamery from Harwick, MA
This is a small round of goat cheese. It has a thick, white rind followed by a thin gooey edge and a dry, flaky center. It reminded me of the texture variety of a Bucheron, but with a thinner gooey edge. It was both mild and richly flavored. I'm not sure how that's possible. We both liked this one very much.

Kunik, Nettle Meadow Farm from Thurman, NY
This is a larger round of cheese, like a small brie. And, this cheese tasted like a mild, but not bland brie. It had the same white rind with a slightly gooey center and a nice buttery flavor. It is made with a delicious combination of goat milk and cow milk. I would favor this over the sometimes funkier flavors of a brie.

Dorset, Consider Bardwell Farm from West Pawlet, VT
This is a wedge of soft, moist cheese. It was mild, but had a slight blue cheese flavor. By chance, we had another cheese in our refrigerator from Consider Bardwell: Pawlet. It is a very similar cheese; a bit dryer and firmer but still soft. It has a similar mild flavor without the tangy blue notes. We liked the Pawlet better.

Cabot Clothbound Cheddar, Cellars at Jasper Hill from Greensboro, VT
This was not our first Cabot Clothbound Cheddar, but it was the most well aged, flaky-dry example we've had: wow! There was really no slicing this cheese, and I'm not sure how they sliced the piece we had. It just broke apart under the knife. The result was a rich cheddar flavor with a mild hint of the caramel notes of a great blue cheese.

Erin included a D'Arcy Spicy heirloom apple to go with the cheddar. The apple was from Scott Farm in Dommerston Vermont. The apple alone was mildly tart, not the type of apple I would usually eat plain. I'm also not usually an apple and cheese guy, but I can see why people would like this pairing of sweet and salty. The textures matched so that it was hard to tell what was apple and what was cheese. The cheese mellowed the tartness of the apple, and the apple mellowed the blue notes in the cheese. I'd rather have those flavors independent and prominent.

Thanks for the gift, Erin.

Formaggio Kitchen Cheese Cave Tour

Gail and I are fans of Formaggio Kitchen, so when the opportunity to tour the cheese caves came up, we jumped at it. Tyler, the cave manager, gave us a tour of the two cheese caves in the basement of the store. Matthew, a buyer, taught us about the process of making cheese. Throughout, we were able to sample a number of delicious cheeses that emphasized what we were learning about.

Our tour started downstairs in the caves. The first cave was cool with water on the floors to keep up the humidity. It held many of the big wheels, with cheeses like Cabot Clothbound Cheddar, Gouda, and multiple Comtés of various ages.



Our first tasting showed the effect of aging with a "Frais" (fresh) goat cheese called Cabri d'Antan, and the same cheese after a few months of aging called "Affiné" (refined). The aging dries the cheese and develops a rind. The result is a richer and funkier tasting cheese.



While in the cave, Tyler gave us samples of some special cheeses using a cheese corer. He explained how he saves the end of the core to re-plug the hole, allowing the rest of the cheese to continue to age properly. He sealed up any remaining edges by rubbing them with a big chunk of butter.

 

Our second tasting compared two types of Abondance Fermier, a French cow's milk cheese. The first was aged 10 months and the second 16 months. Both were delicious, but the older cheese was dryer and richer with sweeter notes. We were interested to learn that these caves are not just for temperature-controlled storage. Formagio extends the aging process in their local caves, making a better product than you might get at a cheese shop without a cave.

We moved into the second cave, which was cooler and more humid than the first. That is where they store and age many of the wash rind cheeses, including a beer washed cheese. Tyler showed us some of the aging experiments he was conducting, where he made a wash of the rind of one cheese and used it to start a rind on a different fresh cheese.

The second half of our tour was upstairs at the cheese counter. Matthew explained the common elements in making cheeses. In describing the use of rennet, he talked about both animal and vegetable rennet types. Then we tasted two young sheep cheeses. The first was made with animal rennet, and the second with a special rennet used uniquely in cheese from Portugal. That rennet comes from a thistle plant that grows in Portugal.

Our final tasting was a wash rind goat cheese and a strong Roquefort cheese. The Roquefort was deliciously salty and tangy on its own, but Gail noticed how wonderful it tasted when paired with a little honey on the plate. That will be something for us to try at home.