American terroir? Or simply skillful cheesemakers...

In my last post, I mentioned that Europeans put great store in geographic origin. In fact, the French term "terroir" is often used to refer to the features of (usually) a wine that are geographically determined. It's interesting that hardly any time elapsed from my making that post when I found myself looking at a book entitled "American Terroir," which uses that concept in characterizing some of our domestic foods: not just wine, says thw author, but vegetables, cheese, and such are terroir-dependent. And each of his chapters describes a different food, and points out somewhere on the North American Continent (yes, despite the title, his focus is the whole continent, not just the U. S. A.) where a great version is produced.

And one of those chapters talks about cheese. And his example is from Northeastern Vermont, Jasper Hill Farm, a cheesemaker and affineur that's been mentioned before in this blog. Now although he mentions the great Stilton-like cheese that they produce, Bayley Hazen Blue, most of the chapter describes a cheese of theirs that I haven't tasted, Winnimere. Now from the way it's been described, this is a Taleggio-like cheese, which would make it resemble Meadow Creek Farms' Grayson and Cowgirl Creamery's Red Hawk, and so we have three American products, from Vermont, Virginia, and California, all closely resembling an Italian cheese (Taleggio) and, of course, thus also resembling a French type, Pont l'Evêque. Given that these places cover quite a lot of territory, I think that makes a strong case that it is not terroir that makes a great cheese, but the skill of the cheesemaker. (And I'd love to try Winnimere, because Jasper Hill seems to have some great cheesemaking skills!)

Classifying cheeses

In Europe, they consider geographic origin the most important identification of such products as wine and cheese. Label a sparkling white wine from California or New York State as "champagne" and all France will go up in arms ("Champagne," according to French law, and probably by now European Union law, must come from a certain area in France!). So if an American company wants to sell wine over there, they must conform to these geography-oriented regulations.

Here in the US, geography is less dominant; anyone can call a cheese "Cheddar" even if it doesn't come from England, though lately we have seen State additions to these ("New York State Cheddar," "Vermont Cheddar," "Wisconsin Cheddar," etc.) but as far as I know we do not have laws about these. What does matter in the USA is trademarks: try to pass off a cola drink as "Coca-Cola" if it's not made by the company that owns that trademark, and it could get you in a pile of trouble.

In any case, these restrictions mean that categorizing cheeses to group together very similar ones runs into terminology problems. Consider four cheeses I have bought in recent days; two from the USA and two from Europe. (I bought three of them at Whole Foods Market; the fourth is also available there, but I didn't buy it there; namely Red Hawk, which I got at a kiosk that Cowgirl Creamery ran at the Bethesda Farmer's Market.):

1. Taleggio, from Italy;
2. Pont l'Evêque, from France;
3. Grayson, from Virginia; and
4. Red Hawk, from California.

The first two are geographical designations; anyone in those parts of Italy and France can produce a cheese by that name, while anyone not in those parts of Italy and France can never do so, no matter how much like these cheeses their product is. The last two are trademarked. Meadowcreek Farms produces Grayson; anyone else (even if they are located in Grayson County, Virginia, the source of the name!) would be out of luck. Cowgirl Creamery produces Red Hawk and several other cheeses, but I'm talking about this one, because it is so much like the other three in this list.

All four of these cheeses are soft (almost liquid), with a thick leathery rind. They have a strong smell which might suggest spoilage if you didn't know they're supposed to smell that way. And they taste almost identically. The Grayson is slightly darker, more yellow-orange, and somewhat stronger-flavored than the other three, but I'd be hard put to tell the other three apart; and even the Grayson, in the dark, would be nearly indistinguishable. But there is no one word I could use generically to refer to these cheeses (and others like them). If I described them as "Taleggio-type" or "Pont l'Evêque-type," the Europeans would be as horrified as they are with "California champagne," and if I described them as "Grayson-type" or "Red Hawk-type," the trademark-owners would sue.

What are we to do? 

Three more cheese recommendations

As I taste the various cheeses I've bought, from time to time I will put in recommendations and descriptions into this blog. Three cheeses I've had some recent tastes of are described in this posting. Two are blue cheeses and the third is a goat's milk cheese, all from the United States, though the third has a name that would suggest it was from Spain.

As I said in a posting on December 18^th, I was told at Cowgirl Creamery that the Jasper Hill Bayley Hazen Blue was very similar to English Stilton. And in fact, it has a nice "earthy" taste superimposed on the "tang" you expect on a blue cheese, exactly like Stilton. It's probably the first USA-produced cheese I've had that I'd compare to Stilton, and a new favorite of mine.

Rogue Creamery's Smokey Blue is another, quite different, American blue cheese. It combines the nice taste of a smoked cheese with the "tang" of a typical blue cheese. I've been getting it at Whole Foods Market, but it can be bought at a number of places, including online (click on the Rogue Creamery link in this post).

And something completely different, also purchased at WFM: Cabra La Mancha is produced by a company named FireFly Farms, a fairly-local company (located in Maryland). It's a goat's milk cheese, but despite that, the cheese I think it most resembles is Meadow Creek Dairy's Grayson (which is made from cow's milk). Both have strong aromas and strong tastes — perhaps too strong for some people, but I love them. And the aromas, tastes, and textures are quite similar. Both are similar to the Italian Taleggio, but more strongly flavored and with a more powerful aroma than even a Taleggio. Oddly, I don't notice a lot of the characteristic goat-milk flavor in FireFly Farms' Cabra La Mancha.

All three of these are cheeses I really like, with the Bayley Hazen Blue particularly recommended.

A couple of finds

Today I was traveling around DC looking to see what I could spot in teas and cheeses, and was pleased to find a couple of cheeses I was not expecting. I'd read of the existence of a blue version of the English Cheshire cheese, but had not been able to find it for sale in this country except by Internet order (and that involves paying for shipping, so I tend to avoid that for things like this). But today I saw "Appleby Cheshire," visibly a blue cheese, on sale at Dean & DeLuca in Georgetown. Now, Dean & DeLuca tends to be overpriced, and I could see other cheeses in the case that I regularly buy at Whole Foods Market at prices a few dollars per pound higher than WFM charges, but I had no option if I wanted to try it. So I bought some — actually, more than I wanted to, because I usually want to buy something like that in ¼-pound amounts, and the man at the counter didn't want to try to cut ¼ pound from a piece of slightly more than a third of a pound that he had there, since it tends to be a crumbly cheese, and therefore I had to buy the whole piece. Then after that I was in Eastern Market, which has a cheese shop called Bowers, and I saw a white Stilton with apricots. (White Stilton, actually has little to do with blue Stilton, which I think is one of the greatest cheeses in the world; however, I've had white Stilton with various fruits in it and it works very well, so I wanted this. I had not been able to buy those fruit-mixed white Stiltons for a while — Giant used to carry them, but stopped.) So that was another buy I had to make! (I also bought some tea today, but nothing I want to describe here today.)

Eclectic food choice?

When I was younger (I'm in my 60s now) I'd sometimes thought that I'd like to open an "eclectic" restaurant. Not like a Chinese or an Italian place, with one and only one country's food showcased, but a place where a group can come in and one have a Chinese dish and another a German or a Mexican one. Well, I never got the capital to open a restaurant, and I'm too old to start a new business now. But there is now the nearest thing I've found to my eclectic restaurant idea: the prepared food bar at Whole Foods Market. I hadn't planned my restaurant to be served buffet style, or priced by weight, so it's still not quite the same, but thinking about my experience yesterday, when I was trying to decide between Moroccan chicken with lemons and olives, on the one hand, and beef chili (Tex-Mex?) on the other, I realized that WFM really provides a nice eclectic-choice spread.

Now if they can get people who can cook like this, and I've had, in the past, things like German Sauerbraten and St. Louis style pork spareribs, why can't a restaurant? I can'd do the new-business thing at my age, but I wish someone might!

The affineurs

In France, the cheeses tend to be aged by specialists (affineurs). And some of these affineurs are very well known for their expertise. (The name of Hervé Mons keeps coming up as I read cheese articles on the Web; I mentioned his name in connection with his Tomme des Bois Noirs.) In this country, the affineurs tend to have corporate names rather than personal ones, and the use of specialist affineurs is not as common. But anything put out by Jasper Hill Farm is good, and Rogue Creamery is another specializef affineur that puts out a good product.

These are names to look for.